Sophie • 24 • ENFP-T • Bisexual • She/Her
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I write fan- and original- fiction. 99% of my original characters are bisexual unless otherwise stated.
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in which eretria is a bank robber, recruits wil as a lookout and they find and capture a wild amberle, and eretria falls for them both. which they’re okay with, really. it could be a worse fate.
tw: attempted rape and references to past assault (cephalo exists) and violence
(5308 words. possibly a part 1, but self-contained, rated M)
Her friends call her Shot, because just like a shot of your favourite drink, once you pick her up she’s already gone.
Or, maybe that’s just what she calls herself. She doesn’t have any friends, after all.
Her father calls her Eretria and she traces the lines on a map she’ll never get to explore, finding the town marked Eretria in the south of Greece, wondering what it’s like.
She imagines it’s cold, like her.
She pulls a mask onto her face, raises a gun they used to tease was bigger than her (not anymore. Not after she put a bullet in that one guy’s foot for the trouble. She hasn’t seen him since, actually) and she points it. “Hands in the air, this is a robbery!”
Their getaway driver is old, she notes, when she spares him a cursory look as she throws bags into the van. He’s probably reduced to driving the car because he can’t run anymore. She’ll never be like him.
She’ll probably die first.
That’s her hope, anyway. She’s been a survivor since the day she was born, but she won’t go out like him – an old criminal who doesn’t have strength left for his heists but can’t stop running.
She’ll never be that.
They need a new lookout, she doesn’t ask what happened to their last one – she doesn’t care. The only ones who tend to stick around are her father and Zora and even she’s on a coinflip. She spends as much time away as she does with them and that’s always been fine by Eretria. She’s fun when she’s around, but it’s almost more fun when she’s gone.
She’s possessive. Eretria doesn’t get to play around when she’s around.
She leans on the bar, sips a drink that’s half as strong as she can handle and cases the bar looking for anyone she can pick out, someone to be their lookout for a small job coming up. The thought passes through her mind that whoever she recruits might not make the night, that when the sun comes up they might be lying in a pool of their own blood.
“Get out before it’s you drowning in red,” Zora had warned and she’d believed it to be goodbye, but the month after that she’d been back. “Can’t quit the high,” she’d said. “You know how it is?”
Truth was, she didn’t know how it was, not at all. She wasn’t there by choice.
She picks him out of a crowd, she selects him from afar. His sleeves are frayed from wear not for fashion and his hair is long, brushing the nape of his neck even with a hat pulled on. He’s poor and he’s always hiding, but more than that he’s hypervigilant. She watches as every time he moves he checks his surroundings, like he’s waiting to be hit.
He probably is.
And yet when someone buys him a drink, he swallows it down.
Vigilant but naïve, a perfect mark.
She slides into the stool next to his to accompany his drink and he nearly chokes when he sees her. She smiles and it’s genuine. She touches his hair and compliments his eyes.
He takes her home.
She browses his belongings while he’s in the bathroom disposing of the used condom and – the chain flushes and she returns to the bed to wait – using the facilities.
They tangle up in the sheets and talk and she pries him open, using his nativity and the interested sparkle of her dark eyes as a crowbar. She bumps cold her feet against him, hooks her ankles around his and uses the leverage to roll on top of him.
She sits on his hips and produces the papers she’d found.
“Where’d you get that?” He grabs at them and she deflects with a laugh.
“Oh, I looked around while you were busy,” she says and holds it out of reach, humming as she reads out the message. “Dear Mister Ohmsford,” she reads in a haughty tone. He groans, drags a pillow over his face. “We are extremely sorry to inform you that the application for scholarship of your medical degree at the University of—” She drops to a southern brogue, just poor enough to make him laugh into the pillow. “—Alabama School of Medicine has been rejected by our Scholarship Selection Committee.” She pulls the pillow from his face. “So you’re a doctor.”
“Apparently,” he says, snatching the paper from her hands and tossing it like it’s scrap, “I am not!” He grabs her by the hips, flips them over and lands on top, descending for a kiss which she dodges, putting the flats of her fingers over his lips but wrapping her bare legs around his to hold him in place.
“How much was it?” she asks and when he looks at her in confusion she slaps him hard on the backside once, eliciting a yip, and says, “The scholarship.”
“I don’t know,” he says in an attempt to wave it off. When she fixes him with a stern look he sighs. “Enough for the first year of tuition at least.”
“Which is?” she prompts.
“I-I don’t know,” he says. “Fifty or sixty-odd thousand, you know.” Another stern look and she watches his defences just crumble before her gaze. “Fifty-seven thousand six hundred and fifty three.” He sighs. “Give or take.”
He’s like a puppy, she decides, but the kind you screw rather than bringing home from the pound to feed and snuggle. He’s clearly spent a long time staring at the tuition fees to remember the numbers, she doubts he has an eidetic memory.
“Can I kiss you again yet?” he says.
“I could earn that in a night,” she says, reaching for where the paper fell and holding it up, waving it like a flag.
He let out a sharp laugh. “Oh, so you’re a movie star.”
“Greta Garbo, baby,” she purrs and he tries to kiss her again. She covers his mouth. “I’m no movie star, though they might make one about me one day.”
He eyes her up. “High class escort?” he says. “Because I don’t have any money.”
She glances around his dingy apartment, wonders who he shares it with, and looks back at him. “Damn,” she drawls, “I sure know how to pick ‘em.”
He manages to look mock-offended for a moment. “So what then?” he says.
She looks him over, long and slow, at his naked body sprawled atop hers. “You’re not an undercover cop or something, are you?”
“Well, if I was I’d be a terrible one,” he says, and she takes a moment to laugh with him, enjoying a moment of mirth.
She could still bail, she tells herself. She doesn’t have to take him to her father, she doesn’t have to pull him into a life he’ll never really be free of. She could walk away, be gone like a shot.
She doesn’t.
“Ever thought of robbing a bank?”
He doesn’t take her seriously at first, laughing at her first three attempts to convince him it’s true, and then he does.
He’s off her like a flash, swinging his legs off the bed and gathering covers into his lap, clearing his throat a few times to shift the nerves that have sprouted there. “You—You’re a—”
“Bank robber.” Four times.
“You’re a murderer?” he says.
She feels offense rise, but it makes sense. “No,” she says. “I’ve never killed someone.”
“I find that very hard to believe,” he says, like he hasn’t found all of this hard to believe.
“I can’t prove it to you,” she says, “but I don’t have a reason to lie.” She shifts down the bed towards him and to his credit he doesn’t shy from her. She finds her phone in her pants where she left them and turns it over in her palm. “Let me prove my other claim.”
He looks at her and that seems to be an agreement, so she thumbs her phone open and opens her bank account, one of the many she has locked away safe and sound. She turns it over to show him and his eyes widen at the numbers. “If you have that much,” he says, “why can’t you just be my scholarship? I’ll pay you back in full when I’m a doctor.”
“Doesn’t work that way,” she says. “It’s dirty money.”
“Then why do you do it?” he says. “If you can’t spend the money.”
“For the high,” rolls from her lips uninvited. “Ever been high?”
He meets her eyes and shakes his head.
She shrugs, lays back on her elbows and displays her body to him like an invitation. “Feels a lot like taking a stranger home.” He drags his gaze over her and she knows the moment she won. “If you can’t be a doctor, why not try a new profession? One that’ll pay for medical school three times over in a few years.”
“Thought you said you made that much in a night?” he says, but he licks his lips. She isn’t sure if it’s at her breasts or her offer (maybe both).
“Money takes time to launder,” she says. She props her body up a little further and looks him over this time. “Plus, it’d be a little silly to drop the haul of a bank robbery the day after you steal it, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never hurt anyone,” he says.
“You wouldn’t have to.” She sits up all the way, drops her hands to her lap and meets his eyes, her own serious now. “You’d be the lookout. You’d have a weapon but you wouldn’t have to use it. You’d just follow my lead.”
“Your group... they’re good?” he says, studying her face like he’s searching for the answers to the questions of the universe. She wishes she could give them to him.
“The best,” she assures him anyway.
He licks his lips a few times, tucks his hair behind one ear and she desperately wants to kiss it. “And what do you do?”
Her eyebrow raises, her eyes sparkle. She lets a smirk play over her lips. “Oh, honey,” she purrs, leaning towards him, “I’m the one that busts the vault.”
His eyes darken and she’s won.
***
If anyone thinks he’s not cut out for this life, they don’t say anything.
She leads the way as always. “Are you the human shield or the leader?” Blondie asks and she isn’t sure of the answer so she doesn’t reply. Their masks are already on.
“Just follow the script,” she says and fires a warning shot that brings everyone’s attention on to her. “This is a robbery! Hands in the air!”
They’ve been over the plan. For every time Cephalo has told him something she’s told him twice more. She’s not sure why she’s invested in his life continuing beyond this night, but she is.
The second the gunshot rings out, she sees him freeze. “Position!” she hisses at him and he scampers, like the puppy she already thought he was, and tucks himself to keep an eye on the surroundings.
The group spreads out – Cephalo taking the lead now, of course – and she follows, casing the place as quick as she can.
The drill is this: find the vault, find the money, find the safety deposit boxes. Open the door to the boxes first, leave someone else to grab those, then go for the vault.
Blondie stays outside all the doors and covers her, although if they get caught he’ll be the first to bolt, following a yell from Cephalo.
It’s happened before. He’s never been afraid to leave her to die.
She leaves Zora to the boxes and whistles for Blondie. He follows her to the vault. “So uh,” he says, “how do we get into this?”
She pulls her bag from her back, retrieves small explosives. “This is a Marksman 7200,” she says, “only way in is explosives. You place them just right and—” She mimes an explosion. He stares at her.
“Isn’t that dangerous?!”
“Says the guy wearing a clown mask in a bank,” she says and starts placing the explosives.
He stays quiet the whole time, one eye on her and the other on the bank. If there are alarms going off, she doesn’t know about it and it calms her, just a little. Cephalo is with the hostages, that doesn’t calm her at all.
She busts the vault open with little in the way of ceremony, but Blondie still lets out a whistle and hisses, “That was cool,” when the smoke clears.
She’s surprised, but she keeps her head down and calls for the others to collect the money.
And that’s when the game changes.
“Rover!” Cephalo bellows. Eretria snaps her head up. They don’t use identifiers unless they have to, and that means something is really, really wrong.
“Rover?” Blondie hisses. She pushes past him, away from the sound of bags filling with money.
“What is it?” she snaps at Cephalo, and then she freezes in place.
He’s holding a woman in his grip, tall and slender with dark hair to her shoulders and large glasses slipping down her nose. Her pencil dress keeps her covered, but leaves little to the imagination, and it’s riding up her thighs. Eretria’s sharp eyes snap to the view and she storms forwards. “What the hell did you do to her?”
“Relax,” Cephalo drawls and drops the woman with little ceremony. She lets out a cry and Eretria catches her. “I didn’t touch her yet.”
The woman – no, she’s barely older than a girl, Eretria’s age if ever a day – sobs in confusion and turns her head. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with!”
“On the contrary,” Cephalo says. “I do.” He holds up a feminine wallet. “We found her out there. Take a look, Blondie. See if you can carry any weight at all.”
Blondie takes the wallet while Eretria tugs the skirt down the woman’s legs, covering her up. The woman frowns at her in confusion, then looks back at Cephalo and Blondie.
“Amberle Elessedil,” he says. His nose wrinkles up. “Elessedil? Aren’t they practically royalty?”
“Mhm, and with royalty comes money,” Cephalo says.
The woman – Amberle – drops her gaze, suddenly aware of the predicament she finds herself in and Eretria growls at Cephalo.
“What the hell? We aren’t kidnappers,” she snaps.
“No, we’re robbers, thieves and murders,” he says.
“Speak for yourself,” she snarls.
“You’ll get your boots wet eventually.” He steps towards her and she instinctively shies away. If Blondie notices, he doesn’t say anything. “Put her in the van with the haul. If she gets away? I’ll know who to blame.”
Eretria cuts her gaze across to Blondie, who’s looking as uncomfortable as she feels, then nods, getting to her feet and dragging Amberle with her. She’s bound lightly, wrists locked at the small of her back with a cable tie, and any fight she attempts is quickly shut down.
“Are you gonna do something about this?” Blondie hisses as they escort Amberle like produce to the van.
Eretria fights down the fear in her chest. “No.”
***
It was a lie, of course, but she’s always been one to manage expectations.
Blondie rides up front, elbow hanging out of the window and a glare set on his face. They’ve swapped vans twice since the heist and Amberle’s spent the whole time transferred from back to back, Eretria’s sleeve wrapped haphazardly around her eyes as a makeshift blindfold.
“We aren’t kidnappers,” she keeps repeating, she keeps saying it every time they move Amberle again. “Where are we even going to keep her?!” It’s like they’re adopting a stray dog, except she’s not a dog, she’s a beautiful woman with a life and a soul and they’re hurting her, bruises are coming out on her upper arms from Cephalo’s manhandling and her dress is ripped.
Eretria hasn’t left her side yet and she doesn’t plan to.
“I hoped you were the leader,” Blondie says. She ignores him. The disappointment in his eyes makes her want to puke. “Guess you were just the meat shield.”
It’s decided they’ll keep her in the warehouse. Cephalo ties her to a metal chair, puts her in the very centre of the concrete floor where she can’t reach anything to get away. He threatens to break her legs one at a time if she runs and Amberle sneers at him in response.
Eretria would have snarked something along the lines of, “If you break them, how will you spread them, pig?” but she’s never been the smartest girl in the room.
“I’m leaving,” Blondie hisses, and Cephalo claps a hand on his shoulder.
“If you leave, I’ll shoot you between the shoulder blades and leave your body to stink up the place for our hostage’s entertainment,” he says and Eretria believes him. Blondie’s eyes say he does too.
Cephalo exits, leaving Eretria staring down the woman in the chair, Blondie by her side.
“I preferred the strategy you used to recruit me,” he says.
“Who is that?” Amberle says.
“He’s the new guy,” Eretria says. She slaps his hand when he goes to move the blindfold. “Do you want her to identify us?”
“I don’t want any of this,” he says. “Meeting you was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
It feels like a stab in her chest and she turns to him. “Do you think I planned... th-this?!” She gestures at Amberle. “I didn’t. We don’t take hostages, we don’t kidnap people, let alone high profile city royalty like an Elessedil. I don’t know what he’s thinking.”
“He’s a sociopath,” Blondie snaps. “He probably isn’t thinking at all.”
“What’s your name?” Amberle tries.
“My friends call me Shot,” Eretria spits at her before Blondie can say something stupid.
“Huh, I guess no one calls you that, then,” Amberle says.
Eretria wants to hit her. She doesn’t do it. She tenses her jaw and looks back at Blondie. “What do you want from me exactly?”
“I want you to do something,” he says. “From the way you sold it to me, it sounded like I was joining up with a group you led. That didn’t kill and didn’t kidnap.”
She snorted, rolled her eyes and looked away. “I don’t call the shots around here,” she says. “That’s my father.”
“He’s your father?” Amberle says in disgust. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Eretria spins around, storms over and grabs her by the hair, wrenching her back until the chair is precariously balancing on two legs, ready to drop back to the hard floor below. Someone squeals, but she’s pretty sure it isn’t Amberle. “Listen, princess,” she snarls down into her face. “I’m the best damn hope you have of getting out of here alive and—” She flicks her eyes down to the dress, ridden so far up Amberle’s thighs she can see her underwear. “—unscathed. So you better start showing me some damn respect.”
“Rover!” Blondie says. She realises he doesn’t know her name, otherwise he’d call her by it and ruin even more of her pitiful existence.
“What,” she says, not a question.
“You’re scaring her,” he says.
She looks back at Amberle. Her jaw is set and her throat is tight. “No, I’m not,” she says. “She’s not afraid of me.”
“Okay, well, you’re scaring me,” he says, tone edging into pathetic.
She resists the urge to release the chair and sets Amberle back where she was instead. The woman pulls at her restraints and Eretria glares at her and then at Blondie. She stalks over, grabs him by the elbow, tows him away. “I’m going to try and get this sorted,” she says. “Worst case scenario, we keep her alive and untouched until her family pays the ransom and we turn her over. She sees no faces, she hears no names, she gets no information.” Blondie meets her eyes, his own earnest and bordering on desperate. “Best case scenario I get this all shaken out and we let her go, somehow.” She cuts her eyes over to Amberle, then back at Blondie.
“What do you want me to do?” he says.
She looks him over a moment. “You look exhausted,” she says. “I want you go to out back and get some sleep.” She pulls a knife from her boot, turns it over and offers him the hilt, clutching the blade in her grip. “Put this under your pillow and if someone tries to hurt you, hurt them first.”
“Even your father?” He takes the blade.
“Especially my father,” she snarls.
***
She drags a chair over, places it in front of Amberle’s, and sits, leaning back in it and watching the woman.
Despite the blindfold, she still feels like she’s in a staring contest.
“I’m Amberle,” the princess says after a moment. “And you?”
Eretria snorts, slices an apple she found and puts a piece in her mouth.
“I like your voice,” Amberle continues. “I heard it all the time when we were in the van. You’re... It’s nice. You don’t sound like the others.”
Eretria doesn’t speak, so Amberle just keeps talking.
“So that’s your father?” Amberle lifts her chin. “Must’ve been a tough childhood.”
She looks across at the princess and considers offering her a piece of apple just to shut her the fuck up.
“And the other man I heard. He’s new?” When Eretria doesn’t reply she adds, “He doesn’t seem cut out for this kind of life, not like us.”
Eretria snorts. “Like us, princess?” she says. “And what do you know about tough childhoods?”
“I’ve been breaking rules since I can remember,” Amberle says. “And getting punished for it just the same.” She lifts her chin further. “I lost my father when I was young and my grandfather raised me. He told me I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do, that girls couldn’t be what I wanted to be.”
“So what did you do?” Eretria says, curiosity peeking up from wherever she last stowed it away.
“I did it anyway,” Amberle says. Her lips twitch in amusement. “My father would have been proud, I think.”
“Must be nice.” Eretria slices more apple.
“Doing what I want?”
“Your father being dead.”
Silence falls and Eretria slices more apple. Amberle finds new words, quicker than Eretria would’ve been able to.
“However much you think you’ll get for me,” she says, “my grandfather will pay triple that if I ask him nicely. No ransoms, no demands, just me walking up to him and asking him to wire you money.”
Eretria glances up at her. She stays quiet, but she stops slicing the apple.
“You don’t have to keep working for him like this,” Amberle says. “I find it hard to believe you like it – him calling the shots, I mean.”
She doesn’t speak.
“All you have to do is get us out of here,” Amberle says. “We can take an Uber to my grandfather’s penthouse, and from there he can—”
“—call the cops,” Eretria finishes for her.
“Hardly,” Amberle says. “He’d hardly call the police on my saviour.”
Eretria snorts and slices apple. She stands up and puts the piece to Amberle’s lips and when she shies she snaps, “It’s apple.”
“I don’t know where your hands have been,” Amberle says and Eretria snorts.
“Nowhere you’ll ever have the privilege,” she says, and walks across the warehouse to sit where she’s out of earshot for some peace.
***
If Blondie slept badly, he doesn’t say so, but he looks as tired as he did when he left.
“Did you have to stab my father?” Eretria says, looking up from where she’s thumbing through her phone.
“Sadly, no,” Blondie says. “How is she?”
“She needs the bathroom.” Eretria stands up. “I’ll take her.”
“I appreciate that.”
Whatever easy comradery they had before this incident seems to be back and Eretria lets out a breath of relief as she unhooks the bindings from the chair. “If you try anything, I don’t let you pee next time.”
“Noted,” Amberle says and she behaves herself as she goes, Eretria leaning against a wall and not looking at her, even though Amberle has no way to know if she’s looking or not – or if she’s doing anything else.
She latches her back to the chair and takes a step back. “Hungry? Thirsty?”
“Are you going to wash your hands?” Amberle says.
“Haven’t decided yet,” Eretria replies.
A moment of silence passes and finally Amberle says, “Both.”
“I’ll get you something.” Eretria leaves without any kind of fanfare and when she comes back, Blondie and Amberle are sitting, quiet.
He’s doing better at being noncommunicative than she manages, she notes and provides the food. “I’m untying your arms so you can eat,” she says, “but if you try something we both stab you. He has one knife, I have the rest.”
“Thanks,” Amberle mumbles and tucks into the food like she’s been starving.
Eretria wonders if she’s ever really experienced hunger before.
***
Cephalo sends the ransom out after a day of Eretria trying to convince him not to. On two four, she brings Amberle a new set of clothes and stands over her while she changes. “I suppose a shower would be too much to ask for,” Amberle says and Eretria answers with a snort.
On the third day, she realises she hasn’t slept in that long, and although sleeplessness isn’t unfamiliar to her, seventy-two hours of unrest is a bit much even for her.
“Can you monitor her?” she says and Blondie nods. “Don’t untie her. Don’t talk to her. Don’t do anything.”
Blondie scowls. “I’ve got this,” he says.
“Don’t let my father be alone with her,” she says. She looks at him for a long, lingering moment. “I’m serious.” She holds a hand out towards him and on her palm is a disposable phone. “My number’s in there. I’m trusting you not to use it for something stupid. If my father—”
“I’ll call you,” he says. He takes the phone, tucking it into his pocket.
“Don’t let anyone catch you with that,” she says and leaves.
***
If she sleeps at all, she doesn’t know it. She tosses and turns, claws pillows closer and shoves them further away, stares at the ceiling until it feels like her eyes bleed and then stares some more.
When her phone rings, she wants to be surprised. “He locked me out.”
She’s at the door in a second flat, lockpicks in her shaking hands. “Move!” She shoves Blondie aside and shoves them into the locks. She’s not sure if she’s sure of what she’s hearing, if she’s imagining the sound of a belt unbuckling, but she’s positive she knows the sound of Amberle’s terrified screams for mercy and help.
The lock clicks and she yanks herself back from it and kicks the door open, storming in and pulling a gun, pointing it at her father. “GET OFF HER!”
Blondie is right behind her but she’s focused solely on Cephalo and Amberle. Her shirt is ripped and she’s on her back on the floor, still bound by the ankles and wrists. Cephalo’s pants are open, but not all the way. He draws up to his full height, turns slowly with a smirk lingering on his smug face. “What’re you gonna do, kid?”
She flicks off the safety. “Get away from her.” She gestures with the gun. “Blondie, get her.”
He skids across but Cephalo intercepts, he grabs him. “Leave her alone,” he says, laughter in his words, “she’s not gonna do anything.” He looks at Blondie and smirks. “You could have a go too, if you wanted.”
Blondie looks like he’s about to throw up at the mere thought and Eretria steps closer, but only twice. She knows better than to let her gun come within anyone’s reach. “Up against the wall,” she says, gesturing with the gun. Cephalo doesn’t move. Blondie hauls Amberle to her feet, tucks her safe against his body.
“What?” Cephalo says. “Are you fond of these two? Did they grow on that stone cold heart of yours? Do you want a pet princess for Christmas?”
Eretria wavers, starkly aware that she has no play here. “I said get against the wall!”
“Or what?” Cephalo says. “You don’t have it in you to shoot me, although I admire you spunk to point a gun at me to begin with.” He looks across at Blondie and Amberle. “She’s gonna be our big payday, kid. We can run away with that much cash. Start a new life wherever we want.” He looks back at Eretria. “Maybe somewhere in Greece.”
“Shut the fuck up,” she says and holds the gun steady.
Quick as a flash he’s grabbed Blondie. Amberle screams, nearly falls when his steady pillar of support is wrenched away. He pulls him to his chest, puts a knife to his throat. “Drop the gun,” he says.
Blondie lets out a gasp of fear, hands raised, and looks across at Eretria.
Amberle pulls her blindfold off and blinks hard in the fluorescent light of the warehouse.
“I said drop the gun,” Cephalo repeats.
Eretria stands her ground, holds it still and pointed at his head. “Drop the knife,” she counters.
“Kid,” Cephalo says, “he’s never gonna love you, not after all this. Neither of them will.” The knife digs into Blondie’s skin. “I’m doing you a favour.”
“A favour?!” Eretria snaps. “You’ve never done me one favour my whole life.” The gun wavers in her grip. “All you’ve ever done is take.”
Cephalo drags Blondie’s head back by his hair. “She’s seen our faces now. She’ll have to die next, but not before we get paid. Drop the gun, kid, before you all have to die.”
Next.
Blondie’s never going to make it out of this alive, not now.
Eretria points the gun at Cephalo’s head. “Final warning!”
The knife cuts into Blondie’s neck, red glinting beneath the silver of the blade, and Eretria fires the gun.
Cephalo and Blondie both hit the ground. Amberle lets out a scream and scrambles to check on them.
Eretria stands, frozen in terror.
“He’s alive!” Amberle screams.
“Yes, I am?!” Blondie says. He has one gloved hand pressed to his throat as he scrambles to his feet with Amberle’s help. It’s bleeding over his hand but it’s a trickle not a gush. Enough that Eretria knows if she’d waited even a second longer he’d be dead.
She should’ve shot earlier.
She looks down at Cephalo’s body and then across at Amberle. “You said triple.”
“I-I did,” she says, nodding.
Eretria lowers her gun and takes a breath. “Looks like I’m calling the shots now, Blondie.”
“The name’s Wil,” he says, meeting her eyes. “My name is Wil.”
She hesitates, looking between him and Amberle for a moment. “Eretria.” She puts the gun away. “I’m Eretria.”
“Let’s get out of here, Eretria,” Amberle suggests.
“Then we can pick our next move.”
Eretria looks across at Wil. He thinks all the doors are open now, but she knows better. More are closed than ever before.
“You two go,” she says after a moment of hesitation. “Amberle will make sure you’re set up for med school. Only my fingerprints are on the gun.”
Amberle steps forward. “We’re not leaving you,” she says, and Eretria looks at her in confusion. “We’re in this together now. We’re not leaving you alone.”
She wonders how long that will last, and looks at Wil, who nods his agreement.
“Then we need a plan,” she says, and steps across, sliding her knife between Amberle’s hands to cut through her bindings. “And a place to bury a body.”
If you liked the fic please hit the reblog button! It means the world to me, is a ringing endorsement and it also helps my fic get more visibility! If you’d reblog art, please consider reblogging any fics you read, not just mine, it means everything to authors, it really does.
You can also leave a comment or kudos on AO3 here, if you like!
Thanks so much for reading! Should I write more of this? I feel like Amberle and Eretria deserve some alone time. Let me know what you think!
In a universe where the Legends returned to their earlier lives after Savage’s defeat, Sara Lance is bored out of her mind. And then a certain crook turns up…
Thanks for reading! I loved writing this story, although the heist was a pain to work out. The story is much better because of @larielromeniel, who helped me with that a great deal.
I’ve written a follow-up that’s pretty much just texts between Felicity and Sara (and Barry and Leonard) the day after the heist. Look for that tomorrow.
Can also be read here at AO3 or here at FF.net.
Sara precedes him through the door of the suite, still by all appearances on an adrenaline high, and by the time he’s followed her into the main room, she’s on the room phone, apparently ordering something from room service. Nonplussed but amused, Leonard ducks into the bathroom before returning, finding Sara tapping her toe in impatience.
“Can I see it?” She rolls her eyes at his slow smile. “The book, jackass.”
Studying it, they both recognize names, although he’s pretty sure Sara recognizes more than he does. She makes noises of anger at some, disappointment at others, and finally shakes her head, handing it back to him.
“Kay’s going to find that arrow in his wall and think his plan worked,” Len observes as he tucks the book into a hidden compartment in his bag.
“Mmhm.” Sara eyes him. “Which is why we do need to warn Oliver. I mean, it’ll be pretty funny if your friends start using that info and Kay points a finger at Ollie…but only if Ollie is prepared.”
He’d been thinking about this quite a bit, really, on the way back.
@tkdgirl2012 this took a slightly angsty turn, I used a soulmate prompt idea of “Your soulmate clock is actually a countdown of how long your soulmate has left to live and holy shit you have to find your soulmate soon because your clock says you have three months left (for angst maybe).” from here but I hope you like it! I also wasn’t sure about the timeline between Sara’s death + resurrection in Flash and LoT, so I took some creative license with it.
It also got long as hell. Oops.
minus figures
“Actually, I was dead for a year.”
It shouldn’t have stuck in his mind the way it did, but there he was, scratching at his arm and glaring at the ceiling of what was apparently his new home.
“When?”
He wasn’t sure when he’d left his room or ambled his way to the training room to find Sara beating seven hells out of a punching bag, but there he was.
“What are you talking about?” she said, turning back to the bag. He stepped behind it, bracing it with his body, and she glanced at him before going back to punching.
“You said you were dead for a year,” he said. “When?”
She shrugged. “Died? A year and a half ago, give or take. Came back... Eh, four months ago?”
He swallowed, fighting to keep whatever confusion he was feeling off his face, but she noticed, lowering her hands and studying him.
“Why?” she said.
“No reason.” He released the bag. She glared at him. He sighed. “Something weird happened to me,” he said, “a while back. Thought it might be related.”
“What, was there blood in your dumpster or something?” she said. He looked at her, confused, and she waved a hand. “Nothing. What happened?”
He didn’t want to tell her, but he felt like he’d signed himself up for this so here he was. “My clock stopped.”
She paused, looking at him. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, sincerely.
He pulled a face. Everyone knew what the stopped clock meant: your soulmate had died. There was no guarantees that you’d find your soulmate before the clock reached zero and they died, there was only the promise that if you had found them you’d know when your clock stopped and they were gone.
He’d never really cared for the idea of meeting his soulmate, although he’d been concerned Mick might be that and his clock was counting down, and then one morning he’d woken up and his clock had reached zero and Mick was snoozing on his sofa and he hadn’t cared, not really, but he’d still felt a small thud of loss in the pit of his stomach because somewhere out there in the universe, his soulmate had just died.
He’d never known them – she, he, them, whatever – but they were still gone, he’d never meet them. He was more bothered by not knowing exactly who had died (he checked obits, but they didn’t tell him anything) than he was by them being dead.
And then, a year after that... his clock had started counting again.
As far as he knew, this had never happened to anyone else. Ever.
But there it was. 00:00:00 turned to -00:00:01 to -00:00:50 and kept going. It was into the months now: -2932:34:21, he’d done the math.
Four months.
Give or take.
He didn’t really want to explain any of this to her, but it didn’t feel right to not, either, so he sighed. “A year after that, it started counting again.”
Her head snapped up, icy blue eyes staring into his. “What?”
“Just under three thousand hours, now,” he said. “Or, well, minus three thousand hours.”
“Can I see?” she said.
He shrugged, rolling his sleeve up to his elbow and no further. Under a few tattoos and a myriad of scars was his clock, still counting down below zero. “Here.”
She stepped closer, into his space, and he wasn’t in love but her presence set his skin on fire in ways he wasn’t used to. She put her hand on his arm, slow so he could stop her but he didn’t, and brushed her thumb across the numbers.
She didn’t speak, he didn’t either.
After a moment of staring at the ticking clock, she lowered his arm and looked at him. “It’s not me,” she said.
He let out a breath and looked at her. “Know someone else who came back from the dead four months ago?”
“Actually, yeah,” she said and turned away, picking up her sweatshirt and pulling it on. “I’m sure it happens all the time.”
He was equally sure it did not.
“It’s not me,” she said again, heading for the door. “But whoever it is, I’m sure you’ll meet them eventually.”
Because her use of gender neutral phrasing didn’t make him like her more at all. “I’m sure,” he drawled, and watched her walk away.
***
She continued to insist they were absolutely not soulmates, that the clock on his arm (still ticking) was absolutely not hers.
He let her, even though he disagreed.
They had sex. She ended the night with, “It’s still not me, Leonard!” and stormed out of his room.
He smirked. It was definitely her.
He hoped Raymond didn’t catch her stomping through the Waverider half-naked.
She’d taken off her pants but never her shirt, but that worked for him. That way he didn’t have to take off his either.
After a while though, he started paying closer attention to her wardrobe choices. He’d seen her in tank tops, before he’d brought up his clock, he was sure of it. It was hard to get the image of her biceps and strong shoulders out of his mind, after all.
But now she was wearing long-sleeves. Jackets. He hadn’t seen her wear her White Canary outfit without her coat in weeks. She even worked out in a zipped-up sweatshirt.
She never took her top off when they had sex.
And maybe that hadn’t been a concern, maybe he’d even liked the excuse not to deal with his own issues, but it didn’t seem like her thing. She seemed like the kind to bare her skin proudly.
He’d seen her wear less than a jacket.
It didn’t take him very long to figure it out.
She was half asleep, curled up on her side of his bed in a long-sleeved shirt and nothing else, and he was lying on his side, watching the ceiling in a t-shirt and nothing else, and before she could fall asleep he said, “Show me.”
She looked over at him. “Show you what?”
He sighed, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Show me your clock, Sara,” he said. “My clock.”
He expected her to argue, insist it wasn’t his clock, spout some nonsense about Oliver Queen being her soulmate again (that was just insulting the first time, let alone the third), but she didn’t.
She sat up, tugged her shirt off over her head (and dear god she wasn’t wearing anything underneath and this would be a great tactic for continuing to deflect him from seeing her clock if he wasn’t a very determined individual) and extended her forearm for him to see.
There it was, counting down the seconds and minutes and hours of his life he had left, and it wasn’t in four digits like hers.
It was barely even in three.
“Oh,” he said. He wasn’t sure what else there was to say.
“It’s not yours,” she said, but it was weaker this time, almost like she was begging.
He licked his lips, mind reeling and going a mile a minute. He could slap on a trademark smirk, kick her out of his bed, sulk quietly, or he could reclaim the determination he’d used to not let her bare chest distract him and put it to good use.
“So here’s the thing,” he drawled out, reclining on the bed with his head on his hand. He reached out, trailing his fingertips up her forearm, along her clock, and enjoying the sharp intake of breath he received in response. “I have no intention of dying.”
She swallowed. “Oh?”
“There are no strings on me, Sara,” he said, fingertips sliding further up her arm. “I’m not going to die just because a clock on your arm says I’m going to.”
She let out the breath she’d taken in and looked at him. “No?”
“No,” he said, and met her eyes. “I’ve never let anyone tell me how to live my life, and I’m not going to start with letting a clock tell me how I’m going to end it.”
She replied with a kiss and he let her, even as the imaginary ticking of the clock on her arm filled his ears.
***
He had never felt truly ashamed of his own actions before, but here he was, ashamed. The time masters had come for them, her clock was reading hours in the single figures, and he’d panicked.
He’d panicked.
And worse still, it turned out he’d been a puppet all along.
“Turns out I was just following a script,” he said from her doorway. She was staring at the ceiling and he wondered if she had the same sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach that he did.
“Doesn’t make you any less of a jerk.”
He ambled over, leaning against her bed, and looked across at her. They did the dance, the one of deflection and avoidance, like they always did, and then he said, “I’ve started to wonder about what the future might hold for me, and you.” He looked at her and he wondered if she knew how hard this was for him. “And me and you.”
She looked back at him. “There is no future for us, Leonard,” she said, and her voice cracked, just a little. “We both know that.”
She slid off the bed, walking out of the room, and he stayed, looking at the bed they’d never shared, and wondering if they ever would.
***
He’d sworn he wouldn’t do this, he’d sworn it. He’d promised himself her clock would go down into minus figures just like his had, he’d made himself a million promises that he’d not die, he’d not prove that a clock on some woman’s arm could dictate when he’d breathe his last breath and yet here they were.
Just like the clock had foretold.
She’d known it all along, and he supposed he had too.
“Just do it,” he said, one hand buried in the oculus and the other at his side. He wondered if there was irony in the fact her clock would blow up long before he did, if the explosion came from his hand.
“No.” She shook her head. “There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” He looked at her, meeting her eyes. “I was always going to end up here. We both knew it.”
It was true. He’d known he couldn’t beat her clock.
He’d take being her soulmate over beating it anyway.
“Show me,” he said. When she looked at him, confused, he sighed. “Your clock.”
She hesitated, then rolled up her sleeve, holding her forearm between them. He looked down at it, reading the numbers as they counted down from two and a half minutes.
“You know it’s right,” he said. “Get Mick out of here. Raymond’s damn clock is still counting, so he can’t die here.”
She made a little noise under her breath, he could see the gears whirling behind her eyes, and then she kissed him.
And it all mattered just a little less.
***
She looked down at her clock.
00:00:00
Not a surprise, but still painful.
Agonizing, even.
She lay awake, staring at it, wondering what it would take for it to start ticking again, what deal she’d have to make, what pit she’d have to drop him into.
Not that there was even a body.
No body for Leonard, no pit for Laurel, just a gaping hole in the very fibre of her being.
She kept going.
She imagined it sometimes, his arm and his clock, the ticking of the minus figures of her life that now felt so empty, even if it was full.
And then one day he showed up again.
And she looked down at her wrist and it was still all zeroes.
Every single number was zeroes.
No minus figures.
He wasn’t alive, he was still gone.
And it hurt all over again.
“We have to send him back to twenty fourteen,” she said, leaning back in her chair and resting her hands in her lap. She hoped she didn’t look as exhausted as she felt, but it was doubtful. “Malcolm has to go back to twenty-seventeen, Damien has to go back to assholeville, and Leonard has to go back to where Eobard recruited him from.”
“Why?” Mick said, and he looked as pained as she felt.
“Because if we don’t set him back on that path,” she said, “he’ll never be on our ship, you won’t be either, and he won’t die destroying the oculus. Either time will fold in on itself, or we’ll end up in a totally other timeline. Probably the first, since the Vanishing Point exists outside of time.”
She’d spent too much time with Rip, clearly.
“Ah,” he said.
She swung through the holding cells to collect Damien, and kept her face impassive when she looked at Leonard. “Before we drop you off,” she said, “show me your wrist.”
“What?” he said.
She eyed him. “Just do it.”
He only argued a little more, and then he rolled his sleeve up and held it to the glass.
The countdown wasn’t in minus figures. On his timeline, she hadn’t even died yet, and on hers he’d been gone almost a year.
She sighed a little and collected Damien.
***
Sara was grateful as she belted through the urban jungle of wrong LA that she hadn’t let herself go once she was captain.
If she had, she’d probably be t-rex kibble by now.
She leapt over a low wall, did a roll and—crunch.
Her foot went down wrong, her ankle snapped and she hit the ground.
She wondered if somewhere in the vanishing point, her clock was about to stop again.
She rolled over, choking back a cry as the t-rex bent down to eat her and then—
It turned to ice.
“I leave you alone for five god forsaken minutes,” a familiar voice drawled, “and you break time.” A pause. “And your ankle.”
She scrambled to her feet, then yelped in pain when she put her weight on her ankle, and Leonard looped an arm around her. “It’s okay, lean on me.”
She did so, tilting her face up to look at him in confusion. “Leonard?”
“In the flesh,” he said. “I assume because – as previously stated – you broke time.”
“You’re alive,” she said.
“You broke time,” he repeated.
She pulled a face. “There’s more where that came from,” she said, gesturing at the t-rex popsicle where it wobbled beside them. “The Waverider is that way.” She gestured. “Help me get there?”
They stayed quiet as he helped her limp back to the ship and through it to the medbay. Once she was lying down, her ankle elevated for Gideon to fix, she looked over at him.
“An ankle is nothing,” he said, “try having your whole hand replaced and repaired.”
“Pass,” she said, lips twitching a little. Everyone else was out trying to fix time or find supplies, so she hadn’t had to deal with them readying up to murder Leonard yet. That was good.
“Yeah, can’t recommend it.” He pulled a chair over, sat down on it and looked at her. “Were you trying to become food for a t-rex?”
“No.” She sighed at his face. “No,” she said again and sat up. “I’m not suicidal if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I just wondered,” he said. “Mick has his moments.”
“I know,” she said. She stayed quiet for a moment, then looked at him. “So you’re— I mean, do you remember—”
“The whole thing,” he said. “Damien, Malcolm, Eobard, killing Mick.” He swallowed. “Bit of a weird thing to remember but not remember. I’m sure I’ll get used to it. Eventually.”
“So you’re—” she said again, not sure how to express it.
“Your Leonard Snart,” he said, with a kind of intensity she knew she should be uncomfortable with.
“Are you going to disappear if we fix time?” she said with a sigh.
“No idea,” he said and she looked at him in surprise. He shrugged. “If I do, I do. If I don’t, we won. It’s not like we’re not used to living on borrowed time, after all.”
Her right hand went to her left wrist without her meaning to move it and he followed the motion with his gaze.
“Show me,” he said, voice low. “Show me your clock.”
She hesitated, but only for a moment. It’d been set to zero for so long, it would hardly matter if it was still zero now. She knew this Leonard was the one she’d shared a bed with, the one she’d kissed goodbye, the one she’d watched die. She recognised him.
She rolled her sleeve up and they both looked.
Leonard smiled a little. “Minus figures,” he said. “Whaddaya know?”
CC next, @tkdgirl2012 I promise! I’m not just skipping that. I wrote from Ray’s POV so it turned into a rambling mess in places but I hope you like it!
meaning
Ray Palmer had never been one to believe in absolutes. He was technically Jewish, but his religion had lapsed as he grew older and he didn’t find himself missing it all that much. Christmas was a nice tradition for family, when you had one, and that was about it when it came to religion.
Absolutes weren’t his thing, and the more time he spent flying around Star City in his suit, or watching Felicity work magic with computers, or just generally knowing that Barry Allen existed, the less he believed in them.
When he was small, he’d woken up to see words tattooed along his arm. He knew it happened to some people, that the words of their soulmate – something distinctive, something you’d just know – would appear on their bodies, but it didn’t happen to everyone.
In fact, it rarely happened at all.
But whereas most people obsessed over it and made entire webpages devoted to the concept of a soulmate and what it meant to have half of a soul out there waiting to rejoin, Ray had simply... continued.
And then he’d met Anna.
She’d asked once, as they lay in bed, if the tattoo on his arm meant something, and he said, “No. It doesn’t mean anything.”
If she’d thought it weird, she’d never said.
He’d never believed that she was his soulmate, but he’d never loved her any less for it. Soulmates were a strange concept, the idea that you could have only one, that if they died you’d be forever without half of your soul, that somehow the soul – this supposedly essential part of any human – could be broken and split between two humans, but that for some reason your soulmate would surely be nearby, not in a backwater village in Japan while you were living it large in Central City or something.
No, Ray had never believed Anna was his soulmate, but he’d never believed in soulmates at all.
When she’d died, he never felt he’d lost a soulmate – just that he’d lost the love of his life.
The Waverider had dealt another blow to any remaining fragments of belief he may had held in fate or destiny – the thought that they could alter time, that one wrong move could wipe a marriage from existence, or a person, or an entire timeline could shatter and disappear left him with a feeling proof, that there was no such thing as soulmates, or divine intervention or anything like that.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t still looking for love.
He was.
For some reason though, his heart had decided to yearn for Mick Rory. He knew why: the man was handsome as hell and twice as sinful, his smile lit up the whole room for Ray whenever he bothered to use it, and he was smart when he let himself be, he just lacked direction and schooling.
But sometimes his intelligence shone through like a beacon, and Ray would find himself just staring at him like he was the sun itself come to light up his world.
“What’s the delay, haircut?” Mick grumbled, coming to rest by his side, eating a banana.
Ray hated him a little for that and he averted his gaze quickly. “I’ve been trying to activate the crystals,” he said of a piece of old technology they were trying to keep out of the hands of the next set of bad guys, “but it’s missing a piece.” He let out a sigh and gestured at it. “You know how you get the IKEA box and in the IKEA box there’s a leaflet and the leaflet tells you how to put the cabinet together?”
“No.”
“Right. Of course not. But we’re missing the leaflet,” Ray said with a sigh. “I think we’re going to have to go back. It’s probably written on the wall of the cave or something. I can’t believe I was so stupid that I didn’t make a note of—”
“Dimittere me ad Deum,” Mick said.
Ray froze. He looked around at him. “Did you just call me dumb?”
Mick looked at him like he truly was. “You ain’t stupid, haircut,” he said. “I said: dimittere me ad Deum. Latin or some shit like that, right?”
Oh yes. Yes, it was Latin, and now he’d listened to it his forearm was itching. “How do you...”
“I pay attention,” Mick said. “It was painted on the walls. Figured it might be important so I read it a few times.”
Ray mouthed at him. “Dimittere me ad Deum,” he said, with the correct translation, and the crystals came alive. “Aha! Mick you genius!”
Mick munched on his banana.
Ray finished up, taking the crystals to Sara, and then...
“Hey Mick, got a minute?” he said, ambling as far as the door to his room but not going inside.
Mick looked around at him. “Sure.”
Ray hesitated a moment, then moved inside and sat down on one of his chairs. “So uhh... I wanted to talk about that Latin.”
“What about it?” Mick leant against the wall.
“I uh...” Ray wasn’t sure how to broach this topic. He wasn’t even sure if Mick liked guys, let alone felt romantic attraction towards them.
He was okay with the idea of a friend soulmate though, if he wasn’t.
He pulled his jacket off, rolling his sleeve up, and showed Mick the tattoo. “I have this.”
Mick squinted. “Ya got it tattooed?”
“No.” Ray ruffled up a little and huffed. “I’ve always had it. It’s one of those soulmate tattoos.”
Mick eyed his arm. “Soulmate what now?”
Of course he didn’t know. Why would he? Why would anything be easy?
“Uhh.” Ray pulled some faces. “Some people wake up when they’re little and they have these tattoos – marks, really, since tattooing involves ink and this is more of a birthmark since it comes from my body naturally – and they’re meaningful words of someone they share a soul with.” He shrugged. “Once you hear them you just know, according to the websites.” He’d researched, he’d just never believed.
Mick snorted. “So you think I’m some kind of soul mate?”
“Well... Yeah.” Ray shrugged a little and swallowed. “Maybe? It felt right. You said these words. I think—I really think it means we’re meant to be.”
Mick’s entire stature changed, his body snapping upright a little and his knuckles going white around his beer.
“Mick?” Ray said. “What—What’s wrong?”
Mick let out a grunting noise and rolled his sleeve up, glaring at his forearm for a moment before showing it to Ray.
It means we’re meant to be was written on Mick’s arm, almost obscured under old burns.
Ray’s eyes widened. “You have one too.”
“Never knew what it was.” Mick said with a shrug. He yanked his sleeve back down. “Guess it’s you.”
Ray felt his face almost break under the size of the smile on it as he leapt to his feet, but he froze when Mick thrust a hand out towards him.
“Hug me, I’ll kill you,” he said.
Ray considered that for a moment, then shot him a grin. “You’d only be hurting yourself, Mick.”
Thanks for the prompt @connorfan1982! I hope this is what you expected :D
It’s green
“It’s green.”
Mick Rory had put up with a lot of shit on the Waverider. He’d consistently been diminished and demeaned, he’d been treated like a psycho (which, he supposed he was but ever since his time in the Vanishing Point he also wasn’t anymore) and just plain ignored.
But this... this was the worst part of everything.
They’d crash landed in Star City twenty-he-didn’t-fucking-care again and Connor Hawke had come on board.
Rip had made some dying seal noises and pointed out he was an aberration or some shit like that, but Mick had tuned him out and had only imagined clubbing him a little.
See? He wasn’t as psycho as he once was.
Connor had fit in well at first. Mick hadn’t really interacted with him beyond a nod of approval when he beat the shit out of some guy who’d taken Sara by surprise, but he’d fit in.
And then Haircut’s damned chore wheel had come into effect, placing Connor in cooking.
Mick had tried a few times to make it so that only Haircut landed in cooking, but he’d never quite cracked how to recode that. He’d managed to make it so that the wheel didn’t land him in cleaning the toilets (really, it was just a simple if variable added to Haircut’s insane chore wheel code that said if Mick landed on Cleaning it just had to keep rotating). He wasn’t sure why Haircut’s idea of a chore wheel had to be randomised and spinny but there you go. Maybe it was so no one could complain it was rigged.
Ha.
Suckers.
But back to Birdman and his damn cooking.
Mick had sat down for lunch, looked down and... green.
He had a feeling that one part was kale. He didn’t know what the rest was. He’d only eaten kale once and that was because Lisa had made a joke and Leonard had insisted he could totally eat healthy food, he wouldn’t even notice the difference.
(He’d noticed. They’d all noticed.)
“It’s green,” he said again, when apparently the first time he hadn’t been loud enough.
Birdman paused with one hand on his own plate. “Well... Yes.”
“Where’s the meat?” Mick demanded.
“I don’t think there is any, Mick,” said Haircut down the table. “Connor’s a zen Buddhist. He doesn’t eat meat and I doubt he cooks with it.”
Connor shot him a smile. Mick resisted the urge to shoot Connor.
“Vegan.” Mick poked his food and a potato fell off his plate. “If it doesn’t scream, I don’t eat it.”
“You eat crackers,” Haircut said.
Mick turned his head slowly, just slow enough that Haircut knew he was about to die and shut the fuck up.
“Mick, Connor went out of his way to cook a nice meal for us,” Sara said. “I’m next on cooking duty. I’ll make sure your entire plate is meat. Just try his food.”
He eyed Sara. “Pass.” Her cooking was almost worse than... green.
He really wanted to punch the kid.
“Maybe your palette just isn’t sophisticated enough to enjoy the flavours,” Birdman said with a big smile, stabbing a piece of green-and-fluffy.
“What’d you just call my palette?” Mick said.
“Unsophisticated,” Connor said.
Down the table, Sara groaned.
Mick launched up from his seat, swinging a punch at Birdman.
The next thing he knew he was on the floor. Birdman was still eating his dinner, but now his boot was on Mick’s throat.
“Ya call that zen?” Mick growled.
“It was pretty zen from where I was sitting,” Haircut said. He paused. “Connor, let him go.”
“Only if he eats his dinner,” Birdman said.
Mick wriggled and squirmed, trying to get out from under the most embarrassing pin of his life. “No!”
Sara leant towards Rip. “Do you ever feel like we became parents to children in adult bodies?”
Rip looked back at her. “I have for a long time.”
“It won’t kill you,” Birdman said. He chewed pointedly on whatever the fuzzy green was. “You might even like it.”
Mick glared at him. “Fine.”
The boot went away from his throat and Mick climbed back into his seat, stabbing his kale and glaring daggers across the table at Birdman.
Leonard’s words rang in his head, that he’d gotten soft, but he hadn’t felt it until he was sitting opposite a zen Buddhist who had just kicked his ass, eating kale.
He looked down at his plate and took a moment to imagine every last item as pieces of Birdman’s body.
I skipped the second prompt, I hope you don’t mind, I didn’t know how to do it. But here’s the first! @connorfan1982
I don’t need a shovel
Maggie didn’t think that Lyra was small or sensitive, she didn’t seem frightened or upset by the procession of people giving her The Shovel Talk, but none of the people who kept interrupting her evening with Maggie at the back of Kara’s apartment while the others left them out seemed to care.
First was James. He introduced himself nicely, shook Lyra’s hand, smiled at her, and then he said, “Just so you know, Winn’s my best friend.” When Lyra looked at him, confused, he said, “And I’m not just a mild-mannered editor.” More confusion. “If you hurt him? You’ll pay.” He was gone before Lyra could respond, and it left her blinking and turning to Maggie.
“It’s—” She wasn’t sure how to explain an Earth custom she genuinely hated. “—an Earth thing. We’re protective of our friends and family so if we see anyone who might hurt them...”
Lyra’s brow wrinkled. “But I have feelings for Winn,” she said, “we’re dating. I’m not his arch nemesis.”
“You’ve been watching too many of Winn’s movie picks,” Maggie said with a laugh, shaking her head. “It’s just a thing. Physical pain is fleeting, emotional pain sticks around, so we’re almost more protective over hearts than bodies.”
Lyra considered this for a moment, then shrugged and turned back to her game of cards with Maggie. She’d won three in a row and Maggie hadn’t let her win. It was starting to bother her.
Next up was Kara, who Maggie had decided was least equipped for any kind of Shovel talk. “If—If you hurt him?” she said, and Maggie could almost imagine six question marks after her statement for all the energy running through her body. “Look he is small! And vulnerable! And—” She blew hair from her face, ruffling up like a pigeon. “If you hurt him I can crush you! With one hand!”
She didn’t wait for Lyra to reply – which was probably for the best because she was just staring at her in confusion – and then she was gone.
Maggie scowled a little.
The rest of her evening passed by with even Alex threatening her new alien friend – while said alien friend kicked her ass at cards – and by the time they were ready to leave, Maggie was ready to blow.
“Excuse me,” she said to Lyra, offering her a smile, and then taking her leave over towards the table.
Winn was helping clear up, James already at the sink with plates and cups and Winn collecting together the placemats. He looked up when Maggie came to stand beside the table. “Hey Maggie what’s—”
“Don’t talk,” she said, “just listen.” She crowded into his space. “I have spent this whole evening watching you and your friends talk and practically ignore us both, and in the few moments we weren’t ignored, your friends were threatening your new girlfriend.”
“Threatening my—” He looked across at Lyra, pulling on her jacket. “Pft. Nahh, they wouldn’t—”
“Let me make one thing very, very clear,” Maggie said, and Winn retrained his attention on her, his eyes wide. “If you hurt her?” She stepped closer. “I’m an FBI agent. I don’t need a shovel.”
He made the tiniest squeaking sound under his breath. “N-Noted!” he said.
Maggie turned, making her way across to her girlfriend. “C’mon, Alex,” she said as she got to her side. “Let’s give Lyra a ride home.”
the oculus is destroyed, wiping Leonard Snart right out of time along with it. (au after season 1)
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is it required?
He fit in with the team like he belonged there.
There wasn’t much they could do with him, a naked traveller from god knows where (or, more importantly, when) so they kept him.
“Like a pet?” he drawled, leaning in the doorway where he’d overheard their conversation from. “I’m not sure how I feel about being your dog.”
“I’m not giving him belly rubs,” Mick said, a beer put to his lips. “I don’t pet Temporal Anomalies.”
“We can’t keep calling him that,” Nate said with a sigh. “He’s – y’know! – a person, as far as I can tell.” He looked over at the man in the doorway. “Seems person-y.”
“He’s a person,” Sara said, a little quicker than she’d like. So what if she’d been getting to know him a little? It wasn’t fair to treat him like an object or a dog.
“So what do we call him?” Ray said. “Peter? Walter?” Sara cut her eyes over to him and he shrank a tiny bit. “Tinkerbell?”
“Could just ask him what name he’d like,” Mick said, quiet almost like he thought they’d ignore him.
“Good point,” Sara said. She looked across at the Temporal Anomaly. “Well... What should we call you? Do you want to pick a name?”
He considered that for a moment, then sauntered across, sitting down and taking Mick’s beer right out of his hands. Ray’s jaw dropped. Nate stared. Amaya stayed quiet, but looked between the two men, her hand creeping for her pendant. “Do I need one?” he asked, like he hadn’t just stolen Mick’s beer.
He took a swig. Mick stared at him, torn between confusion over what he’d just done and confusion over how angry he wasn’t.
“We can hardly continue calling you the Temporal Anomaly,” Amaya said.
“Why not?” The man shrugged and took another sip, then offered the bottle to Sara, where she was sitting just across from him.
Mick tracked the bottle with his eyes as Sara took it and drank. Ray squeaked a couple of times.
“It—I mean—” Nate stammered.
“I like it,” the anomaly stated. “It’s enigmatic. Mysterious. Frightening.”
“You think Temporal Anomaly is frightening?” Mick said, taking his bottle when Sara offered it to him.
“Do you think Heatwave is?” the anomaly asked, no hint of malice in his tone. “Are you going to tan everyone to death?”
Sara tensed, but to her surprise (and his), Mick let out a laugh. “I might just do that.”
“Then—Then it’s settled,” Ray stammered. “We just call him Temporal Anomaly.”
“Until we figure out who he is at least,” Sara said, looking across at the anomaly. “Just because we’re letting you stay, that doesn’t mean we trust you.”
“Noted,” the anomaly said, and sipped Mick’s beer.
***
The only thing that was really off about the anomaly (Sara felt weird calling him that) so far was that she’d noticed things would go missing and then reappear.
For example, Mick, the one day, couldn’t find his sweater. It seemed like a small thing and she was sure he hadn’t taken it off in 1901 the day before, but he couldn’t find it regardless.
Next day, it showed up.
Then Nate’s history book went missing. Mick asked how he could tell, considering how many he’d scrounged back to his room, but it was definitely gone.
Until it wasn’t.
The pattern repeated: one of Amaya’s bracelets, Ray’s screwdriver, Steins glasses for a whole day, Jax’s music player, a comb from Sara’s dresser. They all went missing and then reappeared.
And she knew why.
Amaya wasn’t trained. Mick wasn’t observant. Ray was oblivious. Stein was distracted. Jax was young.
Sara, on the other hand, was league of assassins. She had perfected the art of stealth, both in being unseen and seeing the unseen.
“Gideon, has anything changed with this item?” she asked of her comb, placing it in a scanner.
“No, Captain Lance,” Gideon said. “It is as it should be.”
She hadn’t thought it would be different, but it was best to be sure. She liked Barry Allen, but she wasn’t as trusting as the man who kept inviting traitors in for dinner.
Had her comb and Mick’s sweater and all the other items stayed missing, she’d think that the anomaly was just a thief, stealing for the sake of taking and having, or even trying to hurt them, but nothing precious had been taken (her comb had sat between a photo of Laurel and another of Oliver, next to Laurel’s favourite gold ring, and an arrow necklace with an emerald cut into it that reminded her of Oliver, even if she’d never wear it out) and all the items had been returned to where they’d been taken from within a day or two.
Which meant he enjoyed the challenge.
Stealing Stein’s glasses had meant sneaking into his quarters and taking them while he slept. Jax’s music player had been in his pocket. Ray’s screwdriver most likely under his nose.
Her comb had been in her room, locked tight and inaccessible.
And yet, he’d acquired it.
He liked the challenge more than the having, it seemed. He didn’t want her comb or Mick’s sweater, he wanted to know he could take it without anyone knowing what he’d done.
It was possible returning it was a point of pride too.
She didn’t say anything to him. She let her combs go missing, an occasional broach be lifted, and kept an eye out for any sign of pickpocketing or theft that could cause damage to her ship or crew, and she bided her time.
A good opportunity to use what she’d figured out showed up a few weeks later.
The man who’d killed her sister, the man who’d killed her, and the man Barry Allen had mistakenly thought of as a friend, had teamed up to try and end the world.
She’d be more concerned if she had much more left to lose.
But as it was she just had a mission to focus on and this time it was stealing an amulet from a museum before the legion of doom (she hated Nate for that name) could steal it first.
“I suppose we could rig the alarm system to not go off,” Ray said, wrinkling his brow up. “It’s higher tech than I’m used to though.”
She looked up from the blueprints displayed on the bridge table and across the room at the anomaly. He looked bored, but he’d also been sneaking peeks at the display the whole time they’d been discussing.
“You,” she said. “Anomaly.” He looked around, lowering his foot from the seat beside his own. “What would your plan of attack be?”
It was like she’d put a new battery into him. He bounced out of the chair, a spring in his step, and sauntered across, leaning down on his forearms on the display and taking a moment to take in all the close details.
When Ray spoke, she raised a hand, shushing him and letting the anomaly she’d grown so fascinated by focus.
After a few minutes, he pointed at the blueprint. “There’s a flaw in the system,” he said. “The alarm is set up to detect people entering but not exiting.”
Sara looked across at him. “If we could get in, we wouldn’t have a problem.”
His lips twitched in an amused smile and he looked back at her. “True,” he said, “but we don’t need to be in to exit.” When no one followed his train of thought, he sighed and swiped his fingers across the displays, pulling up information on the staff. “True, it’s a mostly contained facility and there’s not a lot of traffic, but there is this.” A woman’s face flashed up on the screen.
“Who is that?” Ray asked.
“That,” the anomaly said, “is the next person to take a vacation.”
Sara frowned. “How do you know that?”
He pulled other documents over, the ones he’d flitted through while she’d watched him study the information. She’d been so preoccupied with the furrow in his brow and the way his blue eyes sparkled, she hadn’t paid much attention to exactly what he was studying.
A spreadsheet filled the display: named were listed, along with dates and times. The columns weren’t labelled and Sara frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a ledger,” the anomaly said and when she looked at him he sighed again and put his finger to the top left cell, moving it along the columns as he labelled them himself. “Name, date of employ, security clearance level – we’re going to need a seven or higher for this – and then after that the date of out of house vacation.”
“How do you know that’s what those dates are?” Sara asked, frowning.
“They each start one week before the next,” he said, pointing. “There’s twenty-one members of staff and twenty positions.”
“So they rotate,” Mick said, leaning against the table.
“Exactly.” The anomaly leant back.
“So what do we do?” Sara said. “Swipe her credentials when she leaves and enter with them?”
The anomaly looked across at her. “Nothing so pedestrian. Plus, do you not think that a guard on vacation re-entering the high-security building might cause alarms?”
“I suppose it might,” Sara said, more of a drawl to match his than she’d like. “So what do we do instead?”
“One of us – probably the highly trained assassin who knows how to remain unseen – waits just outside the door and places a wedge to stop the door from closing,” he said. “We’ll have fifty-nine seconds to make it into the house before the alarms sound for the door being open too long.”
“We can’t just go in there?” Nate said.
The anomaly looked across at him. “We’re still going to need her credentials to access things within the house.” He gestured at the system. “The alarms aren’t hooked up to detect a card that shouldn’t be in there, because the understanding is that no one can get in with that card anyway.”
Sara nodded. “So what’s the plan?”
A moment passed in silence and she let it without complaint, and then the anomaly straightened up. “I’ll wait outside the gates,” he said. “I’ll walk by as she passes, pickpocket the card and meet you at the door. We’ll go in together, use your talents to avoid security within the house, and find the item. Then we leave.”
She took a moment to look for flaws in the plan, but she had to admit he seemed to know what he was talking about. “Agreed,” she said. “We’ll go tonight.”
He stepped away from the table. “Do you have thieves’ tools?” he asked. “Lock picks, gloves, things like that?”
“The fabricator can create those things,” Sara said with a nod. “I’ll show you.”
She led the way through the ship, the anomaly trailing along in her wake, and when she reached the fabricator she stopped, plugging in the request for objects rather than clothing and gesturing. “Gideon has to know what she’s creating, but after that it’s pretty simple to get what you want. You can program in your own items too.”
He pondered the display for a moment and she watched as he collected lock picks and a variety of other tools from broken credit cards to small strips of metal and even a razorblade or two. She was sure she should want to take blades off him, but if they were going to trust him on their ship and with their heist, they had to trust him with weapons eventually.
When he didn’t turn away from the fabricator even when he’d filled a small bag with things he needed and seemed done, she tilted her head. “What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said, and looked over at her. When she kept her frown firmly in place he sighed. “Just something scratching at the back of my head.” He shrugged. “I’ll figure it out eventually.”
She nodded and leant against the wall. “So theft.”
The fractional stiffening of his spine told her what she wanted to know: she’d been right, he was the sneaky thief in the night that kept displacing their stuff, and he knew she knew it now too. “Apparently.”
“You’re good at it,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“I have you know I’m excellent at it,” he said, looking over at her, smirk stuck to his mouth. “At least, I think I am.” A frown passed over his forehead and he shrugged, closing the fabricator and taking a step back. “I suppose we’ll find out tonight.”
“I suppose we will.” She smiled at him, watching as he headed for the door, then rolled her eyes, noticing a distinct change in a small weight on her body. “Anomaly.”
He looked around and she held her hand out towards him, palm up. For a moment, she thought he was going to misunderstand and take it, but then he snorted under his breath and retrieved one of her ceramic knives from the front of his pants, dropping it into her palm. “I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for your stupid assassin senses.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” she said with amusement in her tone, and tucked it away.
the oculus is destroyed, wiping Leonard Snart right out of time along with it. (au after season 1)
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do we have any new information?
Upon stepping through the doorway into the medbay, the first thing Sara noticed was that the man in the bed was sitting on the edge of the bed. He’d been given pants and a shirt, although it hung loosely off his chest, making him look far skinnier than she knew he was, and he was looking as confused as she felt.
“You’re awake,” she said, stating the obvious to draw his attention from examining his own arms to her presence in the room. Whoever had been in here before her had vacated, presumably to leave him privacy to pull clothes on, so she thought it was only fair to make sure he knew he was no longer alone.
“Apparently,” he said, the word coming out more as a drawl than simply spoken. She wondered if it was a front, some kind of defence mechanism, or just the way he spoke. He looked around at her. “I assume you’re the one that--” He waved a hand. “--rescued me?”
“You’re welcome,” she said and ambled closer, arms folded across her chest and back straight. “Now you’re awake, I’d like to know who you are.”
“As would I,” he said and raised an eyebrow over at her, a smirk on his lips.
Defence mechanism. He was posturing, putting as much confidence into his demeanour and tone as he could, despite the fact she’d found him naked in a field and he didn’t know anything about himself.
She believed that, and that was more confusing than the naked in a field part.
“I’m afraid,” he said, getting to his feet beside the bed, “I don’t remember anything.”
“Nothing?” she said. “You don’t know how you got in that field?”
“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’ sound and she studied him and his smirk.
She kept her arms folded, legs slightly spread for a braced stance in case he tried to attack her, although she wasn’t sure why he would. “Well, I’m Sara,” she said. “We picked you up because you were--” She wasn’t sure how to put it exactly. “Well.”
“Well?” he said and she became aware of the fact he was studying her as intensely as she was studying him.
“You were giving off a strange temporal signature,” she said. For a moment, she’d thought it might be Rip, but no. “Radiation of some kind.”
“I’m irradiated?” he said. A pause. “What do you mean a strange temporal signature?” He looked around and she watched as he took in his environment properly for the first time: bulkheads, metal panels, lights from all directions, and all the futuristic tech his confused mind could handle, she was sure, and-- “This is a timeship?”
The question caught her off guard and she looked at him in surprise. “You know about timeships?”
He looked right back at her. “Apparently.”
“What else do you know?” she said.
“You’ll have to be more specific.” He seemed to be at a loss of what to do with his hands, unwilling to mimic her gesture of folded arms. “I know a lot of things, I know that’s metal and this is plastic and I know I’m wearing cloth, but I don’t seem to know anything else. The brand of the shirt, for example, or my own name.”
“You don’t know your own name.” She’d already gleaned that from his statement of wanting to know who he was, but the confirmation was good. “Do you know where you got your scars?”
His body stiffened a small amount, the kind most would miss if they weren’t paying attention. Sara always paid attention. “No.”
He didn’t seem to be lying, he exhibited none of the tells of a liar, but she wasn’t one to trust blindly. She opened her mouth to question him further, but before she could the door opened and Stein walked in, followed by Jax and Ray.
“Ah!” Stein said, looking between them. “Gideon said you were in here. We gave him a change of clothes and something to drink. We weren’t sure if you’d want him in a holding cell or just kept in here rather than allowed to roam the ship, since we don’t know anything about him.”
“I am in the room,” the man drawled.
“Oh, yes, of course.” Stein looked over at him, blinking a couple of times. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Mhmmmm,” the man said, and looked back to Sara. “I presume this makes you the captain?”
“Is that a surprise?” she said. She’d grown accustomed to encountering resistance whenever she introduced herself as captain to men, no matter what era she landed in.
“Not at all,” he said, a smirk on his face. “Someone has to keep these fools in line.”
“Hey!” Ray said from behind Jax.
“He’s baiting us,” Jax said. “Relax.”
“Do we have any new information about who he is?” Stein asked, looking to Sara.
She shook her head. “He seems to have no memories, although he knows about timeships. He doesn’t remember his own name or anything about himself.”
“I imagine he must be from a time when timeships are commonplace!” Stein said. “Quite fascinating, really.” Sara’s lips twitched, as did the stranger’s. “Similar to how someone from our time might forget who they are but not - for example - what a microwave is, although perhaps not how to use one.”
“Open door, insert hot pocket, dial in numbers, wait for it to explode,” the man said. “I can use a microwave.”
“Guess we’ll put you on kitchen duty then,” Ray said, then furrowed his brow. “Although maybe not if you explode the microwave.”
The stranger cut his eyes across to Ray, then back to Sara.
They were all waiting for her to make a decision as to what to do with him, so she let out a sigh. “We’ll have Gideon keep track of him but until we figure out what he is--” She ignored his look of offence. “--and why he’s here--” She continued to ignore his scowl. “--I don’t see why he can’t wander the ship under supervision. We can give him somewhere to sleep. It’s not like we can dump him back in twenty-seventeen unattended.”
“I’m touched by how much you care,” he said.
She ignored him. “Gideon, please keep track of the time anomaly while he’s on board. Restrict sensitive areas of the ship and computer.”
“Of course, Captain,” Gideon said.
If he was surprised by the disembodied voice, he didn’t show it. He did however scowl. “The time anomaly?”
“Would you prefer the source of the radiation?” Sara said.
It was his turn to ignore her and she snorted. “We have a fabricator, you can get some clothes that suit you better there, Jax will show you. And until we figure out what to do with you, you can stay on the ship.”
She kept her hesitance hidden: there was only one empty room that wasn’t the captain’s quarters. Although it had crossed her mind to move in there, she hadn’t gotten around to accepting Rip might not be coming back yet, nor had she accepted the thought that if he did she might not be happy to hand his ship back to him. The only room left for him to stay in was the empty one, the one she gravitated to whenever she couldn’t sleep.
It almost crossed her mind to swap rooms with that one and give him hers.
“Ray can show you to the empty room,” she said and nodded.
“All right.” She wasn’t sure if she’d expected a thank you, but she wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get one.
Awkwardness settled over the group and she lowered her arms from her chest, looking between them for a moment before letting out a sigh. “Stein, see what you can gather from the scans Gideon ran on the time anomaly--” She did not look at the expression on the stranger’s face that clearly read really? “--and let me know. Jax, take him so he can get some clothes that actually fit.”
She turned her head and the stranger was just looking at her in some cross between offence and utter amusement.
She ignored him and left the room, abandoning the others to introduce him to the fabricator while she cleared up the evidence she’d been sleeping in the spare quarters.
It only took her a few minutes to pick up all her things, shoving them into a bag, and then she turned and-- Damnit.
He was in the doorway, clothes folded over one arm, a bag in the other and his eyebrow raised, shoulder leaning against the frame.
A sense of overwhelming familiarity hit her like a punch to the gut and she swallowed hard rather than speaking.
“I can sleep elsewhere,” he said, and before she could say anything more he continued with, “I’m sure there’s a warm patch of engine room with my name on it if I’m invading your second set of quarters.” He gestured. “I assume these aren’t yours.”
She scowled at him. “I have problems sleeping,” she said. She paused. “Where’s Ray?”
“I ditched him somewhere near the galley,” he said. “He was determined to show me every corner of the ship when all I wanted to do was change into something less...” He looked down at himself.
“Linen,” she supplied, at the same moment he said, “White.”
Her lips twitched and she held onto her collection of items. “Do you have something against white?”
“Only on myself,” he said. “When I got my hands on the fabricator, I ended up picking this.” He held up a jacket, shirt and slim jeans, all of which were dark colours. “Jax--” He said the name warily, as though he was unsure he’d remembered it correctly, and she nodded he was right. “--said I should pick a few outfits to rotate so...” He waved the bag. “I followed my instinct.”
She held her hand out for the bag. “May I?”
He hesitated for a second, then handed it over. “It hasn’t exactly enlightened me as to who I am.”
She took the bag over to the bed, emptying out the contents and looking it over. He’d picked almost exact same items over and over again: dark shirts with varying heights of neck, but always long-sleeved; jeans that were never anything less than snug (she had to admit he was good looking and she somewhat dreaded having to see him in those and force herself to not stare); a couple of lighter coloured undershirts; and--
She picked up a skirt and looked it over for a moment, cutting her eyes across to him. He ambled over, leaning against the bed. “It goes with this.” He held up one of the tightest pairs of pants and she took the sight of the two items in, wondering if this was another future thing.
“Fashionable.” She put the skirt down and looked the clothing pile over. “You don’t seem to like showing skin.”
He looked at her, surprise in his blue eyes, and she shrugged. “Long-sleeves, a skirt--”
“Kilt,” he said.
“--a skirt that goes with leggings--”
“Pants.”
She looked at him and rolled her eyes, refusing to relent. “Long sleeves, turtlenecks, a skirt that only goes with leggings,” she said. “You don’t like showing skin.”
“Scars,” was all he said and she looked back at the clothes. She had her own scars, but she didn’t mind having bare arms or her shirts riding up on occasion, and yet she’d known to cover him the second she found him.
She didn’t say that.
“You don’t know where those came from though,” she said and turned her gaze back to him. He was slightly lower than her, reclining against the bed that, she supposed, was his now. “The scars, I mean, not the skirt.”
Amusement glittered in his eyes. “Kilt.”
“Skirt.” She turned around, leaning her lower back against the bed. She’d been sleeping on it for weeks, but now she didn’t want to invade what was now his bed by sitting on it.
“Scotland, as far as I know,” he said.
“So you remember history.” She looked over at him. “Unless you mean you’re Scottish.”
“Do I sound Scottish?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I asked Gideon,” she said. “On the way to the medbay I asked Gideon who you were.”
“And who am I?” he said.
“She said there’s no one fitting your temporal signature, nor your specific DNA marker, throughout all of history.”
“I’m unique,” he said, although there was something she couldn’t pin down behind his eyes.
She looked at him. “You don’t exist.”
“If I didn’t exist, you could keep this room,” he said.
She rolled her eyes and pushed off from the bed, reacquiring her items and looking around at him. “If you need anything--”
“I’ll come and find you,” he said, looking across at her.
Despite that being exactly the sentiment she’d been planning to convey, she smirked at him. “I was going to say Ray will be happy to assist.”
“Mmm, pass,” he said, smirking right back at her.
She stepped out of the room, letting the door swish closed behind her, and came to a dead stop in the hallway, taking a few deep, steadying breaths and clutching her items in her arms.
The sense of familiarity had been overwhelming, and now she’d left the room all she was left with was the question of why and - more importantly - how a man who didn’t exist settled such a feeling of warmth and trust in her chest.
She was stronger than whatever was going on though, she was sure of that, and whatever his plan was, whatever his agenda, if it endangered her crew she wouldn’t hesitate to stop it and - quite probably - him.
She scrubbed a hand over her face, held her items a little tighter, and made her way to the bridge, only stopping to throw her stuff into her room on the way, determined to figure out and stop whatever was going on.
the oculus is destroyed, wiping Leonard Snart right out of time along with it. (au after season 1)
[ all chapters | prev ]
where does it begin?
Not for the first time, she woke with tears staining her cheeks and didn’t move, curled up around a pillow and breathing hard, confused for a moment. She’d never been one to sleep deeply or give in to dreams or nightmares and she didn’t even remember what she’d been dreaming about.
All she knew was there was a hole in her chest in a shape she couldn’t recall.
She got out of bed, dressing for her day and making her way through the ship. Her responsibilities had changed since Rip had disappeared, captaincy putting extra pressure on a back she was sure would break if she wasn’t careful. Sometimes she missed the simplicity of bars in Tibet and the ease of Oliver Queen’s orders, even if she’d never taken them without argument.
A time aberration had cropped up in 2017 and Gideon had already put the cogs into motion by the time she reached her chair, moving them towards that point. No one was arguing about going back to Central City, but she wasn’t sure why they would. Stein was always happy to see his daughter and Mick never stopped grumbling about how Central City had the best bars. Any excuse to bring her crew home was good in Sara’s eyes, even if it was an aberration.
The mission itself went off according to plan. The Legion of Doom (she hated calling them that, it put far too much credit into their stupidity) had screwed up time (again) and they had to put it back together, which unfortunately meant saving the president on a visit to Central City.
They were halfway back to the ship when Gideon said, “Ms Lance,” she said, “I am detecting a temporal anomaly.”
Sara stopped in her tracks. “Another aberration?” she said. “Here?”
“No.” A pause. “A temporal anomaly, as I said.”
Sara was never sure when Gideon was being sarcastic and when she was being factual. “Where?”
“I am transferring you the coordinates as we speak.”
The trek out to the location didn’t take very long and Sara led, closely followed by Ray and Nate. A big open field greeted them, long grass waving in the light breeze and the sun dipping down beneath the horizon over the hill beyond. “I don’t see anything.”
“The anomaly is right over there, according to this,” Ray said and Sara frowned, striding forth through the grass towards the spot Gideon had specified.
She found the cause of the anomaly as soon as she got close and her eyes widened as she hurried closer, checking her eyes weren’t deceiving her.
No, there was definitely a man curled up naked in the grass, seemingly unconscious.
Without thinking, she whipped her coat off, laying it over his body to cover his exposed skin and scars, and rested her hands on his upper arm. “Gideon, is this the anomaly? This man?”
“Confirmed, Ms Lance,” the computer said. “He is giving off high levels of temporal radiation and the ship is having difficulty getting a complete lock on him.”
Sara looked down at him, a frown creasing her forehead. He was older than almost everyone on the ship bar Stein and Mick, she thought, although only his greying hair gave that away, his face, lined as it was with the tells of age, appeared was younger than the rest of his body. “Let’s get him back to the ship.”
“Is that a good idea?” Ray said. “He could be another Chronos.”
“I heard that,” was grunted across the comms.
“I’m just saying,” Ray said, “we don’t know where he came from.”
“Well, he doesn’t have any weapons on him,” Sara said, the words coming across as far more of a snap than she’d intended. “We’ll keep him under guard, Gideon can have him on lockdown, but he needs medical attention.”
“Is he hurt?” Ray said.
“He’s lying naked in a field of flowers,” Nate said, blinking across at Ray. “It’s safe to assume he’s not entirely cognisant even if he’s not injured.”
“Also a good point,” Ray said.
Sara sighed down at the man in the grass, refraining from muttering a snarky comment about her teammates to him, and then turned her attention to the comms. “Mick, bring the jump ship and a blanket or two.”
***
Once they got him into the medbay, Sara made sure he was covered by the blankets as much as she could, unsure why she cared so much about a stranger’s modesty, and then hovered at the end of his bed. “Gideon?”
“He appears to be unharmed, Ms Lance,” Gideon said after a moment of thought. “He is still emitting strong temporal radiation and he is still somewhat displaced in time, however he is in perfect health.”
“Why isn’t he waking up?” Sara asked.
“His mind appears to be... elsewhere,” Gideon said.
Sara swallowed, looking at the man for a moment. He was covered in scars, although none of them were recent or fresh, and there were no bruises on his skin, so he hadn’t been in a fight or hurt by anyone. It crossed her mind that maybe someone had just... dropped him off, leaving him for them to find.
But why?
“Will the temporal radiation hurt you, us or the ship, Gideon?” Sara said once she’d dragged herself back out of her thoughts.
A pause. “No, the radiation is not harmful in any way.”
Sara let out a breath, looking back at the man. She hadn’t wanted to drop him back off in the field, but she hadn’t realised just how much she didn’t want that until Gideon had confirmed she didn’t have to do it.
“Let me know if there’s any change,” she said and left the medbay, returning to her room and getting into bed once she’d briefed the crew on the stranger’s condition. As long as he was unconscious and not getting in the way, there was nothing stopping her from sleeping off the long two days she’d had in Central City.
Nothing except insomnia, it seemed.
She lay awake, her hands clasped over her stomach and her eyes turned up towards the ceiling, unfocused. She didn’t feel restless, but she wasn’t feeling restful either, so she got back out of bed, roaming the halls.
Ever since they’d lost Rip and maybe even before she’d taken to walking the Waverider like she could find answers in the feel of her soles against the cold metal. She’d sit at the bottom of stairs in her pyjamas, she’d lean against walls with her bare shoulders icing over against the titanium, and she’d walk and she’d walk until even her well-trained muscles ached and her shoulders started to sag in exhaustion.
And then she’d find the empty room and she’d fall asleep, curled up in a bed that wasn’t hers, that wasn’t anybody’s.
A long time ago, when she’d trained with the League, she’d walked halls. She’d roamed the corridors that separated the Assassins from the Trainees, seeing how long she could go before someone caught her.
It was always Nyssa who caught her.
She’d sweep Sara into her arms and they’d kiss and Sara would laugh as though the weight of the world wasn’t starting to settle its way onto her shoulders, and then Nyssa would accompany her back to her room where they’d share her warm bed, rather than Sara’s cold one.
Nights like this on the Waverider she felt claustrophobic rather than free like the flashing stars should make her feel, and curling up on an unoccupied bed in a dark room with the curtains wide and the lights dim didn’t make her feel any less trapped or make her chest ache any less.
She always found the hole in her heart that missed Nyssa where she wrapped up around nobody’s pillow in the dark, the hole that mourned Laurel as though she’d lost a limb of her very own, and the hole that didn’t belong, the one that left her waking stained with tears when even Laurel’s death didn’t.
She fell asleep with her legs tucked up against the outer bulkhead and the pillow clutched in her arms. She felt childish, glad that no one knew where to find her, ashamed of the inner workings of her cracked and broken soul, but it helped and before long she fell into a dreamless sleep.
“Ms Lance.” Gideon’s voice woke her, but she didn’t know how long it had been. “The temporal anomaly is awake.”
She bolted upright, discarding the pillow, and then paused. “Is that what we’re calling him?”
“He does not have a name, Ms Lance,” Gideon said.
That was true, he didn’t. “You’re not wrong, Gideon,” Sara said, and headed to the medbay.
the oculus is destroyed, wiping Leonard Snart right out of time along with it. (au after season 1)
[ all chapters | next ]
don’t fall asleep
The oculus blew and all at once it felt like Sara’s heart did too. She didn’t love him (did she?) but it was there: that precursor, that deep feeling of nearly, the soft almost rhythmic extra thump her heart did when his hand brushed hers.
Maybe with Leonard it was more than that, more than love (she didn’t love him). She felt a lot of things for her team, some were soft and fluffy (Ray, Kendra), some were darker and more powerful, like something tearing at the inside of her chest (Rip) and some were just there, and she trusted them all in the way someone trusts a team to get them out of trouble.
(Except Rip. Maybe not Rip after what happened with Stein.)
But with Leonard, it had been different, a different kind of trust. When he held his gun to her she stood her ground, demonstrating implicit and complete trust, the kind he likely didn’t have in himself.
She trusted he wouldn’t shoot her, whether he knew it or not.
Had anyone else put a gun to her – Rip, Kendra, even Ray, definitely Mick – she would have fought, prepared to survive or die trying.
With Leonard, she just stood there.
Love had never come hard for Sara (harder as she got older, perhaps), she’d loved her high school boyfriend, she’d loved her college girlfriend, she’d loved Oliver, she’d loved Nyssa. It had never been hard to open her heart and accept someone in.
Trust though, trust had been hard even when she was young, but especially after the island and the League.
Leonard had earned her trust so fast she hadn’t even seen it coming.
And now he was dead.
He died to save them all, to save Mick, to save her.
No one would ever know but them.
She walked the halls, not wanting to change her clothes because they smelled like him (she didn’t love him, but the smell was comforting, it was like he was still with her) and sometimes she’d hear an echo of Gideon telling Rip of the progress of the oculus’ destruction, but mostly it was quiet.
One by one, everyone went to bed. Rip offered her his sympathy, like he knew there was something more between them than just friendship (not love.) and Ray tried to hug her (she dodged, not wanting to taint the smell of him on her clothing, on her skin. Kendra offered words of empathy, and Sara wondered what it felt like to lose a soulmate you’d fallen in love with (she didn’t love him).
Stein stayed awake the longest and she found herself sitting by his side while he studied something (she asked what, he replied, she forgot) in quiet contemplation.
A pack of cards sat on the desk and after a while she found herself shuffling them, dealing sets of ten and then shuffling the pack again, repeating in a loop with no one to play with.
She looked across at Stein and he was asleep and she sighed, dropping the pack on the desk and standing up.
He jerked awake. “What—Oh.”
“Sorry,” she said, gesturing. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s not like you to make any noise at all,” Stein said. “Is everything all right?”
She looked at him like he was crazy for a second, before it occurred to her that maybe he’d just never seen how close she and Leonard had become. “I just miss him.” It wasn’t like she was the only one. “I’m sorry for waking you.”
She turned to go and Stein’s voice chased her. “Miss who?”
She stopped and looked around. “That’s not funny.” His look was blank and she read him like a book: he was confused, not attempting poor humour or being cruel (she was unsure if he had a cruel bone in his body). “Leonard?”
“Who?” he said.
Her stomach dropped and she looked at the cards, a buzz of confusion in her head. She’d been shuffling them, but why?
She fought through fuzz, seeking the answer through a molasses of confusion: Leonard. She’d played cards with him. They’d spent hours in stairwells and on their beds, playing cards, they played—
She couldn’t remember.
They played—
It was a—
They used—
It was a card game and she was always beating him by—
She hit the bridge at a run. “Gideon. Leonard Snart.”
“Who, Miss Lance?”
She didn’t have to ask any further questions, she just started running, bolting down the halls until she hit his room and let herself in.
There was nothing.
The photo of Lisa was gone, his trinkets were gone, the cold gun she’d put down where he kept it was gone, his parka was gone it was all gone.
Everything was gone and her memories were going with it bit by bit, she could feel them chipping away at her consciousness and she scratched at them like a cat at a door. Leonard Snart. Blue eyes. They kissed, once, right before he died a hero. They played cards but she couldn’t recall the game no matter how hard she tried.
She spent too long on that thought, stumbling back to her room and dropping to her bed in exhaustion. She couldn’t stay awake, which made no sense: she had League training, she could stay awake days and not—
No, she had to focus on the details, she had to hold onto the details. Blue eyes and—what colour was his hair? Blue eyes and—a cold gun. Ice. A parka. She loved that parka.
Her head hit the pillow although she couldn’t remember when she’d lain down. Her eyes were closing. She didn’t eant them to. She knew if she slept it would all slip away and maybe that was why sleep was claiming her with such determination.
They played cards and he’d held a gun to her and he’d wanted a future with her but she’d said no, angry he’d ever point a gun at her, but she’d wanted to say yes and she’d shown him that before he died a hero.
They’d kissed just the once. Just once, right before he’d died. She’d kissed him, she’d shown him she wanted a future too, a future for her and for him and for her and him, that she’d loved him too, loved him back.
She loved him, she’d loved him, Sara Lance had loved Leonard Snart, she had, she’d loved him, she’d loved him she—
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