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She runs hot these days, which is what has her in the backyard on a cool and breezy Central City night, when the Waverider’s shuttle comes to a skidding landing across the dew-dampened grass. She barely has time to react before the shuttle doors hiss open and an unsteady figure takes two, three steps out before collapsing, ragdoll limp.
Between the interior light of the shuttle and the bright motion-activated floodlights of the house behind her, Nyssa easily identifies the figure. She would recognize her anywhere.
She is off the deck and down the steps in no time, falling to her knees and feeling for a pulse instinctively.
“Habibti,” Nyssa says out of habit. “What’s happened?”
Under the blood and the ragged breathing, Nyssa finds it hard to determine which Sara this is. Or rather when Sara this is.
Time traveling is a headache.
“N-Nyssa?”
“I’m here.”
The most worrying wound seems to be in Sara’s upper leg, and it spurts out too much blood. Nyssa’s old training easily takes over, pushing fear and confusion to the side as she strips off the utility belt from Sara’s silly White Canary outfit and makes the best tourniquet she can.
“Where is your team?” Nyssa asks. “Your ship?”
“You know about them?” Sara asks, voice hoarse. That gives Nyssa at least some idea of time frame.
“Sara, that is not important right now. Gideon would be the most efficient way to save your life. Where is she?”
Sara shakes her head, pushing up on her elbows and groaning at the effort.
“Ribs,” she complains. “I hate it when it’s the ribs.” Her breath hitches and catches, and now Nyssa is worried about what those ribs are doing to her lungs.
“Sara. Your team.”
“Gideon sent me here. Waverider’s a mess, I was far from home. She told me she was sending me somewhere I could be taken care of…” Sara gets a moment of clarity as Nyssa brushes matted hair from her face to check for signs of head trauma. “How did she know?”
Nyssa sighs and rocks back on her heels, removing her sweater so that she can form a pillow under Sara’s head. The cool and wet grass is not ideal for this, but she is reluctant to move her.
“I told you, it’s not-“
“Holy shit,” Sara sputters and coughs. “You’re knocked up.”
Nyssa’s sigh is heavy. This is not a conversation they should be having right now. But at five months along, it’s rather hard to hide. Sara seems to be stabilizing with the application of the tourniquet, and Nyssa starts cataloguing what she needs from the house.
“Who? Whe-“ Sara starts.
“What year are you from?” Nyssa asks.
“2018.”
“Then you get no answers,” Nyssa says firmly.
“What? What year-?”
“2024. It’s too close. You know the rules.”
“Yeah… but why do you?”
“Sara…”
Sara grins, that old, wry grin, and says as cheekily as she can muster, “I liked habibti better.”
Nyssa swallows her response, and because it is 2018 for Sara, she says: “Then you must have lost a lot of blood.”
Sara frowns, hurt.
“I need to get some supplies. I suppose I should try your shuttle first.” Nyssa pauses as she stands, letting the frantic energy get the better of her for a moment. “Please don’t die.”
“Wait.” Sara cries out as her efforts to pull Nyssa back aggravate at least one of her injuries. Sara’s next words are in Arabic and bring tears to Nyssa’s eyes. “Is she good to you?”
“Yes,” Nyssa promises, but has to switch to English to control herself. “Do not die.”
“You’ve always been so bossy,” Sara says, but the complaint is not delivered like one. It’s warm and fond. “Always liked that.” Sara relaxes back onto the sweater pillow Nyssa created for her. She breathes deeply, and it rattles worryingly.
“I’ll be right back.”
***
Nyssa looks really nice with short hair.
And pregnant.
Can’t forget that revelation.
It hurts to breathe. Sara thinks that’s the ribs. Probably.
Her head is swimming. That’s almost definitely the blood loss.
Might also be the headrush from seeing her former soulmate out of nowhere and super fucking pregnant.
She tries to catalogue her injuries. That seems like a much safer course of action than lingering on the idea of Nyssa settled down with some other lucky girl, carrying a goddamn baby. That is definitely what the responsible Captain she is supposed to be would do. Especially the responsible Captain with a serious girlfriend.
Sara’s queasy. She swears it is the blood loss.
Big old puncture wound on her thigh. Nyssa of course knows how to field dress sword wounds, though, and has made a decent tourniquet. Sara remembers all her lessons about her agreement with pain, but they’re all, as usual, in Nyssa’s voice, so it’s not helping on the distraction front.
Three, no, maybe four, fractured ribs. One or two of the dangerous rather than inconvenient variety. Now she understands Nyssa’s admonitions.
The rest of her just feels like one very large, contiguous bruise, so nothing serious there. If Nyssa’s tourniquet holds and she avoids a lung puncture, she’ll be just fine.
If.
Where the fuck is Gideon. Sara doesn’t like the idea that she’s gotten so dependent on the Waverider’s future technology, but… yeah. It has made her more reckless. When your timeship can bring you back from anything so long as you’ve got a little brain activity, you should take those big risks to get the job done.
At least that’s what she’s been telling herself.
Anyway, Gideon will be here any minute. She always is.
***
“Sara,” Nyssa says firmly, sitting back down with the shuttle’s first aid kit, “Stay with me.”
“I wanted to,” Sara says blearily. “I always did want to.”
Nyssa takes in a sharp breath as she tears open what she believes to be the pressure dressing.
“Sara…”
“That last time… I wanted you to ask.”
“I should not have to ask,” Nyssa snaps before she can remember herself and her charge. She rips Sara’s pant leg wider and slaps the pressure bandage onto the gaping wound in order to avoid further slips.
“Have I told you that in 2024?” Sara asks.
“Save your energy,” Nyssa tsks. She sorts through the injections for something useful, finally settling on a few helpful fortifiers and applying them to Sara’s neck in quick succession.
“Ow.”
That can’t help but make Nyssa laugh.
“You have 10 centimeter wound in your thigh, and you cannot handle a few pricks?”
Sara starts to shrug, but Nyssa clamps her hands down in her shoulders. “Do not move, you stubborn little bird. I prefer you not add punctured lung to our list of problems simply so you can be roguish.”
“Sorry,” Sara says sheepishly.
There are intravenous fluids in the kit, but no blood, so it’ll have to do. Nyssa resists the urge to scold the captain on her lack of preparation and simply starts the process of administering the IV.
As she grabs Sara’s hand to straighten the arm, Sara squeezes tight, and Nyssa makes the mistake of meeting those bright blue eyes.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” Sara asks. When Nyssa hesitates, Sara adds: “Or have we finally moved beyond that in 2024?”
“A boy, until he tells us otherwise.”
There’s probably no harm in telling her that: they just found out themselves.
“You’ll be good at that.”
Nyssa arches an eyebrow. “And if I’d said girl?”
Sara laughs lightly but it turns into a worrying cough. “You’d be good at that, too.”
Nyssa bites her tongue and switches gears.
“Now may I start this IV or would you like to interfere more in the future?”
“Interfering in the future is my job,” Sara says, but obediently lays her arm out flat.
“I do not think that is true,” Nyssa scolds, squinting until she finds a vein and then inserts the needle. Sara does not complain this time.
“I’m really glad you’re happy,” Sara says softly.
She doesn't look exactly glad, and Nyssa finds a small part of her enjoys the jealousy behind Sara’s eyes.
“When did I say I was happy?” she teases.
“I can tell.”
“You have lost a lot of blood.”
“Doesn't matter. I know you. You’re gonna be an awesome mom. He’s a lucky baby. And she’s a lucky asshole for getting to be there.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her you said so.”
Sara’s eyes dart away and her brow wrinkles.
“Where the fuck is Gideon?”
“My thoughts exactly,” Nyssa agrees.
A silence falls over them as Nyssa desperately thinks of what else she can do. She could call an ambulance, but that could be problematic with the time shuttle currently sitting in her backyard. Perhaps a speedster could get Sara to a hospital in time, but Nyssa is reluctant to move her even that quickly, given the state of her precarious injuries. She wants Gideon and that futuristic medbay to show up now and make sure Sara Lance from 2018 does not die in 2024.
Or maybe she wants to wake up and realize she just fell asleep on the deck, and this is just another of those strange dreams brought on because her son has, nongenetically, inherited his other mother’s love of Big Belly Burger.
That last one seems less likely. She is, unfortunately, building up quite a grease resistance.
“Do I know her?”
“Sara!”
“I love riling you up,” she chuckles, then her face goes white, her eyes fluttering.
Nyssa takes quick stock and curses. The pressure bandage has burst, the tourniquet loosened, and Sara is losing blood fast.
“Stay with me,” Nyssa pleads, searching the first aid kit and not finding anything she wants. “Stay…”
“Mmmaybe it’s jus’ time,” Sara starts to slur. “Mmmm. Maybe Gideon sen’ me here in the end. ‘m glad she did.”
“No!” Nyssa says forcefully. “It is not time. Keep fighting.”
“’m glad you’re happy,” she repeats. “Now I can see Laurel.”
“No! Not now. I need you to keep fighting.”
Out of options, Nyssa thrusts her finger into the wound. Sara doesn’t even seem to notice, which is a bad sign. But Nyssa knows this isn’t time, and she really needs Sara to hold on.
Only years of training tell her that she’s found the artery, and the place the sword nicked it. She presses it, hard, and the bleeding does, miraculously, slow.
Careful not to move her hand or Sara’s ribs, Nyssa looks up to try to meet Sara’s eyes, half-lidded and unfocused.
“I know Gideon will be here. I need you to hold on until she is. Sara, please.” When it doesn’t work, she gets desperate. “Habibti, he is yours. The baby, he’s yours.”
Blue eyes pop open and meet hers with a spark of life.
“He’s not even our first. We have a little girl. She just turned three. You’ve taken her to see a movie with your mother tonight. So no. It is not time. You must fight and stay with me until Gideon gets here. So that we can get here. Please.”
***
“Gideon, what do you mean you sent her somewhere safe?”
The Waverider’s bridge is a flurry of activity, Zari Tomaz barking orders to Legends and Bureau agents alike in an effort to get the ship fully functional again.
“My system was crashing, Director Sharpe. Ms. Tomaz needed to do a full reboot to prevent a nuclear meltdown.”
“She means that literally,” Zari says, hurrying by.
“Even if I could have gotten the Captain safely returned to the ship, my system would not have been prepared to handle her injuries when she did. Instead, I jumped the shuttle to a time and place that could and would see to the Captain’s life-threatening injuries immediately for triage. No questions asked.”
“So is she okay?” Ava asks, trying to remain professional as the panic closes around her throat.
“As I said, they are administering triage. As soon as my system is functional, I will jump us to-“
“And when will that- You know what, no. Send the coordinates to my watch.”
“Director Sharpe-“
“Now, Gideon.”
***
Ava steps off the Waverider’s bridge and into a quaint suburban backyard, where her girlfriend is bleeding out in another woman’s arms.
At first, Ava doesn’t recognize the other woman, between the dark and the blood covering both her and Sara, and the fear, the all encompassing fear. Business-like, Sara’s savior begins to report, though she does not move a muscle:
“She just lost consciousness but her pulse is still there, for now. Her femoral artery has been nicked, and she has several broken ribs. I am reticent to move her, but Gideon should be able to-“
Ava’s brain finally catches up. She does know this woman, because she has read Sara’s file, much more than once, and when she’d been confused and angry and studying Sara as an enemy, she’d never fully understood why her brain developed an irrational dislike of this woman:
Nyssa al Ghul.
Sara’s first savior, first teacher.
First love.
And Gideon sent a dying Sara to her.
“I can take her from here,” Ava says, even as two of her agents are hustling through the portal with a stretcher.
“I’m sure you can,” Nyssa says, and she’s quite civil. “But currently my hand is the only thing keeping her femoral artery intact and therefore enough blood in her system to keep her alive.”
“Oh.”
Nyssa moves out of the way as best she can while the two agents load a limp Sara onto the stretcher. She stands as they do, fluid and graceful, as beautiful as she was in all those pictures Ava obsessed over, and… yep, pregnant.
Ava shakes everything off and hurries alongside the stretcher, relieved to see Sara’s chest still rising and falling, however belabouredly, as she takes her hand and they all double-time to the medbay.
***
Once they’d gotten Sara into one of the beds in the Waverider’s medbay, Nyssa had stepped back, out of the way, letting Gideon do what she needed to do. She supposes she could leave now, should leave now, for minimum timeline interference. But, she resolves, as her bloody, sticky hands fall to her stomach, she has a vested interest in the outcome of all of this.
Director Sharpe, Ava, stays at Sara’s side, grief-stricken, and that Nyssa wholly understands.
Sara’s crew pours in, as undisciplined and emotional as Nyssa remembers them to be, but with their very loud hearts in the right place, as always. Most don’t notice her, nor even know who she is. Ray pauses when he sees her but she waves him off.
“She will make a full recovery,” Gideon finally announces. “She will need rest and-“
The rest is drowned out in the flurry of celebrating crew, pressed in close to their Captain. Nyssa longs to go to her but with relief, she knows that she has her own Sara to return to. This one isn’t hers, just yet, and the longer she lingers, the messier it will become.
She flags down a time agent and asks to be returned to her time and place, as soon as possible. She doesn’t know what even this brief time travel could do to the baby, and she’s not inclined to risk it any longer.
The young agent, awkward and wide-eyed, readily agrees. Gary, Nyssa remembers, fiddles with the contraption on his wrist, and a doorway to home appears. She smiles warmly at him, filled with Sara’s stories of him, and steps through without a goodbye.
***
Sara comes to with something old on her mind. Or was it something new?
“Nyssa?” she breathes out, her eyes finally opening.
Nyssa isn’t there, though, and her request has wounded the one actually hovering at her side.
Sara shakes her head, trying to clear the cobwebs. Maybe she was dreaming.
“Ava,” she sighs and smiles warmly. “Hey.”
She is happy to see her, truly. She just thought that…
“Hey,” Ava greets with tears, squeezing her hand. “Hey, the crew’s gonna want to see you. Let me go get them.”
“Wait.”
But Ava’s already out the door, and Sara is still trying to orient herself. Under her neck, there is something awkward and lumpy. She pulls it out. A sweater.
A sweater that smells like… Yep. A sweater that smells like Nyssa.
***
“Mama! We’re home!”
The front door slams, louder than she likes, but Nyssa is too relieved to scold this time. Sara rounds the corner swinging their toddler around wildly, and the dark-haired little girl giggles delightedly.
“How much candy did you have?” Nyssa asks knowingly.
“Too much!” Sara admits easily. She leans in, their daughter still dangling from one arm, and kisses Nyssa in greeting. It’s warm but brief, and Nyssa catches her before she can pull away. She drags her back, deepening the kiss, so grateful to see her here and whole and hers. Even if she tastes of Sour Patch Kids.
“Hello to you, too,” Sara says when Nyssa finally lets her go, her voice taking on a little more rumble than usual. Sara meets her eyes, searching. She puts their girl down and brings a hand up to the curling ends of Nyssa’s wet hair. “Is everything okay? Did you… take a shower?”
Nyssa is a creature of routine, and showering in the evening is not one of those routines. She closes her eyes, trying to chase away the sight of all of Sara’s blood swirling down the drain.
“Nyssa?”
Their little one is clambering up Nyssa’s side now, also demanding to know if Mama is okay. Nyssa corrals her onto her hip, adjusting her around her little brother, and opens her eyes.
“I had a visit from the Waverider tonight,” she says in a light voice, kissing the toddler’s cheek. In return, she gets a head of dark curls sweetly resting on her shoulder.
“Huh.” Captain Lance is retired now, but her crew does swing in from time to time for advice. “What are those crazy kids up to now?”
“It was your Waverider. It was you.”
“Oh. Wait… Wait! That was real?!”
Nyssa looks away from their baby girl and meets her wife’s wide eyes.
“What do you remember?”
“Waking up in the medbay. Gideon and Ava glossed over all the details. But I was left with a sweater that smelled like you, and a lot of very confusing dreams… That suddenly make a lot more sense.” Sara smiles. “Why are you always saving my life?”
Nyssa laughs. “I think you’re very cute when you are almost dead.”
Sara’s smile cracks into a beam.
“You’re such a brat. And now I owe you so many!”
“You owe me nothing,” Nyssa says seriously, her arms full of the love they have made together, surrounded by this wonderful, peaceful life they have built. Nyssa never could have dreamed of it, and Sara has made it a reality.
“I owe you everything,” Sara corrects sternly, taking them both in her arms. The little one rubs at her eyes and yawns. Sara kisses each of their cheeks in turn, then presses her palm into Nyssa’s stomach. “So, thank you. Again. How about I go throw the munchkin in the bath and then we all settle down for the night? You can tell me all about your own adventures in time travel.”
Nyssa agrees, and Sara takes their pliant daughter from her arms.
“One thing first,” Sara says cheekily, “Was I dashing?”
Nyssa rolls her eyes. “You were bleeding out.”
Sara laughs her way towards the steps.
“Not mutually exclusive!”
***
fin