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Mick isn't human.
It's a fire spirit, wrapped up in a human shell. It's a parasite lodged inside Mick Rory’s body.
Len knew Mick Rory before the spirit took him. He was a good thief, but small minded.
He much prefers the Mick he has now.
They have a partnership of sorts. It's partly by choice, partly by magic. Len just happened to be the human that the spirit took a liking too. He’s its mate, the thing that keeps it anchored in the human world.
It listens to him, calls him boss, follows him onto the time ship. He fights alongside it, and for it, when it gets captured.
But they have arguments: he didn't want to bother taking the Boy Scout out of the gulag. They work through the disagreements, either Mick or Len bending, making a compromise.
The spirit is complacent and calm for so long that Len forgets that it is a spirit and not a man.
When they go to the alternate Star City, Mick wants to stay. The spirit is pulled to this city of criminals in a primal, instinctive way. This is the closest they've ever been to what it wants.
Len glares as Mick takes the girls on his arm, shouts orders at the gang. He's jealous; Mick has always been his. His to hold, his to command. Now, Mick seems to have forgotten him.
They argue over whether to stay or go. They can't split up; they're in a symbiotic, unbreakable bond.
Len ends up knocking Mick out. It makes sense, at the time.
But when the spirit wakes, Len realizes he's made a mistake. He's gotten used to ordering it around, used to it being his criminal, human partner.
As it glares at him through the force field, he feels fear grip him. It's angry, not in the way it usually is, in the way that's mostly Mick and very little spirit.
Now it's truly angry. It's mate betrayed it, and that is not acceptable.
Len takes down the force field. It rushes out and pushes him into the wall, a hand around his throat.
It's half an embrace, half an attack. It's not a position that Len hasn't been in before, willingly, but with the anger boiling through their link it feels much, much more dangerous.
It snarls at him, hand still loose and painless.
“What do I want?”
Len arches against it, feeling its body against him, wide chest and strong thighs and too warm to be human. It's a comfort, but also a reminder of the danger he's in.
“For the world to burn.”
It isn't a criminal. It's a malevolent entity that's folded itself into a tiny human body, that restrains itself, satisfies itself with only burning a few humans, just because Len has asked it to.
“Touch me again and you'll burn too.”
And it rips the link away. Len screams, body on fire, a black hole opening in his head. Their link may be symbiotic, but they aren't equal partners in it. If the link broke, the spirit would go on its way, saddened by the loss.
Len’s brain would collapse on itself. He'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life, empty of anything but agony.
It returns the link and Len gasps, slumps in its grip. The hand around his throat becomes a support rather than a threat.
Mick steps back, walks away. Len takes deep breaths, calming himself.
He'd made a mistake, treated Mick like a dumb thug, muscle that couldn't think for itself. Mick is his partner, should be his equal.
And Mick isn't going to let itself be put down. Nor should Len want to, not when having Mick as a partner could be so much more enjoyable than having him as a subordinate.
He makes his way to the bridge, orders Gideon to pull up the security footage from the hallway. Even in the black and white footage, Mick’s eyes burn in an inhuman way that can't be ignored.
Len crosses a few wires, overwrites a little code. All of the footage for the past day disappears. It's best if their teammates remain ignorant of their special partnership.