#coldwaveweek2017

[yovnggod]

Coldwave Week: Day 4 (Alternate Earths) 

[ittybittymattycommittee]

Coldwave Week 2017: day 2 - Soulmates ↳ Textposts of Tomorrow

[marcomardon]

                                          COLDWAVEWEEK2017

[robininthelabyrinth]

Fic: Interconnect (ao3 link) - Chapter 1 Fandom: Flash, DC Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Mick Rory/Leonard Snart

Summary: Fate has decided that Leonard Snart and Mick Rory are soulmates.

Yeah, okay, they're good with that.

(for @coldwaveweek2017)

A/N: Instead of doing different fics for coldwave week, I decided to do one with multiple chapters, each based on the various days.

Chapter 1: Early Days

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"What're you doing today?" Mick asks his favorite stuffed animal, a polar bear that he'd gone crazy for when they'd visited the zoo.

His dad said he was too old for them, but his mom hushed him. She was just glad he was talking more now. His older brothers thought he was just weird, talking to a bear

"Nothing much," the bear says. "I'm having trouble walking, but no big deal."

Mick nods, then frowns. "Ain't you like nearly two?" he asks. Mick's all of five, now – well, almost – and it's been two years since they met, and that means...something.

Two plus two equals four. Mick likes the math they do at his kindergarten, if only because it's much easier than reading. The letters don’t make sense to him the way they do to the other kids.

"Well, yeah," the bear says. "But my dad stepped on my foot and it hurts."

Mick scowls. "Why'd he do that?"

"I was crawling underfoot," the bear replies. "What's underfoot?"

"Under-your-foot."

"Oh," the bear says contemplatively. He was younger, so he didn't understand things sometimes; their conversations had gotten much more interesting when he'd figured out how to get his eyes to focus. "I wasn't, though. He came over." A pause. "He was yelling at mom again."

"That's not nice," Mick says wisely. His mom is very firm about how you should be nice to women. Especially if you're holding hands with them. Or something like that. She'd been very loud about it, anyway. "You should do something."

"I cry sometimes," the bear says. "Doesn't help, and it makes mom sad, so I stop. Maybe when I'm big, like you."

Mick nods. "You'd better get big like me," he says firmly. "Then we can play for real."

"I'd like that."

A creak of sound. Mick tenses. "Someone's coming," he says. He's learned not to talk to his bear when someone is around. Mom's okay with it, but Dad and his brothers - no. "Bye-bye." He kisses the bear on the head.

A hundred miles away, a toddler sighs audibly, a mix of happiness and sadness. Happiness, at the comforting gesture; sadness, that they couldn't talk anymore.

"What is it, lemele?" his mother, Shoshana, asks. "Are you okay? Did you drop your doggie?"

She checks, but he still has his dog plush clutched tightly. He loves that dog so, she reflects; a big shaggy dog with a frankly unnerving snarl, but he'd seen it at a yard sale and shrieked bloody murder until he'd gotten it.

Lewis hadn't been happy about that, but when was he ever happy?

At least he didn't take it out on her little Len.

"Do you want me to sing to you?" she asks, disregarding the question of his adoration of the dog. He spoke to it as often as he spoke to her, but it was normal, wasn't it, invisible friends? It wasn't related to - no, it couldn't be.

"Uh-huh," Len says, cuddling his dog. "Please?" He holds up the dog. "Mick says please, too."

Shoshana smiles, and wonders where Len thought up the name Mick.

Television, perhaps?

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"No!" Leo shrieks, throwing himself at his dad's feet despite knowing the danger. Sure enough, he gets a kick, right in the side, and it sends him rolling away, but he just scrambles up again, tears of pain mingling with the tears of panic rolling down his cheeks. "Give him back!"

"You're too old for toys," Lewis snarls at him.

"He's not a toy!" Leo howls. "He's Mick! He's my Mick!"

"He's only six, Lewis!" Shoshana protests, but she can't seem to rise up from the couch. The medicines for her sickness have made her very frail. "Let him have his dog."

"He needs to learn some respect," Lewis says. "You know what he did? Walked right into one of my business meetings - to get some water. For him? Oh no. For his dog. Which isn’t even a real goddamn dog!"

It'd been a Family meeting, too. Lewis had been horribly embarrassed by the lapse in professionalism, but more than that, he'd been afraid that they would just pull out their guns and put him in the ground, either him or his boy. He hated being afraid, hated it bitterly, and he lashed out to everyone around him, to make them afraid, because when they were afraid that meant he was in control.

Luckily the Family rep had thought Leo was cute.

"Give him back!" Leo is still shouting.

"I'm gonna light him on fire," Lewis shouts back.

Leo goes silent, stricken with horror. He's always had a terrible fear of his dog catching fire; neither Shoshana nor Lewis had any idea where it had come from, but it was there and it was bone-deep. "No," he whispers, eyes big and wide and blue. "No, don't! Not Mick!"

"I am," Lewis says. "And maybe you'll learn a lesson!"

"It's his favorite, Lewis," Shoshana says, struggling to her feet. "Leave it alone -"

He slaps her, and she falls back into the couch and looks up at him, eyes big and wide and blue, just like her son.

Lewis feels a flash of guilt, but that just makes him angrier. He gets his lighter from the kitchen cabinet, ignoring the small boy beating at his legs and trying to stop him.

He lights the flame under a paw.

Leo shrieks as though he himself has been lit on fire, and he doesn't stop, not for air, for anything.

"Oh, shut up," Lewis shouts, but nothing seems to penetrate. Finally, in the interest of his eardrums, he clicks off the lighter - the paw is singed, but no real damage has been done. He tosses it back to Len, who immediately goes quiet and starts checking it over and cooing at it as if it's been really hurt. "There, you have it back. Bet you learned your lesson, huh?"

Leo looks up at him, silent and solemn, his mother's eyes looking up at Lewis, reminding him silently of all his flaws, how he never gave her the life she'd hoped for, all the anger between them.

"I wanna be called Len," he says.

"What?" Lewis asks, taken aback. It'd been a long-standing dispute - a humorous one, one of the few that generally stayed humorous and didn't escalate - between him and Shoshana, whether their little Leonard was a Leo (Lewis' preference) or a Len (Shoshana's). "How's that?"

"I wanna be called Len," Leo repeats, very slowly and very firmly.

"Where'd that even come from?" Lewis asks, bemused. He didn't really mean it as a question - who cared? Kids were weird and had strange whims - but Leo's brow wrinkles as if he's very seriously considering the answer to the question.

"Because," he says finally, standing up, holding his dog tightly to himself, "I hate you."

"Don't talk like that to your father," Lewis says automatically, starting to bristle.

Leo looks at him, right in the eyes, his mother's eyes solemn and serious and honest, and he says, "But it's true. I hate you."

And then he turns and he leaves the room without another word.

Lewis stares after him for a long moment, temporarily unnerved. Leo had been so serious, so solemn, like he'd finally given up on whatever last bit of hope he'd had for Lewis. Then Lewis shakes his head and turns to the kitchen, grabbing himself a beer.

Kids are weird, and they have whims.

Leo'll get over it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

"They're gone," Mick says to the shrink. "I know they're gone."

She nods encouragingly. "That's good," she says. "Not that they're gone, your family, but that you know it. Now why don't you tell me more about Lenny?"

"What about him?" Mick asks, bewildered. "He's mine."

"He was -" she checks her notes, but Mick's pretty sure she does that deliberately; she's asked him about Lenny at every session before. "- your bear, right? A polar bear?"

"Seemed fitting," Mick says cautiously. She's getting at something again.

"And he burned in the fire, too, right?" the shrink asks. She talks to Mick like he's dumb. He knows he is; he knows that he's behind in his classes, even for an eleven year old boy. He knows that most eleven year old boys didn't have the fascination he did with fire.

He knows that most boys don't burn their whole family.

He doesn’t like to think about it.

Maybe that’s why he hates these stupid shrink sessions.

"Yeah," Mick says. "It burned."

"So why do the nurses tell me you're still talking to him?"

"Because only the bear burned," Mick says, confused by the question. "It took a while before we figured it out, but the bear was just convenient."

Convenient, yes. Also beloved, of course. It was as close as he could get to holding his Lenny in his arms, and now it was gone.

He was using a lamp back in his room, which worked, but it wasn't the same.

"So you understand the bear burned?"

"Of course I do," Mick says. "I get that my family burned, I get that the house burned, I get that the bear burned."

"But you keep talking to him?"

"Well, yeah," Mick says.

"Why?"

"Why - not?"

"Isn't Lenny the bear?"

"Lenny's only sometimes the bear," Mick explains. "Lenny's dad takes away his dog sometimes - that's me; I'm the dog - and we had to figure out a different way to do things. Do you know he's got a brand new sister?"

"The...bear?"

"No, Lenny!" Mick says, exasperated. "And she's not quite brand new, she's a few months old now, but he keeps being really impressed by how she blows spit bubbles or something."

The shrink looks deeply confused. "Are you perhaps confusing Lenny with someone in your own family? There was a baby..."

"Nate was a baby boy," Mick tells her. He's not sure where the confusion is coming from. Maybe she's dumb like him. "Not a girl."

"I - see."

"Can I go now?"

"Sure," she says, shaking her head. "Come back after dinner and we'll do some more cognitive therapy."

She means supervised lighter time. Mick likes supervised lighter time.

He also likes dinner, so he scampers off.

He swings by his assigned room first, though. "I think she's gonna give me the green light soon," he confides into Lenny-the-lamp. "Which means foster homes."

"I've heard bad things about those," Lenny says. "Be careful. Try to palm a knife and bring it with you."

"They don't really got knives here at the hospital, Lenny."

"Well, when you get out. I don't want anyone thinking they can hurt you or take advantage or something."

"Take advantage? Of what?"

"Dunno. Something Brittany said."

Brittany was Lisa's mom. Lisa was Lenny's new baby sister. Lenny’s real mom had died a while back; they'd both mourned that pretty bad.

She'd been a good one, Len's mom. She never told them to grow up out of it or anything, and she sang them songs, and she even told them about The Curse.

"You think I should tell the shrink about the curse?" Mick asks.

"Mom said we shouldn't tell too many people," Lenny points out. "She said people might look at us weird and act weird. Not everyone has a curse like us."

"Good," Mick decides. "I don't want everyone to have something like us."

"So don't tell. They're adults. What'll they do?"

Lenny didn't trust adults, which was fair. His dad was a pretty bad example of one.

"Okay," Mick agrees. It's not really any of the shrink's business, anyway. "I'm going to dinner."

"I'm going to my grandfather's place."

Good. That meant Lewis wasn't around.

"Later, Lenny."

"Later, Mick."

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Mick can barely stand still with excitement.

Lenny's coming.

It'd started after Lenny got set up to take the fall on a job by his old man and got sentenced to go the juvie for a couple of months. He'd been anxious as hell about it - he didn't want to leave little Lisa with Lewis - right up until he'd told Mick the name of the juvie center he was heading to, in the hope that Mick - who'd been in and out of juvie a fair few times by now - would have advice.

That's when they found out that the juvie Len was going to was the same one Mick was staying at.

They were going to meet.

Mick's going to get to see what Lenny actually looks like.

Of course, Mick's plans to meet him when he gets off the bus are dashed because the shrinks notice his excitement and assume he's lit something on fire, so they haul him in to an extra-long shrink session (he barely has enough time to tell Len-the-chair).

He mostly ignores their questions, which just makes it longer, but eventually they let him out.

Mick goes out and beelines to the cafeteria.

Len-Lenny-Len-Len!

He finds the kids all crowded around a fight - some new kid got mouthy with one of the gangs that get formed in juvie.

Mick pushes his way forward, eyes scanning the crowd. Nothing. No feeling of recognition, no sudden awareness, nothing.

He turns his eyes on the fight right when what's-his-name, that asshole, pulls out a shiv to the impressed oohs of his companions.

Then Mick's eyes drop down to the kid held down on the floor.

Recognition.

Awareness.

Mine!

Mick bellow and charges forward.

Len scrambles up from the floor to help.

It's their first fight together as partners.

When it's all done, and all the kids have testified that Mick wasn't at fault, Mick and Len are finally allowed a moment's peace.

Mick scarcely knows what to do. He looks at Len - at a human being, flesh and blood, and sees the only friend he's ever known. That's never happened with a human before, only with objects that he could see Lenny in.

"Lenny," he whispers.

"Mick," Len replies, his eyes big and wide. He's a gawky kid, all elbows and shoulders, a shrimp with a fair bit of growing to do ahead of him, with messy black hair that curled too much to be controlled, with the fading traces of old bruises making his face come off as lopsided.

He's the most beautiful thing Mick's ever seen in his life.

Mick steps forward and pulls him into his arms.

Len's arms rise around him, clutching at him tightly.

"Mine."

Mick's not sure which one of them said it.

But it's true.

Soulmates.

[coldwaveweek2017]

Coldwave Week Topics

The topics have been chosen! Thank you to all who participated in the survey!

They are:

August 7th: Early lives/Teen or young adult years - Basically anything involving Mick and Len's lives before The Flash started. We heard from Len how they met in juvie, but how exactly did it go down? Were they close right away or did they take a while to warm up to each other? What exactly happened with "Alexa"? As long as it takes place before the show, anything goes!

August 8th: Soulmate AU -  Characters having soulmates and hints to finding them is a tried and true fandom trope, and one that never gets old. Do Mick and Len realize they're soulmates right away or does it take them a while? Are there complications? Do one or both of them have trouble accepting the idea? If you need ideas check here and/or here, or just search for soulmate aus.

August 9th: Domestic AU - There are a couple ways to interpret this. Is it an AU where they never became supervillains or criminals and are living a more domestic life? Or a glimpse at their lives together in canon outside of being Captain Cold and Heatwave? Do they fight over chores or the temperature on the thermostat? Who cooks? The possibilities are endless.

August 10th: Alternate Earth - What are Len and Mick's lives like on another Earth? If Len is Mayor Snart on Earth-2 than who is Mick? Or is Lisa the mayor and Len has a different job? Is there an Earth where they're both heroes or only one is a villain? Have their Earth-38 selves ever met Supergirl? Go wild!

August 11th: Hurt/Comfort - Another fandom favorite. Explore Len helping Mick through the fallout of being turned into Chronos. Maybe one of them gets injured on a mission or a heist and the other patches them up. Or maybe Len comes back from the Oculus a bit worn for wear and needs some help from Mick to get back to his old self. As long as there's pain followed by fluff or at least relief, anything goes!

August 12th: Jealousy/Protectiveness - What it says on the tin. Is there a mission or heist that involves one of them flirting with someone that gets the other riled up? How many times has Mick wanted or been able to do something to keep Lewis from hurting Len? Is the Oculus the only time Len's put himself in danger to save Mick? There's a lot of different possibilities here.

August 13th: Free day - Whatever you'd like to do! Your favorite polyam ship involving Coldwave? A topic you liked that didn't make the final seven? Take this final day to do something that wasn't covered on any of the other days this week.

You have a month to create fics/gifsets/any other kind of edits, so don’t wait too long to get started! Have fun!

[heroaintonmyresume]

Coldwave Week - Day 1 -Early Lives/Teen/Young Adult Years

[sanctuaryforalluniverses]

Coldwave Week 2017 fic: Partners

August 7th: Early lives/Teen or young adult years

000

Mick had been sitting by the wall, staring at the flame of his stolen cigarette lighter, for more than an hour now. It was like Len wasn’t even there.

Which was better, really. He was heading back to Lisa tomorrow – who’d better be fine, or dear old Dad was going to wake up to a shank between the ribs – and he’d probably never see Mick again anyway. Len would go back to protecting Lisa from Lewis, and Mick would age out of juvie in six months and go off and do whatever the hell he wanted. They probably wouldn’t even run into each other on jobs, since Mick only seemed interested in burning stuff. Arsonists could get decent work, but they ran with different crews than thieves did.

Besides, it wasn’t like Mick would even care. It wasn’t a surprise – no one cared, really – even though Mick had taken on an entire gang to save Len’s life all those months ago. Even though he’d stuck by Len’s side ever since, making crazy eyes at anyone who looked at him funny and taking a few more shanks to the arm for his troubles. Even though he’d made Len feel safe for the first time in his entire fucking life.

That wasn’t… there’d probably been some ulterior motive to it. There always was.

Read more

[snarkysnartes-blog]

Coldwave week day six: jealousy Len gets jealous too

Len has never been the one to display jealousy that Lisa claims that he had hidden inside of him.

Ever.

Other times it's always been Mick who doesn't like the way that Len looks at someone, doesn't like the twinkle in his eyes as he chats with the latest Mark and Len has always hated that (not the sex of course because a jealous Mick makes for amazing sex) but he hates the way that Mick's hand would linger on his waist while they're out or the show of making sure that everyone saw the hickeys left behind him.

Most of the people on the waverider knew just who he belonged to and no one dared make a move.

But when it came to Len, and someone clearly not taking the hint that Mick Nathaniel Rory was clearly in a committed relationship.

“He was staring at your ass.” Len has Mick pressed against the wall, leaving kisses down his neck.

“I'm yours.”

“I know that-----”

“He didn't know that. And I didn't like the way that he was looking at you.”

Mick thrusts his hips forward, “the way that you dragged me out of there I'm sure that he knows too.”

Len smirks. “Good.”