Chapter Text
Panting from her sprint through woods and along the corridors, Sara stopped to take stock of the team while Amaya and Mick settled the Colonel onto a med chair. Mick’s arm was bleeding from where he’d been hit and Ray kept looking around like he still couldn’t quite hear what anyone was saying to him, they would each need a brief stint under the scanners in due time. Amaya and Nate were no worse for the wear than usual after a fight and while Sara herself could feel a bruise blooming on her hip and lower back she marked herself down for field clearance as well.
What she couldn’t tell, and was provided no insight on by her team during the transit or by Gideon upon arrival, was why the doppelganger had dropped like a rock after the firefight without a scratch on him. Her agitation was mounting, watching his chest stutter up and down while Stein and Gideon worked to get a response out of the equipment that had never had a chance to catalog to his body’s biology.
“Dammit, will someone tell me why! Why was he on the ground in the first place?!” Her voice was coarse but she decided that the battle and unexpected strain of comms’ loss were the culprits.
Amaya responded, returned from ushered Jax away from the action, “I’m sorry, Sara. I related to Ray that we were falling behind and he suggested that the rifle Snart had used may help-”
Stein finally managed to engage to software and secured the diagnostic cuff around the Colonel’s wrist with a triumphant click . Less than a beat later Gideon chimed with an update.
“Captain, it appears that my cursory scans of Mr. Snart when he boarded last night were lacking. I did not consider any ill-effects of alternate Earth technology on his system.”
A good start but- “More, Gideon!”
“ This Mr. Snart has a cardiac regulator, similar to the more advanced pacemaker of the late 21st century of our Earth. It appears that the device’s interactions with his heart were disrupted by the mechanical-electrical relays found in and around the Zurich compound. The signal ‘fritz’, as Dr. Palmer describes, was not the cause of Mr. Snart’s fall, but actually an alert of the malfunction.” She sounded a little too human in her frustration for an AI.
“As the implant began to fail, the signal was broadcast. Had this happened on E-R-N 49, a medical professional would have been contacted - likely one of the Colonel’s own choice - and dispatched a response team, and a software patch, if applicable. Instead, the device located the nearest frequency with a ‘Communications’ distinction - with the six of you standing around, the Waverider’s systems were closest at hand - but was only able to blast static across the foreign wavelength until I reformatted it.”
“So, an alert almost burst my eardrums. Great.” Nate mumbled to Sara’s right, earning him a not so subtle ear flick from Amaya.
“Okay, so does this mean that you can, um, settle whatever happened?” The Colonel’s limbs were still tensing and relaxing with force enough to require Mick to bracket the man’s knees with his good arm to keep his lower body on the chair.
“It does, Captain Lance. Though I believe that first administering a sedative may ease the process along. And while you and Mr. Rory may wish to remain present to manage your own injuries, I suggest the others leave.”
Nate, Stein, Amaya, and Ray filed out just as whatever drug Gideon was pushing made it to the Colonel’s circulatory system, leaving Mick free to raid the cabinet for bandages and a needle. Sara had moved to skim the results of their passenger’s scan when the AI interrupted her.
“It appears that you managed to bruise a kidney. Not horribly, but I would still like to lessen the inflammation - take a seat.” Gideon must have run a scan when Sara turned her back, damn her omnipotence.
Sara began a dismissal until she caught Mick mouthing an attack on her personal agency, usually avoiding the irradiative beams at all costs, and eventually allowed it with what she would call minimal grumbling.
She let her mind go blank as the pale laser worked her over, let her eyes drift from the rhythmic movements of the arsonist’s stitching to the still fluctuating status bar on the display of the other occupied chair. The oxygen content of his blood was still dangerously low but the decreased exertion meant that his body was better equipped to handle the loss, especially with Gideon’s facilitating. The diagnostic bar along the lower half of the screen was still cycling through, slowly pulling all available data for a rendering of the regulatory device and its situation. Sara really wished she had leaned on Jax a little harder to upload to E 49 data - at least then Gideon would something to compare it against.
When the thrum against her skin finally died, she stood. The movement caught Mick’s eyes and he asked what she had been about to, shrouding any attentiveness by curling around himself to reach the deep bullet graze on his outer arm.
“How’s it goin’, Gideon? Don’t look like he’s back in step yet.”
“No, Mr. Rory, he is not. Unfortunately it seems that the device was far more integral than most. Where other pacemakers act as assistants to the muscles of the heart-”
“-to keep the rhythm, right? Or apply a shock to restart the beating. . .” Sara butted in, the old knowledge prickle at the back of her brain.
“Correct. But the device in this Mr. Snart’s chest cavity has a second, higher objective than over vision or maintenance - the regulator and the device’s complementary structures have almost completely taken over the cardiac load.”
Mick huffed, brow pinched in the way that Sara had long-since noticed that it did when he was pretending to be denser than he was. “Wh’do’ya mean, ‘taken over the load’?”
“I believe that due to some drastic medical measures is his recent past, Mr. Snart’s heart was left as little more than an organic shell, heavily regulated by the device we are speaking of now.”
“That’s . . . not good, is it.” Sara bit her lip after the words left her, watching Mick’s eyes fall to the face of the Colonel, looking somewhat pained as they did.
“I think it is safe to say that it is not, Captain. Moreso because of my own lack of familiarity with the technology, but also in general, the implant is completely artificially and while The Colonel’s Earth may have discovered ways to apply such materials effectively-”
“But we haven’t. In the 21st or 22nd century.”
“Why would the bastard get on the ship if it was just goin’ to take him to a place where no one could do the upkeep?” Mick finished off the final stitch he was working on but held his slumped position for a little longer, grumbling the words more to himself than either Gideon or Sara, but she herself shrugging anyway.
“Based on the way he was talking last night it was more about getting away.” He had mentioned rules and time limits - and gone. The word caught in her head again, thoughts flicking to the past experiences that had left her well versed on the topic; maybe he really had meant the more . . . final application of the term.
“He is not a lost cause yet. Once the technology is analyzed, I should be able to provide most services. Assuming, that is, that the signals can normalize his automatic systems again.”
His body was completely still now, more so than Sara had been trained to expect when under normal sedation. Instead of a steady rise and fall, his chest would in- and exhale on a cycle of fifteen seconds, and the heart monitor was giving off a faster but similar reading no audible lub-dub distinction between the contraction of the heart quadrants, too unnatural and precise to be believable if it wasn't for the fact that Sara could see the biometric comparisons of now to the time he arrived in the cargo bay fewer than 24 hours ago on the far screen.
“And do you think it can?”
“I am hopeful. It appears that the musculature surrounding his heart and lungs has adapted quite admirably to the prosthetic additions, strengthened in ways that a normal person’s would not, but with a device with this level of intricacy, I cannot trust my conservative scan alone.”
That made sense, Sara supposed. There could only be so much information gleaned from any diagnostic-
“So, what do we do?”
“There is an apparatus in the second compartment against the back wall, Captain.”
Sara found the instrument with ease - wrapped in the sterile clear plastic that seemed to be everywhere on the ship, membrane thin and the slightest bit tacky on the outside - and unfurled the appendages to reveal something that resembled a white, flexible ‘Y’ with palm-sized suction pads on each end with roughly four feet of tubing bound in cotton webbing. After Gideon confirmed her find, Sara sliced through the packaging and returned to the bedside.
“Usually, the Machrin’s CS-3 can be applied to a clothed chest but with what appears to be added electrical components to Mr. Snart’s clothes, it will be best if they are removed. Mr. Rory, you will lend a hand. . .”
They made quick work of it, separating the med cuff from the Colonel’s wrist long enough to shuck off the canvas jacket then the long sleeve shirt and tank that were underneath. His skin was cool to the touch, and pale, but Sara heard no comment from Mick about either and didn’t voice her own. When she moved back around to the foot of the chair after clearing the clothes to the side, she found herself rooted to the spot.
The Leonard Snart that they had known had claimed his fair share of scars - she had seen a number of them on one occasion or another, but never up close - but his had been old, fine marks from the past, some nearly melted back into his skin the way that Sara hoped that some of hers might one day. That was not the case for the Colonel. She should have expected it - obviously the heart monitor was a fairly new installation and would have required a hands-on installation - but she could not have foreseen the expansive cords that the man bore on his chest. In a gruesome way, it reminded Sara of the arrow marks on her belly, like starbursts drawing to a point over the center of his chest. His, though, added an element with a long primary stroke cutting him bilaterally.
Sara cut a glance to the side to see that Mick had been caught as unprepared as she had, staring with eyes too large to be counted a stoic, even if it was a near thing. Quickly, she laid the Y as Gideon’s projected diagram proposed - inverted, with the center fall at the bottom of his sternum and the ends curling to his sides or over his left shoulder to the back of his neck - and the AI initiated the new test as soon as the core lit up after alignment.
The pair stepped back as the leads began to pulse with yellow light and slowly. . . very slowly, Sara noted as she watched minutes tick by, the Colonel’s breathing began to return to a human rate. She felt Mick’s should relax next to her when the oxygen levels began to rise as well and she forced the tension out of her own jaw and hands.
“He’s younger.” The words were abrupt, drawing her from her own thoughts of leases on life, but Sara nodded.
“I’d thought so when I saw him this morning back I wasn’t sure . . .” She had never known him as anything but the silver-haired Crook (and briefly an infant with a tendency to clutch whoever’s fingers were closest) but the near-black didn’t throw his features into too different of a relief.
“Didn’t really start losin' the dark ‘til around a few years ago. This guy looks about the same that Snart did at 36 an’ 37.” Mick shook his head a little. “‘S an impressive scar, ain’t it, Boss.”
Sara settled herself before she flinched this time, but only because the identifier seemed to catch for a moment in his throat. “Fresh, too. Maybe a year and change.”
“You are correct, Captain Lance. Both the surgery and the cardiac event that lead to its necessity appear to have taken place 14 months ago.”
“Your test done?”
“It is, Mr. Rory. You may remove the CS-3-” Mick was moving before Gideon even finished her sentence, pulling the leads off of the Colonel’s skin even more quickly than Sara had placed them.
“So, what’s the prognosis, Doctor?” Sara asked to cover Mick’s sharpness as he moved to pull the shirts back into place.
“The regulator is extensive; whatever happened to Mr. Snart delivered quite a debilitating blow to his primary function originally, but someone or - more likely several someones - took great care to bring him back to full capacity. Most of the involuntary actions of his left-hand lung along with the entirety of his heart is influenced by an advanced titanium-alloy threading and leads-”
“-And? What does it mean for him, he’s still unconscious.”
“Yes, Mr. Rory, he is,” Gideon sounded more than a little put out, though Sara couldn't tell if it was because of Mick’s interruption or because of the truth in his observation. The Colonel was still prone in the med chair, unresponsive despite the charts expressing a lighter load of sedatives being administered. “But he should come around soon, since the CS-3 did its job.”
Mick grunted his acknowledgment before asking after a suggested time window, but it seemed that the 45 to 70 minutes range was not near enough and Sara watched the arsonist stride out of the Med Bay.
With Mick gone, there was little to do but wait.
Sara settled back into the second chair and messaged Jax to ask if he could get a jump on the data from Earth 49 only to receive a three-second video response of the young crewmember looking dead-eyed into the camera before snorting and dropping his head back onto his pillow.
So much for a head engineer.
About half an hour into what Gideon had referred to as human recalibrating - Sara had assumed it was some form of AI humor - the Colonel’s body starting seizing again. Even despite Gideon’s calm assessment of the contractions as harmless and unavoidable, she had to pry her fingers from the chair’s arms and force herself to relax.
It was senseless, the way that Sara could feel a chill run through her body every time the vitals on the screen dipped below normal. But she was the captain, and everyone on the ship, crew or not, was her responsibility to make sure the made it back safe. To make sure that every reasonable avenue of assistance was explored. She had done it countless times with the strays that they always seemed to mang to pick up, but there was a pattern there: bring them onboard, heal the bumps and bruises and break, usually a little bonding depending on the visitors disposition, then after a memory wipe or a convoluted cover story, they were back on the ground where they belonged.
But with The Colonel there was no putting him back, not after they had taken him away - it's not like they Waverider was supposed to make universe-hopping a casual event. And, with the Colonel, there was no easy observing. It seemed that every time Sara chanced a look at the face she’d known before or the scarred chest that was now once again covered in layers. She sucked in a deep breath when the shaking stopped, but it did little the lessen her nerves.
Amaya stopped in as few minutes shy of the bottom threshold, asking after the Colonel’s health even in the same moment that her eyes swept the room. Sara gave her a short response, he’s fine, nothing to do but wait , and spared the other woman from asking by telling her that Mick had run off under the guise of hunting out liquor. More or less a lie, but a useful one because soon Sara was alone again with the monitors and their incessant pulsing.
Thirty minutes turned to forty, then sixty before the Colonel expressed any indicator of consciousness. Just a hand clenching against his leg, nails probably digging in to give some form of sensory feedback after the deprivation of sedation. Sara had caught herself doing that before. Gideon would probably shame him like she had her. Another five minutes and his eyes were squinting against the lights before opening.
“Welcome back, Mr. Snart. I have recalibrated your internal rhythmic device-”
“Thank you, Gideon, but I don’t suppose I could get some pain meds before you begin your spiel? My arm-” Sara could see it without him say so; his arm, the left, was pulled up to be cradled against his chest almost as soon as he regained motion and he actively kneaded the meat of his bicep with his free hand. The med cuff lit up as the medication was administered.
“My apologies, my adjustment of the leads may have lead to discomfort and the strain-”
“-Of the seizures didn’t help, I know, thank you.”
He over and saw Sara now, though based off the stillness of his express, he had known she was there already.
“Sorry for falling down on the job, Captain. I won’t make habit of it.”
“From what I can tell, you’re in no position to be able to make that promise.” It came out more than a little more harshly than she had intended for a conversation with a man of recently regain alertness, but Sara stood by it if only because of the truth it held. And the Colonel at least had the presence of mind to look properly set upon, brow furrowing in an annoyingly familiar way.
“I suppose you’re right, but I can try.” He met her eyes as he said it, forcing a promise into the words that spoke of none, but Sara didn’t want promises.
“Spare us your attempts - how about the truth. Starting with: who are you?”