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xxx
i should be crying but i just can't let it show
i should be hoping but i can't stop thinking
xxx
She shouldn't be alive.
The words have been on endless repeat in her head since she stood in the doorway of the med bay and stared at Stein's dead body.
She should be dead far too many times over.
It was Oliver, of all people, who'd dared to take her arm. Her first death, and her second.
Laurel isn't alive to be her third.
Jax won't look at her.
She pushes up the guard the moment the Waverider is safely into the now-familiar storm of the temporal zone. The rest of the team follows in a sort of daze - including Snart - Leo - who doesn't look nearly as apprehensive about being on a freaking timeship in the middle of green swirling space as he probably should. Sara's not sure what possessed him to join them, or what possessed her to let him. He's not their Leonard, she knows that, but...
But right now, she just can't handle losing anyone else, even if it's a doppelgänger of her former teammate. Friend. Whatever the hell they'd been. (Some days, many days, she wonders if maybe she'd read too far into it, if she's remembering wrong, if he'd ever actually cared.)
And right now all she can hear in her head is Rip echoing her words back at her, in his most sarcastic drawl, about not being like him and not letting her team get killed and hadn't that already been a lie, when she'd been her own first casualty of command?
Well maybe you should've stayed dead this time.
xxx
all the things i should've said but i never said
all the things we should've done but we never did
all the things that you needed from me
all the things that you wanted for me
xxx
He shows up an hour later, while she's on the floor sharpening her knives for the fourth time, because of course he does. She's about to snap at him to leave when he holds out a bottle of something probably stolen from her own study, remembers this Snart apparently believes in things like due process and feelings and drops her hand.
He sets the bottle down next to her and sprawls out as though she's not holding several knives, and she's tempted to knock it over out of spite. But then she realizes it's the vodka Mick had stolen back in the USSR what feels like a lifetime ago - is technically a lifetime ago for her, she supposes. She shoots Snart a sharp look, but he's fiddling with one of her knives, because of fucking course he is.
"Two years ago, I woke up in a Nazi concentration camp with no idea who I was," he says mildly, as though it were the goddamn weather. "It's how I met Ray, actually. When he broke out I went with him, joined the resistance. They said it's not uncommon for prisoners to just... snap. Break. That our minds just... pretend the world isn't what it is."
He takes a long swallow of vodka. Sara doesn't move.
"Fast-forward to meeting you lot, and this strange feeling like I'd met you all before. Doppelgängers and all, I thought. Until we went through that portal, and it wasn't just a feeling anymore. It was... flashes of memories that weren't mine." Sara can't fucking breathe. "Still doppelgängers, I told myself. Asked Gideon about it, just to be safe."
He doesn't say it. He doesn't even look at her, fingers still around the bottle and eyes fixed on it. Sara can't stop staring at him. Can't get a word out.
"There was a block in my brain, she said. Something our minds do during extreme displacement to preserve our sanity. She asked me if I wanted her to remove it. I said no."
Sara would scream if she could, but she can't even breathe, can't make a sound. All she can do is stare at this man who looks so much like what she'd lost, and nothing like him at all.
"That was before the funeral," he continues, his voice catching the smallest bit. "And then I saw you after, and I saw you when you walked away an hour ago, and I knew I couldn't be that selfish." She's missing something, some piece of this that he hasn't said, that he's talking around as though she doesn't know. "I asked her about your Leo, when she found the block. And everything she said was what I didn't want to be. He was... he was miserable, and selfish, and alone. Why would I possibly want those memories?"
Sara chokes at that, physically recoils from him as he finally looks at her. "But you looked at me like I was something else, something more," he says, eyes she almost recognizes locking with hers. "And then you looked like your world had just ended again, and if I'd stayed Leo I'd've been everything I'd said I wouldn't be."
She shakes her head, pressing uselessly back against the wall with a little whine in her throat, wishes he'd look away. He holds out his right hand, slowly, palm up, then releases the bottle to tug up his sleeve. "Always thought it was weird, being covered in scars everywhere but here," he observes, turning the hand over and back as though it were some foreign creature. Holds it out to Sara again, says softly, "Sara."
"That's impossible," she whispers, finally finding her voice. "That's not... you can't be..."
He smiles, that real smile she'd only seen on rare occasion, that looks so at home and so foreign on his face. "The one and only, little bird," he says, and there's a roaring in her ears. "Well, I guess '52 only', but-" He breaks off when she launches herself at him, swallowing his words, knocking him back with a muffled oomph. He tastes like salt and she's not sure which of them is crying, kisses him until she's dizzy from lack of air and lets him pull back to cup her face in his hands and apparently she's the one crying because he's brushing at her tears and-
It's not possible.
He kisses her again, softly, kisses the tears from her cheeks before pulling her into his arms. "I suppose this makes me a hell of a thief, hm?"
Sara grumbles into his shoulder, but doesn't let go.
xxx
i know you have a little life in you yet
i know you have a lot of strength left
xxx