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Mick doesn’t remember much about the first few weeks after… After.
He remembers Hunter offering to take him to see Len, though. Lets Mick pick the year even, like it would make a goddamn bit of difference. Like seeing Len at 40 is going to hurt less than seeing him at 14 or 24. Hunter probably thinks it’s a kindness, giving Mick that choice. In reality, it’s the cruelest thing he’s ever done.
Mick picks 2013, mostly because he’s pretty sure he won’t run into himself there. They’d been having a rough patch around this time, one of countless others over the years. Things between them had already been starting to fracture. Too many silences, too much space. A younger Len might expect Mick to throw an arm over his shoulders, or even a kiss. Not this one. It’s only a couple of weeks now before the fire. Before Mick nearly burns alive and Len leaves him, not for the first time, but Mick was pretty sure then it was going to be the last.
It wasn’t.
Shows what he knows.
But now that Len’s gone, really gone, and Mick’s staring at him across a sticky table in a seedy strip club holding a two dollar beer, it finally hits Mick. Len’s not gonna waltz back into his life in a few days or a few years with a half-assed apology and a present in the form of a plan or a gem or a souped up flamethrower. This time he’s really gone.
“Mick, I don’t do ‘touchy-feely’. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
Mick stumbles out a few words, not quite what he wanted to say, but close enough. Mick’s never been real good with words anyway, never needed to be. But now, all he wants to say is “I love you.” Or “Don’t go.” Or “I’m not worth it.” But he can’t.
Mick stands and takes one last look at Len. God, he’s gorgeous. Always has been, ever since the first time Mick saw him, a scrawny little bird of a thing, hissing like an alley cat and fighting like a junkyard dog... Len’s giving him the same suspicious glare he had then too, demanding to know what Mick wanted in exchange for saving his life.
The blue lights of the bar catch Len’s eyes, reflecting a sheen of neon iridescence, like the shimmer on a pearl. For a moment they seem to flash with some sort of spark, the strike of a match and the burn of a flame, blue like the center of a candle light. Something so hot that in that first instant it feels cool. Something so cold it will burn you. In that split second of blue flame, Mick can see all the cold Len claims to have inside his heart, and maybe a little of Mick’s own fire too.
Then the illusion’s gone and it’s just Len, sitting there in that parka--that damned ridiculous Captain Cold parka--still trying to figure Mick out even after all these years. It’s enough to make Mick laugh, if it didn’t hurt so much.
“See you around,” Mick says, and walks away.
Outside the club, Hunter offers to bring Mick back whenever he wants. And Mick was wrong, that’s the cruelest thing he’s ever done.
Those first few weeks after, Mick does what he does best. He plays the big dumb guy, the wildcard too stupid to know what’s going on. The inrush of time travelling kids all blabbing about “League of This”, “Society of That” helps; Mick couldn’t follow half of their drama even if he wanted to. They expect him to mess with Haircut, and make jokes no one finds funny, and grumble when each new punk asks to join the crew, so he does. But he doesn’t really care. At least not until the new girl, the one who reminds him a little of Kendra but less annoying, comes up to him right before a time jump.
“Is this seat taken?” She motions at the empty seat next to Mick. He pauses halfway through pulling his harness down, ready to tell her to go sit next to Haircut, really make his day, but Sara is already sitting there, and all the other seats are filled, everyone’s place taken except--
Mick steals the rest of Hunter’s scotch that night. Fuck the 1700s anyway.
So. Alternate Universes. Who knew?
“I know what you’re thinking.”
Mick doesn’t jump when Sara sneaks up behind him in the kitchen, too used to years of Len’s sudden grand pronouncements after hours of silence, but it’s a near thing.
“That’s a neat trick,” he says as he tightens a tiny screw on the side of his heat gun. “I ain’t sorry for thinking about you and those redheads though. Would’ve been hot.”
“Mick.”
He glances up sharply, not at her words but at her tone.
Sara’s shoulders droop and she leans back against the kitchen doorframe. She looks tired. “You’re not the only one who lost someone, you know.”
Mick rankles. “You heard the kid, Sara. Near infinite possible universes! That mean’s there’s gotta be at least one out there where it goes the other way right? Where I’m the one who goes out with the Oculus in a blaze of glory and he’s the one stuck here behind on this goddamn shithole of a tin can!” Mick doesn’t realize he’s yelling until there’s a clang and he sees the screwdriver he was holding embedded in the bulkhead just a few inches from Sara's head. She doesn’t even flinch.
Mick takes long slow breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth like his therapist taught him. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he won’t turn into this. Not now. Not again. It takes him a few minutes to get his breathing back under control. Sara just watches him and waits.
He angrily grabs a rag off the counter and turns his back to her. If there’s anyone on this tub he’d be okay with losing it in front of, it’s her. He’d say it’s because they both know that even at his worst, she could put him down without even messing up her hair, but it’s more than that. Maybe it’s because more than anyone else she does know what he’s going through. He knew Len for thirty years, probably longer than she’s been alive, but she never even knew a world without her sister. Or maybe it’s because she’s treated him like a friend and equal from day one. And yeah, that means a lot.
Still, he feels kind of sheepish.
“Sorry about that,” he says without looking up. He selects a small spring and gently wipes it with the rag, before maneuvering it back into place inside the gun. “What I said though, it’s gotta be true for you too. There’s gotta be a world out there where she lost you instead.”
“She already did.”
Mick glances back at her and raises an eyebrow.
Sara waves a hand. “Long story. The point is, it wouldn’t be fair to either of you, and you know it. Any other Len you found out there wouldn’t be your Len, and you wouldn’t be his Mick, any more than my sister would be my sister. Trust me, trying to fit into another world like that... You’ll go crazy.
Mick turns back to the gun. “Who says I’m not already?”
“You’re not.”
And it’s the way she says it, so matter-of-factly, that makes Mick pause. It’s been a long time since anyone has just...trusted him like that. No scanning his words for lies or ulterior motives or ways to trip Mick up. Not since long before 2013, and isn’t that something. Someone actually believes in something about him, and it’s that he’s not crazy. Go figure. He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just slips the spring back into place before selecting a piece of the trigger guard and beginning to meticulously wipe every last smudge off it.
Sara sighs and there’s a scuffling sound behind him before the screwdriver lands on the metal table with a loud clatter. Mick does jump this time, and looks over his shoulder at her with a scowl.
“I’m the one who’s going to go crazy if I see you taking apart that damn thing one more time,” Sara says, turning to go. “You wanna be useful? Go do something with your old suit in the cargo bay, Chronos. It smells like jockstrap.”
The obscene offer Mick makes when Sara walks out isn’t real, but the laughter when she flips him off is.
It takes Mick a few days to get down to the cargo bay, tool kit and bottle of mineral spirits in hand. He goes because he wants to, of course, not because Sara told him to. Still, she was right about his heat gun. Mick had been good with machines even before the centuries of training with the most advanced weapons known to man, but even he has to admit that the Ramon kid knows his stuff. His heat gun’s pretty much perfect as is.
Mick wrinkles his nose. Sara was also right about the suit. It stinks, but Mick’s not going to tell her that either. In his defense, he was living in it pretty much 24/7 for who knows how long, and it’s not like the Time Masters had sent it out for drycleaning before cramming him back into it.
He gets the fabric parts of the thing deodorized pretty quick with the help of some futuristic Febreze Gideon whips up for him. The stuff works so well, he and Snart should have just stolen a bottle and patented it in the past, instead of trying to commit heists through time. Talk about a perfect score. He turns to share the joke with Len, but there’s no one there.
Cleaning the rest of the Chronos suit is a different matter. He’d probably have an easier time remembering exactly what all the bits and pieces did if the Time Masters hadn’t decided to scramble his brains a second time. Still, he’s always liked a challenge, and it quickly becomes clear that no one’s going to bother him when he’s down in the cargo bay all alone, muttering to himself as the eyes of the helmet stare at him from on top of a box of dehydrated meal replacements.
He knows Hunter’s probably having Gideon monitor his every move. Mick almost wants to start talking to the helmet or something, really give the douche something to fret about, but doesn’t want to give Hunter an excuse to try to trap him in the plexiglass cube or strand him again.
“Screwdriver.” Mick holds out a hand. When no screwdriver appears he looks up and… right. He glances up at the tiny glass spot that hides one of Gideon’s many internal cameras. He closes his hand slowly and is careful not to let it happen again.
Mick’s taking apart a gauntlet when the idea hits him. Literally.
He notices a tiny panel on the pinkie finger that seems to be slightly out of alignment, but when he tries to press it back into place, nothing happens. When he releases the panel, however, there’s a slight but audible click.
Mick knows what a noise like that means.
“Oh shi--”
Mick wakes up in the medbay with four things:
• A skull fracture
• Burns on top of his burns
• An incensed Rip Hunter raving at him
• The beginnings of an idea
The first two are the easiest to take care of. He makes a compromise with Gideon. She gives him the good stuff, and in return he lets her heal his head and new burns as long as she leaves the old scars alone.
The third thing is a little harder to handle. He has to play dumb with Hunter, but not too dumb. He doesn’t want Hunter to know that Mick knows what set off the self destruct in the gauntlet. Partially because it might eventually lead Hunter to have the same idea Mick has, but mostly because Mick doesn’t like the guy and enjoys making his life harder.
But if Mick plays it too dumb, Hunter might just be stupid enough to try to take away the suit “For your own safety, Mr. Rory, and everyone else’s” and Mick’s not going to be responsible for his actions if that happens. Especially because if Mick’s even halfway right about his idea? He needs that suit, and there’s not a damn person on this ship or any other who’s going to be able to keep him from it.
Mick feels jittery just thinking about it, so he pushes the idea out of his mind and focuses on walking the tightrope with Hunter.
“I dunno,” Mick slurs, eyes a little wider and voice a little slower than normal. The stuff Gideon’s given him is good, but it’s not that good. Hunter seems to be falling for it though. “There was this lil’... tube thing in one of the pouches? Looked kinda like a flashbang? So I thought, ‘That looks kinda like a flashbang.’ Then next thing I know…”
Mick tries to wave a hand around the medbay and pretends to be surprised to see it cuffed down while Gideon does her magic light thing on him. He leans in towards Hunter and whispers, “I don’t think it was a flashbang.”
“Hm,” Hunter has his arms crossed in front of him like the patronizing asshole he is and taps one of his fingers on the elbow of his stupid coat. Mick sways a little, careful to not oversell it, but trying to look instead like a man who’s trying not to sway. The drunkest guys are always the ones who try hardest to look sober.
“What did you say it looked like again?” Hunter asks. Mick’s sure Hunter is partially trying to catch him up, and partially honestly curious. By some lucky chance Mick just happened to be working on the suit at an angle that Gideon’s cameras couldn’t quite pick up. What a crazy coincidence.
“Lil’ tubey…” Again Mick tries to raise his hand, and again pretends to be surprised to see the cuff.
“Very well, Mr. Rory. I’d advise you to be more careful in future when dealing with technology you don’t fully understand. And there’s going to be a lot of it.”
Mick bristles, but makes himself nod like what Hunter’s saying is the smartest advice he’s ever gotten. He grimaces at the pain this causes and Hunter frowns at him.
“Gideon will see to your wounds,” he says, then sweeps out of the medbay without another word.
Mick leans back and closes his eyes. He’s going to be monitored even more carefully now, so he can’t smile, but he thinks about his idea and hums while Gideon does her work. And people always say Lenny is the brains.
When Mick was a kid, he used to go hunting with his dad. His dad had always liked deer hunting the best. Said there was something noble about it, something soothing about waiting for hours in the quiet of the woods, just for that one perfect shot. It was like a real man’s version of all that sissy meditative crap the people in the city pissed themselves over.
Patience, though, is a skill Mick’s only picked up recently. Very, very recently. Deer hunting used to bore him out of his mind, but quail hunting? Quail hunting Mick loved. With quail hunting, you didn’t sit quietly in one spot with your ass going numb, instead you got to tromp around until you saw little circles of shits.
“Quail sleep in circles,” his dad had explained, pointing out a circle underneath some dry brush, “So they leave circles of shits behind in the morning. How fucking funny is that?”
Mick had thought it was hilarious. Len had been less than impressed, the one time Mick had tried to explain it to him. To be fair, it wasn’t the first time Mick had tried to distract Len when was on one of his no-rest-all-planning binges.
“...Then once you find the shits, you make a bunch of racket until the quail get startled. When the quail get startled, they make this cooing purr of a sound, like housecats with the midnight crazies.Then they fly up all at once and BAM! BAM! Dinner, straight from the sky.”
“That’s great Mick, I’m sure I’ll find that highly useful someday. Now look here, where these blueprints don’t line up. What do you think? I’m thinking Mr. CEO didn’t want his little saferoom to be a matter of public record…”
“That’s great, Lenny. Now that you’ve figured out what’s been bugging you about those, how ‘bout you get some some sleep, huh?”
“Sleep is for the weak. If we enter here we’ll be in a camera blindspot until we hit the bedroom hallway…”
He had wanted to tell Len why it was important. How the night of the fire, Mick doesn’t remember much, but he remembers the startled coo of quail all flocking into the sky, one shit circle after another.
He hadn’t.
Mick’s thinking about this as he turns the remaining gauntlet over and over in his lap. He see the same slightly askew panel on the pinkie, and brushes a finger against it, careful not to press down.
The thing about hunting quail that Mick had really loved though, is that his dad only had one regular shotgun to hunt with. The asshole had kept that one for himself. The shotgun he’d given Mick to use was his great-grandfather’s old trap shooting gun. The kind of gun used for target shooting clay pigeons as they were hurled through the air, way back when Mick’s family had the kind of money to waste on that sort of thing.
“Just don’t shoot your own damn foot off,” his dad had said, and with good reason. Most guns, you pull the trigger and that’s it. The action is done, something is either dead or it isn’t.
Trap guns don’t fire until you release the trigger.
Mick loved that gun. It took him awhile to get the hang of it, he missed every shot at first. The instinctive confusion of pulling a trigger and having nothing happen, only to be shocked by the recoil when he released it. Then he realized it was just like the moment between the spark and the flame, and he was hooked.
He loved knowing that once he pulled that trigger, the gun would fire, there was no way to stop it, but not until he let it go. He got to hang there in that excruciating moment of shot/not shot, dead/not dead, for as long as he wanted until he just... let go.
There was one day, after a string of bad days, that Mick remembers following his father through the bracket and stopping. He’d raised his gun at his father’s back and pulled the trigger. And he’d held it, and held it. And in that moment, his father was already dead, but still alive, the action already taken but still up to Mick to decide.
Mick had swung the gun down and nearly shot his own damn foot off.
Mick stares at the panel on the pinkie finger of the gauntlet. It hadn’t gone off until he had released it. It was designed for self preservation. For someone to make the decision that yes, something needed to die, but still giving them the choice of when and how. Like a trap gun with the trigger pulled, or a grenade with the pin removed but the lever still clutched in a hand.
Or the suicide switch on the Oculus.
Mick brushes the panel again. That’s what gave him his idea. This great idea that Mick is trying so hard to convince himself can’t be true. That Sara’s wrong and he has to be crazy because if he’s right... Jesus, if Mick’s right, the hope alone might kill him.
Because the Time Masters didn’t put this catch on Chronos’ helmet or torso, they put it on his pinkie, where sure, the explosion might damage the guy inside the armor, but not so bad that he can’t keep fighting. Worst comes to worst, he can shoot one handed. It’s designed to give him time to decide to take out everyone around him, wait for them to get close, and then let go. But the important thing, the thing that Mick can’t get out of his mind now that he’s thinking about it, is that it’s designed for the guy holding the trigger to come out okay. And if they were willing to protect some lowly foot soldier with this kind of booby trap, then why wouldn’t they protect the Oculus, their most prized possession, with the same trick?
Mick’s mother used to tell him that “The best mill grinds slow but fine” and Mick tries to remember that in the next few weeks. He’s no Lenny, his plans take him forever to come up with, and even longer to work out, but he thinks he knows what he has to do.
He’s also forced to take his time to keep anyone from getting suspicious and if that isn’t the most frustrating part of all, getting the info he needs in little dribs and drabs at a time. Some of the stuff he already knows. If he could remember everything about being Chronos it would help, but after the fourth night in a row of waking up from nightmares of atrocities he hadn’t known he’d committed, Mick decides he’s okay with some memory gaps.
He takes the Chronos armor--his armor--apart and puts it back together again and again until he knows it better than his heat gun. He starts dropping hints about being bored and joining Jax in the engine room, just to kill time. That’s a pun Len’s never going to get tired of.
He and Jax try to figure out what makes the Waverunner go and turn to Stein for the parts that are more theoretical than two mechanics are used to dealing with. Mick’s surprised to find Stein more helpful than anticipated. He tends to forget he’s not lecturing to a hall full of baby geniuses, but seems just happy to have someone listen to him, even if it is Mick. The new kids, and they do seem like kids most of the time, mostly act like they already know how a timeship works or don’t care. Mick’s gonna feel bad leaving Stein to babysit.
Haircut’s helpful too, but the conscience Mick didn’t know he still had pricks at him every time Ray gets that dopey grin and some over-enthusiastic explanation of “But the really neat part is…” or “Guess what! I just figured out how…”
Mick offers a hand in putting together a new device for the Atom suit, a tracking device so Ray can find both where and when he lost it, if necessary. Mick “accidentally” breaks the first few--big hands, too clumsy for such detailed work--and feels even worse when Ray doesn’t complain, just lets Mick keep helping until they could both probably build the thing blindfolded. Mick drops hints to some local girls about “a rich and highly skilled American” when they hit Paris in 1889 and decides to call it even.
Mick doesn’t go to Hunter for anything. It’s not because he doesn’t like the guy; Mick would do whatever it takes to learn what he needs to know, even if that meant crawling up to Rip Hunter and licking his boots. No, it’s because Rip Hunter doesn’t actually know anything that will help him. Mick’s patchy memories as Chronos tell him more about the time stream than Rip, or any of the Time Masters had ever been officially taught. After all, an architect may know the layout of his building, but it’s the maintenance guy who knows how it really works.
After nearly getting buried by a mortar strike at the Battle of Verdun, Mick decides it’s now or never.
He’s packing the last of his armor into the jumpship, when he notices the complete lack of sound that he’s come to associate with Sara.
“Come to say goodbye, Blondie, or just good riddance?”
He stows the armor, and does a final count of his supply boxes. There should be plenty of supplies where he’s heading, but Len’s taught him that there’s no such thing as being over-prepared. There’s also a footlocker strapped into one of the seats just labelled “Stuff”. That one’s full of spare clothes in two different sizes, as well as a couple books, some odds and ends they picked up on their travels. The cold gun’s in there too, wrapped inside a couple of jackets to keep it safe. Its partner is strapped to Mick’s thigh where it belongs.
Satisfied, he turns to Sara. She’s got her head tilted and eyes squinted like she knows she’s just one puzzle piece away from seeing the full picture.
“You’re not abandoning us again.” It’s not a question, so Mick doesn’t answer. “I thought you were all about the team now?”
“I am. The old team. My team.”
Her eyes widen. “You think he’s still alive?”
Mick grunts, unable--after all this time, all his planning and thinking--to voice the hope that he’s been clinging to. He’s afraid that if he actually says it out loud, he’ll hear how ridiculous it sounds. How stupid. How crazy.
But Sara doesn’t think he’s crazy. That’s something at least.
Sara doesn’t say anything, and Mick realizes this may have been something he didn’t plan for. He knows Lenny felt something for her, that there was a spark there, and she was definitely interested, but Mick had kind of figured that once he had Lenny back…
“Did you...” he mutters, running a palm over the back of his neck. “I mean, there’s room for one more if…”
Sara smiles and walks up to him. Mick freezes as she goes up on tiptoe and kisses him on the cheek.
“Go get ‘im, Tiger,” she whispers in his ear, then with one last look, walks back off into the ship. Mick watches her go, then climbs into the jumpship and activates his override of Gideon’s lockdown.
Seconds later, he’s gone.
Mick arrives in Nanda Parbat in 1960 as the tail lights on the Waverunner blink out in the far distance.
Right now on that ship he’s not Mick Rory, but Chronos, captured and raving, and Len is alive. Missing a hand, missing a hand that he shot off himself to save Mick’s life, but alive.
Mick spares a moment for the burn of the after image to fade from his eyes, and feels that little flicker of hope stir again in his chest, then he starts looking for the field where he left his--Chronos’s ship. He lands the jumpship next to his still-cloaked ship and begins to unload. He types in the “AUTHORIZED ACCESS, DO NOT SELF DESTRUCT” code into the computer on his remaining gauntlet and smiles as his ship shimmers into visibility. He pauses when he sees the door left open. Could the League of Assassins have found it already?
He draws his heat gun and approaches slowly. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
There’s a thin trail of blood leading out the door and into the grass. Duh, Lenny wouldn’t have wasted time closing it behind him when he…
Mick spins away and closes his eyes until the world stops spinning around him. When he feels like he can move again without dry heaving, he types another code into the gauntlet and starts to unload everything off the jumpship into the field. He doesn’t stop until the gauntlet beeps cheerily at him, letting him know his ship’s interior cleaning has been completed.
It takes Mick longer to load the ship--Bertha, he’d called her Bertha--than he’d expected. Every step into Bertha had sparked another memory of his time as Chronos. Some useful, most not. Finally, he just leaves everything in a pile inside the bay doors and stalks off to the bridge. He keeps his eyes straight ahead, and pretends not to notice how much stronger the scent of fresh cleanser is on the walkway to the bridge, or the new scratches in the paint on the handrail.
“Welcome, Chronos,” Bertha says. “Good hunting?”
Mick starts. He’d almost forgotten the sound of her voice. Deeper and fuller than Gideon’s. More real, less perfect. “N-new Protocols, Bertha. Activate sequence...048...69?”
“Would that be sequence 04896?”
Mick can’t help the huff of laughter. Honest mistake. “Yeah, that. And no more of this Chronos shit, just call me Mick.”
“Very well, Mick. Activating sequence 04896. Will be running dark to all possible manners of detection or communication until ordered otherwise. Would you care to specify a destination?”
“Just get us out of here.”
The last thing Mick does before Bertha jumps away is remotely cloak the jumpship and set the beacon he left behind to go off in five years. Plenty of time for any temporal trace of his destination to vanish, but not so long that the League is likely to literally stumble into it. He considers leaving a note, but doesn’t know what he’d even say.
Mick’s next few weeks are something of a learning curve. He never once has a problem flying Bertha, he figures that’s like riding a bike, but all of her schematics and operating systems are just different enough from the Waverunner’s that it takes him awhile to get the hang of everything, even with Bertha’s help.
He parks Bertha in a little pocket he knows outside of time and gets down to work. He rewires Bertha’s scanners to be able to pick up on the energies given off by the Oculus explosion and programs her to search all other points in the time stream for a similar energy. He figures, if the Oculus popped out of time with a bang, it probably popped back in with one too. After all, something as powerful and damn near mystical as the Oculus isn’t just gonna go out in some measly little explosion like the one that destroyed the Time Masters’ entire base. It’s going to protect itself by jumping away through time instead.
What Mick hasn’t let himself hope though, what he barely lets himself think about, is that if the Oculus is designed to be as powerful and all-seeing as he thinks it is, then maybe, just maybe, it’s designed to be powerful enough to take someone with it. That maybe the trick is that whoever would give their life to keep the Time Masters from abusing the Oculus’s power is the kind of person its creators would want protecting it, wherever it lands.
And that’s the entire hope/not hope that Mick has been planning for. What he’s been spending the last God knows how long researching and learning goddamn rocket science for. To figure out how to rewire his ship to search time for something that is at once outside of time and constant throughout all of time. Not to mention how to keep from blowing himself out of existence or being stranded with the dinosaurs in the process.
Mick slides the final rewired circuit board into the control panel and crosses his fingers.
“Bertha, run Oculus scan.”
“Scanning.” Minutes go by, then Bertha says, “One result found.”
If she had lips Mick would kiss her. He thinks about kissing the control panel anyway, but he hasn’t been alone that long. He walks forward to see the co-ordinates.
“Two results found. Fourteen results found. Six hundred and thirty-seven results found. Fifteen thousand, eigh--”
“Silence scan.”
Mick slumps down to the floor. He knew it was a long shot, but this? He doesn’t know how many lifetimes it would take to visit all of those points on the timeline, and Lenny could be at any one of them, or none at all.
He could be dead. For the first time, Mick allows himself to really think it. That Len is dead, no more quick smiles, biting glares, or restless hands. All gone. Separated from Mick like so many times before but with no chance of crossing paths or reconciliation, just gone. And Mick had spent their last few weeks together angry at him. Hell, their last few moments together yelling at him, and now he’s never going to get another chance to let Len know how much he loves him, always has. Or how Mick would do anything for him, even now. Even when he’s dead and Mick’s crazy.
Mick reaches up and clutches the ring he wears on a chain around his neck. He sits there, perfectly still, for a long time.
“Mick?” Bertha eventually asks. She sounds tentative for a robot. “I’ve completed the scan.”
Mick swallows, there’s a lump in his throat that feels like a boulder. “What’s the damage?” he croaks.
“There are a total of one hundred, forty-three thousand two-hundred and twelve points in the current timeline which may bear traces of energy similar to those left by the destruction of the Oculus. However, any number of those might be false positives created by time travellers such as yourself or unresolved shifts in the timestream. In addition, data points may be missing due to safeguards on the Oculus that are not in my database.”
“Fuck me.”
“Indeed.”
Mick sighs. He knocks his head back against the control panel. His hand hurts where the ring digs into his palm. He uses his free arm to wipe the tears he won’t acknowledge off his face.
“Fuck it.”
Mick rolls to his feet and walks unsteadily back to the cargo hold, ignoring the handrail. “Guess I better get started then.”
He takes a few days to rig together a replacement gauntlet for his Chronos suit out of some of the parts he brought with him from the Waverider. It wasn’t the sort of work he wanted to do under Gideon’s (aka Rip’s) watchful eye, but it does make him miss the old crew, just a little. He wonders what Jax would have thought of all of the tiny little components that make up what Mick is calling the “Kung Fu Death Grip” function, and Ray could have probably put the damn thing together in an afternoon. Of course since he probably would have spent the entire time being disgustingly cheerful as well as helpful, Mick’s current solitude has its perks.
Still.
Once the suit’s all back together Mick picks a time point at random from Bertha’s list and starts looking.
To say the search goes poorly is an understatement. Some time points Mick can tell immediately are false positives caused by other time travellers. It helps him narrow down the list a little. He discards any time points within a day or two of any well known assassinations and anything in Germany during the 30’s and 40’s. He figures, even if by some stroke of fate Len got zapped back to Dallas in 1963, from what Mick can tell there were more time travellers at the Kennedy assassination than the were actual Texans, so Len can just hitch a ride home with one of them.
Other time points take longer to investigate, days or even weeks tromping around in his cloaked Chronos suit trying to find out who or what is out of place. It helps him burn off some steam too, kicking the occasional time pirate ass or lifting a few “forgotten” treasures.
He runs into himself in a field in Sweden in 1492. Or rather, he runs into Chronos. Mick doesn’t remember a mission to that time, but that doesn’t really mean anything. On a whim, he turns the cloaking off and raises a hand in a wave. Chronos doesn’t wave back, just watches Mick for a long moment before turning and marching off.
What a dick.
It’s not until he’s is back on Bertha that Mick realizes it’s possible that he didn’t run into past-him, but rather future-him, double checking all of the thousands of places he’s already searched. He breaks into the last of Rip’s scotch that night and doesn’t stop drinking until he’s out.
“Hey Bertha, you remember the guy I had handcuffed in here?”
Mick’s cleaning the sweat and grime out of the inside of his helmet after a particularly long stopover in Ancient Rome. Christ, that thing is like a personal sauna.
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific, Mick. During your time as Chronos you apprehended a number of--”
“The last one.”
“Mr. Leonard Snart.”
Hearing his name out loud after all this time is like a bunch to the gut.
“Yeah,” Mick hesitates, superstitious for a moment, like saying his name will have some sort of dangerous power or curse like in a fairy tale. “Yeah, Lenny. Do any of those points you found on the Oculus scan sync up to appearances of his scanned DNA on the timeline?”
“I’m afraid it would be impossible to say, there are a number of points in which both occur simultaneously, but most of those are most likely readings from unrelated time travels, or from residual energy from the Oculus working it’s way backwards through the time stream.”
Mick looks up at that last part. “That gonna hurt him?”
“Quite the opposite, the Oculus’s detonation has now become a fixed point on the timeline, such as it is. The energy appears to be protecting Mr. Snart, to keep others from altering his timeline and thereby causing the detonation to never occur.”
She says it like she knows Mick has thought about doing just that every single time he lays down in his bunk to grab a few minutes of shut eye. He hasn’t said it out loud, but Mick’s still calling it “Plan C” and fuck anyone who tries to stop him, Bertha and the time stream and Rip Hunter included. Mick exchanges his rag for a set of dental tools and starts picking the sand out from under the helmet’s plates. Something Bertha said catches at the back of his mind, buzzing like a housefly. It takes him a moment to figure out what it is.
“You said ‘detonation’ this time, not ‘destruction’.”
“Indeed.”
Holy shit. HOLY SHIT.
Mick can barely breathe, “So it’s still out there? Lenny’s still out there?”
“The timeline appears to have stabilized enough to confirm that yes, the Oculus remained in the time stream after its detonation, but due to the observed interference with its energies, a precise location would be impossible to narrow down further. It also appears that Mr. Snart’s energies were not terminated at that time, likely due to the aforementioned protection of his timeline by the Oculus after the detonation as well as before.”
Mick takes a moment to let that sink in. He’s alive. Lenny is alive. Holy shit Lenny is alive and Mick isn’t crazy and Lenny is alive!
“Okay,” Mick says, in a voice steadier than he feels. “Okay. Plan B. We can’t track the Oculus, let’s track Snart.”
His tosses the tools back in their bag without looking and crosses to the nearest screen terminal, his helmet lying forgotten and upside down like an overturned turtle on the workbench. Mick hums in thought and scrubs a hand over the back of his head.
“You said he’s hard to track, right?”
On the screen, Bertha brings up a swirling image of green and blue lines, ever-shifting. Some strands cross and loop so tightly Mick instantly loses track, others cross back over themselves in endless loops, and still other float, slow moving and unconnected to the rest, time remnants or other fragments just waiting for the time stream to change again and erase them completely.
“Correct,” Bertha says. “While Mr. Snart’s DNA alone narrows down the field significantly, the corruption from the Oculus’s energies makes precisel tracking difficult. Not to mention…”
She honest-to-God sniffs in disdain. Mick didn’t know computers could do that. “...the fact that Mr. Snart was a time traveller himself and is previously recorded as having visited his own past muddles things even further.”
Mick feels a small smile tug at the corner of his mouth. “Not a big fan of us meddlers are you, sweetheart?”
“Indeed not. However, as your current mission is to locate and retrieve a rogue element from the time stream, I have decided to overlook certain aspects of your mission.”
“Thanks, doll.” Mick pats the console next to the screen fondly. “So what’s it going to take to narrow things down further?”
There’s silence for a long moment while Bertha calculates. Mick focuses on the timelines on screen in front of him. Somewhere in that mess is Lenny, his Lenny.
“I believe,” Bertha hesitates, “I believe that if I was able to draw from varied time samples in order to confirm Mr. Snart’s energy signature prior to his encounter with the Oculus, I might be better able to filter out his energies from its own, thus enabling my calculations to reverse engineer a more likely location in the time stream for his appearance.”
Mick frowns, “In English?”
“If we go to where Mr. Snart has been, I’ll be able to figure out where he will be.”
Mick backs away from the console until he hits the edge of the work bench and sits down heavily. The helmet rattles against the metal and rolls back at the movement. Christ. Mick thought seeing Len, the old Len, once in 2013 was bad? The only places Mick knows for sure he’s been are places where Mick was with him. Seeing himself with Len together and happy, or Hell, even together and pissed? Mick exhales slowly. This is going to break him.
“I guess we’re going back to Central then.”
Mick gives Bertha a list of dates, locations. Not in any particular order, some he remembers perfectly, others he knows are off by only a week or two. She tells him when she has collected her data and is preparing to jump to a new time, but other than that Mick doesn’t ask how it’s going, or even look out the window. He stays down in his workshop in the cargo bay, methodically dismantling and rebuilding his Chronos suit, his heat gun, anything he can get his hands on that isn’t part of the ship. He doesn’t want to accidently take out something integral to Bertha while she’s working.
When Bertha cheerily informs him to strap in, next stop Las Vegas, early June 1996, Mick orders her to lock him in his bunk until they’re gone.
When it finally happens, Mick isn’t even surprised. He’s walking past the bridge on the way to the kitchen when he spots a building out the front window. He can’t immediately place it from this angle, so he walks closer without thinking. It’s a massive structure, all brick and concrete, industrial and depressing. Around it are several outbuildings, as well as some of those temporary trailer things that look like they’ve been parked permanently. Surrounding it all is an open space, with a track and basketball courts. Mick steps closer. And a fence. A fence topped with barbed wire and with metal guard towers at each corner.
Suddenly, Mick knows exactly where and when they are. Wakefield Juvenile Correctional Facility. 1988. Which must mean that the skinny kid with the 10-speed bike leaning against the bus stop is…
“LAND. NOW.” Mick doesn’t wait to see if Bertha follows his orders. He’s back remembering a sunny day, glaring at the light as he walked out into the sun clutching a cardboard box containing his few possessions. The clothes he’d gone into juvie with were way too small, so he’d left them for someone who needed them, a few months past eighteen and all he’d had was a few bucks for a bus ticket, a pair of sweats and a t-shirt from Walmart, and a battered box of comic books and paperbacks.
He’d walked in a daze over to the bus stop, trying to decide whether he was going to catch the bus to Keystone and check in with his parole officer like he’d said, of if he was just going to say “Fuck it” and see how far he could go with what he had. Instead, Lenny had been there, with that stupid bike and a grin from ear to ear.
“Got you a present,” he’d said and tossed something shiny at Mick. Mick had dropped the box to catch it, a beautiful silver lighter with mother-of-pearl inlay, now lost and replaced a dozen times over the years.
Mick throws on his Chronos suit as fast as he can. The moment he feels Bertha touch down he activates the suit’s cloaking and runs out the cargo bay door.
He gets to the bus stop in time to see a cloud of dust vanish down the road along with the echo of laughter as the two boys ride away.
The cardboard box still lies where Mick dropped it, a few seconds and a lifetime ago. Mick nudges it with his foot, then kneels down to look inside. It’s mostly cheap sci-fi books that Len left him when he got out--Asimov, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury--the nerd. One of them is Have Space Suit-Will Travel, because Mick’s life is a cosmic joke. There’s also a couple of dog-earred X-men comics with pages from a Penthouse magazine torn out and hidden inside. Mick snorts. At the bottom of the box is a half empty notebook, a pair of dice, a baseball, and that’s it. Eighteen years of living and everything he had couldn’t even fill up a cardboard box. And he’d dumped most of it the second he saw Len again.
Mick takes one last look down the road, then picks up the box and walks back to the ship.
After that, Mick can’t stop himself. He doesn’t always leave the ship while Bertha runs her scans, sometimes he just watches from the bridge as Bertha hovers low and unseen over a county fair or prison yard. When he does go out though, it takes every ounce of willpower not to interfere, not to touch.
It’s only brief glimpses at first, a glimpse of blue as Len runs across a jewelry store parking lot into a getway car that squeals out, leaving rubber on the pavement as a younger Mick in the driver’s seat tears off into the night. But Mick gets better and better at figuring out exactly where and when their younger selves are likely to be, spending minutes standing silently in the shadows as Len picks the lock on a museum door or pushes his fries around his plate at a Hub City diner at three in the morning. Sometimes, Mick catches the tail end of a fight, Len storming out in a huff as Mick stalks off in the opposite direction. Sometimes he catches part of a reconciliation. He sees himself, younger and dumber, push Len away, only to come crawling back, time and time again and he sees Len push him away just as often.
Once, Mick watches himself and Len, only a few years older than they were when they got out of juvie, lie in the bed of a truck for over an hour, sometimes necking, sometimes just watching the stars, with Len wrapped up warm in the leather jacket Mick had given him for his birthday that year. Mick arrived too late to catch their first kiss, but that was probably just as well.
By now, watching Len has become almost as much an obsession for him as fire and almost as dangerous. His hands start to tremble if he goes too long without seeing him, if the dates or the co-ordinates or Mick’s memory are just a little off and Len’s not there. Mick draws on every ounce of patience and determination forced into him by the Time Masters to just watch and wait.
Every time Len speeds off out of sight, or storms out of the range of Bertha’s sensors, Mick walks back to her, shoulders low, new memories of the moment mixing with the old. Mick wants so badly to talk to him again, touch him like he didn’t even last time he saw him, like they rarely ever did, but he can’t.
The times when Mick has to leave while Lenny is still there are the worst, Bertha calmly whispering in his earpiece, “All necessary data has been collected from this time point, Mick. New co-ordinates have been set.”
At those times, Mick has to tear himself away with reminders that this isn’t his Lenny, not anymore. This was his Lenny when Mick was 19 and 38 and 26. His Lenny is still out there, and each time he turns away he gets that much closer to finding him. He catches himself repeating the same mantra under his breath. Just one word. “Soon, soon, soon, soon…”
Meanwhile, Bertha is processing the data she’s collected, making new suggestions and eliminating possibilities. Every time Mick asks to see the time stream map again, it is still a jumble of dozens, if not hundreds of mixed and tangled possibilities. Eventually he stops asking.
He’s in the kitchen, mechanically shovelling food into his mouth, not tasting any of it, when Bertha speaks up.
“Mick, I’m unaware how this is possible, but while waiting for you to be ready for our next time jump, I was running some much delayed systems maintenance and internal scans, and appear to have located Mr. Snart’s presence.”
Mick drops his spoon. Bertha continues. “Again, I am unaware of the logistics, and my internal cameras are picking up nothing, but according to the current biometric scan, Mr. Snart is in fact aboard ship.”
“WHAT? WHERE?” Mick leaps up from his chair.
“Mr. Snart appears to be located in the hall just aft of the bridge. Again however, my cameras…”
Mick runs from the kitchen, tears of joy in his eyes. “My own goddamn ship, you got yourself beamed to my own goddamn ship, of course you did. Len! Lenny!”
Mick takes the corner too hard and slams into the opposite wall. He turns, ready to see Len perched ridiculously on the stairs, or leaning back, ankles crossed, against the navigation console, but there’s no one there.
“Lenny?” Mick tentatively steps forward. “Bertha, where is he?”
“According to my scan, he should be just two feet ahead of where you are presently standing.”
Mick reaches out, hoping to touch Len, somehow cloaked for maximum theatrical reveal, like the drama queen that he is, but Mick’s hand passes through nothing but air. Mick runs the length of the hall, but Len isn’t there. “You said he’s here!” he yells frantically. “Right here! Fuck, fuck! A duct! A bolt hole! There’s gotta be something!”
He starts tearing at the walls with his bare hands, not noticing when his fingernails start to break and bleed, but there’s nothing. He pulls up the raised walkway, the diamond patterns of the metal scraping against his knuckles, but the flooring underneath is solid, no hidden seams or raised edges. He reaches down into the space, hands groping desperately for anything, when his fingers brush against something small, lodged in a back corner. Mick pulls it out and stares uncomprehendingly at it for long moments, not understanding what it is.
This is the spot. This is the exact spot Len was sitting when I had him here last time. When I had him handcuffed to this rail, right here, but he was still able to get to his cold gun and…
Bertha’s automatic cleaners couldn’t reach that back corner. The object is off-white, tapered in the middle and sits in the palm of Mick’s hand. It’s about the size and shape of a finger bone. Because it is.
Mick sobs and throws the bone down the hallway, before turning and puking over the upturned walkway. When he’s finished, he starts to cry. Every goddamn emotion, all the guilt and love and frustration with this goddamn quest and this goddamn ship and goddamn Lenny all pouring out of him. He doesn’t know how long he lies there, in his own blood and sick and tears, but eventually he hears Bertha softly repeating his name.
“Mick? Mick? Would you like me to jump us to a more secure time pocket for an extended stay? Or perhaps Ancient Greece, or uninhabited Australia? The beaches there around 60,000 BC are particularly restful.”
Mick lies there before exhaling out a long breath and sitting up slowly and painfully. “Gimme twenty to get cleaned up, then jump us to the next spot on the list,” he says woodenly.
As he walks down the hallway to his bathroom, he notices that the chunk of bone is nowhere to be seen.
Soon, soon, soon, soon...
When Mick finally crosses a line, it’s actually an accident.
He’s standing in the corner of the abandoned warehouse that had been their favorite safe house for most of the mid 2000’s. He’s watching himself, his younger self, watch TV. Mick doesn’t really think there are that many differences between the two of them. What’s another ten years when you’re getting to be his age anyway? But the him on the sofa is maybe a little less worn, less haggard. He’s certainly less scarred, his bare chest and shoulders still eight or so years away from the fire that twisted and revealed Mick to be the person he is now.
If Mick remembers correctly, this is the time Len’s bus broke down when he finally got out of jail. Some eighteen month bullshit that began with him telling Mick to take the money and run, they’d meet up later. They hadn’t, of course, and any minute now that flip top cell phone on the coffee table is going to ring and Mick’s gonna get called out to pick up Len from a payphone at the ass end of nowhere. Mick couldn’t remember exactly where the pay phone was, so he’d told Bertha to just drop him off here, and they’d follow once Len called with the location.
Apparently, Mick’s memory confused this jail stint with another one, because five minutes of crappy 2000’s prime time television later, he hears the front door of the warehouse slam open.
“Honey, I’m home!”
It’s only a lifetime of Time Master training that keeps Mick from jumping at Len’s voice. His younger self doesn’t have that training however, and nearly falls off the couch.
“You asshole!” the younger Mick yells, before vaulting over the back of the couch. He rushes across the empty space as Len closes the door behind him with a butter-wouldn’t-melt expression on his face. Mick never slows down, just crashes into Len, knocking him into the wall with the full weight of his body and catching his face in both hands to hold him in a crushing kiss. Len kisses back just as hard, clutching at Mick’s bare shoulders and digging in with his nails causing Mick to pull back with a hiss.
In the far corner, Mick shifts uncomfortably in his Chronos suit. Oh. This. Yeah, Mick remembers this.
Unaware of his presence, the younger versions stand panting against the wall, their foreheads resting against each other’s and talking softly.
“Next time you tell me to run, I’m dragging you with me.”
“Yes, well, things can’t always go according to plan.”
They keep kissing and talking in voices almost too low to be heard as Len gently pushes Mick back and guides him towards the bed against the side wall. From his vantage point in the corner, Mick has a clear view of the whole thing, a real, king-sized bed on a frame and a box spring. Len was only in his twenties when he had started to complain that he was too goddamn old to sleep on a mattress on the floor anymore.
The backs of younger Mick’s knees hit the edge of the mattress and he falls backwards in a huff. Len grins and climbs on top of him, wasting no time in unbuckling Mick’s belt and tugging at his jeans. Both Micks smile the same amused smile. “Miss me, Lenny?” says the one on the bed.
“Shut up and take your pants off,” says Len, stripping off his sweater and twisting to sit on the end of the bed to unlace his boots. Mick kicks off his pants and crawls over to where Len is sitting, wrapping his arms around Len from behind. He slides forward, a knee either side of Len’s slim hips and his entire body pressed against Len’s bare back. He drops his head against Len’s shoulder.
“I missed you too,” he murmurs and in the corner Mick startles. Even after they married, Hell, especially after they married, he and Len had never really done the whole…
“Hey,” Len whispers softly as he lays his arms over Mick’s. “We don’t really do the whole touchy-feely thing.”
Mick grunts, but they sit there for a long moment anyway, unmoving, just reveling in the warmth and comfort of each other’s touch.
Mick spreads his hands under the gauntlets. He could almost swear he can feel Len’s fingers entwining with his own even now.
On the bed, Mick slowly pulls back and Len follows him, shivering when Mick opens his jeans and slips his hand inside. They don’t talk, their lovemaking unusually quiet and subdued, but Mick can’t take his eyes off of them. When Len slowly sinks down, seating himself fully on Mick’s cock and throwing his head back in a gasp while he catches his breath, it’s the most beautiful thing Mick has ever seen. Then Len starts to move, body graceful and sinuous in the dim glow of the the street lights coming in through the dirty warehouse windows. He’s at his most beautiful like this, taking his pleasure in Mick’s body, giving that same pleasure back and gasping little curses and pants of Mick’s name. Beneath him, Mick groans and runs his hands up Len’s thighs and across his chest, reveling in the chance, in the invitation, to touch Len everywhere.
Mick has to bite his lip to keep from making a noise as Len comes, body freezing on a breathy little “oh!” before he melts down languidly atop Mick’s younger self. That Mick rolls them both over, covering and sheltering Len’s body with his own, before giving a few final thrusts.
“Lenny...” he sighs.
Then, there’s few minutes of comfortable silence. The noises of the city filter in through the warehouse walls, but aside from that, the only sound is their combined breathing, and the occasional rustle of movement against the sheets. Eventually, there is a whispered half-argument that ends with Mick rolling out of bed to fetch a wash cloth. After they clean up, the two lie in bed, sheets pulled up tightly over Len’s shoulders, making sleepy plans to collect the stash from where Mick’s hidden it and finding somewhere to lie low for awhile.
Tomorrow, they’ll decide on Arizona, Mick knows, and they’ll see the Grand Canyon, and nearly run over an armadillo, and Len will swipe him the gaudiest turquoise jewellry he can find. But that’s tomorrow. Tonight, they talk until their voices fade off into sleep and Mick is finally free to step out of the corner and stretch his aching joints. He exhales, and it feels like he’s been holding his breath for hours. Even though they’re both asleep, he leaves the cloaking device on, not knowing who might be out walking the streets and not wanting to be seen. He starts to walk towards the door, but pauses.
The next thing he knows he’s standing next to the bed.
Len is draped across Mick’s chest, his chest, in the way that has always made Mick feel like he’s the king of the world. His head is on Mick’s shoulder and his hand is resting over Mick’s heart. He’s not wearing his ring, but that’s alright, he never wears it on a job in case something goes wrong. Mick stashed it with the cash after Len got picked up. They’ll get it tomorrow.
Mick hesitates, before carefully pulling the sheets up a little higher, covering where they’ve slipped down Len’s bare shoulder. When they’re having sex, Len is gloriously, beautifully unselfconscious, but all other times he likes to be covered. Plus, he gets cold so damn easily. Mick’s hand hovers after he finishes adjusting the sheet. This is the closest he’s been to Len since… before, and he can’t help but take a moment to look at him. The dark brush of his eyelashes fan out so delicately against his skin and Mick swears he can feel the stir of breath from those slightly parted lips even through the armor of his gauntlet. Mick reaches out, and carefully runs a finger down the arch of Len’s cheekbone.
Len stirs at the invisible touch. “Mick?” murmurs softly, his eyelashes fluttering as he starts to open his eyes.
“Go back to sleep,” Mick whispers, his voice too quiet to be altered by the distortion of his helmet.
“Hmm,” Len hums and burrows in even closer to Mick, clutching at his chest possessively. “Y’can’t make me…” A moment later his breathing evens out in sleep again. Mick takes one more long look, then leaves as quietly as he can.
When he get backs on board Bertha, he strips his armor off quickly, leaving it lying where it falls rather than giving it his usual post-excursion cleaning. He strides naked through the halls of the ship, straight to the shower. Minutes later, he comes with his hand on his cock and Len’s name on his lips, the hot water washing away all evidence of both.
Mick doesn’t know how many times he’s gone through this by now. Every time Bertha says she almost has it, she just needs a little more information… But Mick knows the Oculus is still changing Len’s readings, making him harder and harder to find. By this point Mick is starting to wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense to just go back to the beginning, start at the very beginning of time itself and wait for Lenny to find him. But Mick’s no Vandal Savage. He’d be dead long before Lenny had any chance of showing up.
It’s easier when he gets to see Lenny, reminds him why he’s doing all this, even as it cuts to the deepest part of his heart. But times like these, when he’s been off by only a little bit and just missed him…
Mick kicks the remains of a partially rebuilt radio. He knows he’s never coming back to fix it. He’s in 2016 and just minutes ago he and Len had run out to catch the Waverider. To become Legends. Mick kicks the radio again. Minutes ago. The sheets on the bed are still warm.
Mick knows he doesn’t have long to stay, knows that soon this whole place is going to go the way of every other safe house they’ve finished with. A blazing inferno to say goodbye to a place that they’ve called, for however short a time, their home. Still he lingers, knowing that all this is about to disappear from the timeline anyway, so he might as well see if there’s anything he needs. He grabs a couple of spare parts and throws them in one of those reusable grocery bags Len always buys but always forgets to use.
On the battered sofa, one of Len’s many spare parkas lies forgotten. A tear on the elbow being apparently enough for Len to decide to break out a new one. Mick laughs. Len has had a frankly absurd number of them. He’s only made them his signature for the last two years since becoming Captain Cold, but apparently fighting superheroes all day and other villainous pursuits are tougher on outerwear than one would think. Not to mention the half dozen that have been confiscated as evidence. That’s why Mick prefers his fireman jackets. Nothing gets through those.
There’s a book half-hidden under the sleeve of the parka. It’s lying open, face down, but Mick can’t quite make out the cover. Curious, Mick lifts the sleeve and laughs again, voice cracked and croaky from disuse. It’s an ancient copy of “The Illustrated Man”, held together with packing tape and a prayer. It’s the same one Len had given him in juvie that first time and one of the only things he’d pulled out of that box before riding off with Len. Mick remembers Len losing this, being pissed at himself on the Waverunner when he realized it was gone. They’d traded this copy back and forth for years, in and out of jail, carrying messages, or just to reread for fun.
The stories in it are both of their favorites out of all of Ray Bradbury’s stuff. He remembers them all. “The Veldt” with those parents who got what they deserved, “The Fox and The Forest” which they’d both thought was cool at the time, but now that Mick’s actually done the whole time travelling assassin thing, the thought of it kind of nauseates him. They’d both agreed “The Fire Balloons” was too damn preachy, but there’s something about it now that’s tickling at the back of Mick’s mind, a memory of blue fire. He smiles. He might as well take the book with him now, it’s already lost to time and Len will get a kick out of seeing it again when he gets back.
Mick picks up the book, wondering what story Len left it on. When he picks it up, something slides out from underneath it and falls to the floor. Mick bends down to pick it up and notices idly that smoke is starting to seep out of the kitchen. He opens his hand. In his palm is a silver lighter with pearl inlay. Mick’s breath catches in his throat and his hand snaps shut around the lighter. His other hand shakes as he turns the book over. About halfway down page 53 the story “The Long Rain” starts, but the rest of it… Mick starts to read the last few paragraphs until the shaking in his hand gets too bad to make out the words. It doesn’t matter, he knows that story almost by heart. “The Man”. Mick looks from the book, to his fist holding the lighter, to the parka strewn on the sofa.
“Well, fuck,” Mick breathes out as the smoke starts to curl around his ankles. “I’m an idiot.”
“What took you so long?”
Mick’s back in a seedy strip club in Central City in 2013. This time though, when Len’s eyes shimmer and flash with that iridescent blue fire, Mick knows it isn’t a trick of the light. He’s every bit as gorgeous as Mick left him.
“Got your present,” Mick says, pulling the lighter out of the pocket of his green jacket. “How long you been waiting?”
Len cocks his head to the side and glares at Mick and Jesus, this is Lenny. His Lenny. Mick can barely believe it. All this time all those other Lens belonging to all those other Micks and he finally found his again.
Like all lost things, he was exactly where Mick left him.
Len exhales and draws a little pattern in the condensation rings on the table. Blue lines glow along the path he draws. He looks so old for a moment, and Mick wonders how long it took him, searching through time with something as inscrutable as the Oculus, its energies growing and becoming part of him. Len figuring out how to control it, how to make it bring him to this one moment, this little pocket of 2013 which never really was for either or them.
“Mick…”
“Yeah, I know. Stupid question. Why didn’t you say anything the first time?”
Len squirms in his seat and if Mick had any question about this being his Lenny, he’s positive now. “I wasn’t sure. In my defense, you literally just walked out.”
Mick knows he’s in the parking lot right now, listening to Hunter’s false sympathies and Ray’s useless reassurances. He drops his eyes from Len’s face, still so happily drinking in the sight of him, down to Len’s parka. The parka he’d started wearing when he took on the moniker of Captain Cold. In 2014.
For a moment Mick lets himself get angry for all the time he’s wasted searching. If only he’d noticed the stupid parka the first time, if only Len had actually said something instead of playing his coy little games.
Just as quickly as the anger arrives though, Mick lets it go. All the time and suffering Mick endured to become Chronos had given him the tools he needed to get Len back. Maybe this is something similar. He’s probably never going to know what it took for Len to learn to work the Oculus, to find this place, this moment. How long it took to plan their meeting. How long to pull all the tiny little threads at all the tiny little moments that would bring himself and Mick back together again.
Besides, If Mick’s learned anything from all this, it’s that time means fuck all.
Mick picks up the cheap beer he left behind just moments and ages ago. Still cold.
“What now?” he asks.
“Well,” Len drawls. “Between the two of us, we have a spaceship that can travel through time, the most advanced technology mankind will ever produce, eons worth of knowledge, the ability to manipulate time, and a device of literally infinite power. What do you want to do?”
Mick finishes beer, then reaches out and touches Len like he hasn’t in... a long time.
“I want to go somewhere a little quieter,” Mick says.
Len closes his eyes and smiles, and instead of seeing all the time they spent apart, Mick sees all the time they’ve spent together. And maybe a single lifetime of togetherness shouldn’t outweigh endless lifetimes of emptiness and searching, but it does.
Then Len opens his eyes and looks directly at Mick. He blinks blue fire and Mick catches a glimpse of all the lifetimes they still have to come.
“Yeah, let’s do that.”
“Yes, poor man, he’s gone,” said the mayor. “And he’ll go on, planet after planet, seeking and seeking, and always and always he will be an hour late, or a half hour late, or ten minutes late, or a minute late. And finally he will miss out by only a few seconds. And when he has visited three hundred worlds and is seventy or eighty years old he will miss out by only a fraction of a second, and then a smaller fraction of a second. And he will go on and on, thinking to find that very thing which he left behind here, on this planet, in this city—”
- Ray Bradbury “The Man”