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These days, all Lisa Snart wants is to be the most feared criminal in Central. When they speak her name, they should shudder. The Golden Glider, they should say—a gold gun in her hand, and gold armor around her heart. Watch out for her, they should say—she’s left behind her a trail of gold-plated rivals, lipstick-stained lovers and empty-pocketed marks, from Gotham to Star City.
Then no one will be able to touch her.
When Lisa was six years old, her brother left her for the first time.
Lenny found her sitting on the floor, on the far side of her bed. He crouched down and pulled a face at her. And she rolled her eyes, because she was a big girl and too old to giggle.
When he slid down next to her and asked if she was okay, she scowled. She was six, but she wasn’t dumb. He was the one who’d been downstairs with Dad, arguing so loudly that Lisa wanted to run and hide in the closet and cover her ears. But she was getting too big for that, so she just stayed behind her bed, out of sight but in reach of a door, like he’d taught her.
And then he told her he was going away. I got in trouble, Lise.
She listened to Dad clattering into the kitchen with bottles, and asked if he would be gone a long time. She felt Lenny wince. She doesn’t remember what he answered.
She remembers looking down at her red shoes, the ones he’d got for her when she won the red ribbon in junior skating, when he’d been so proud of her. She remembers his tired eyes, so sad it hurt her heart. She remembers that he was gone when she woke up the next morning, and that she didn’t see him again for nearly a year.
But at least, that time, he came home.
The second time he left, she was fifteen and he didn’t say goodbye.
Hartley Rathaway is not a Rogue. Yet, he would say. He’s a weasel who always knows which side his bread is buttered, Lisa would say. This time, they’ve come to a mutually satisfying arrangement. There are heist plans coming together, and Rathaway knows how to disengage alarms. He’s been practicing since he was twelve, beginning with the one at his parents’ house. And Lisa knows how parents can be excellent motivation for the very best criminal expertise.
“I’m sure the Rogues will appreciate the help, Hartley.” She licks her lips, tasting slick gloss. The bold Sultry Cerise might not appeal to Hartley in the conventional sense, but he doesn’t fail to notice anyway, his eyes drifting to her lips. She pulls them into a satisfied smile. “You’ll be… well remunerated, shall we say.”
Hartley is seated at the far end of the table, his back to the wall, with Lisa at the other end. She never lets anyone get between her and a door. As she stands to leave, she lets her hand brush across Hartley’s back, enjoying his pleased hum at the attention. She takes a step away, a single click of a heel.
“Good to hear,” Hartley says. “Hey, Lisa...” He pauses to sip his coffee.
Lisa waits to see if he’s worth her time.
“You’ve heard the rumours, I assume?” he goes on.
Of course. Rathaway deals in knowledge. He relishes the advantage of knowing something that someone else doesn’t, using it against them.
When she turns back, Lisa’s smile is perfectly fixed in place. “There are so many rumours in this town, Hartley. Especially when it comes to a girl like me. Why don’t you enlighten me?”
He raises an eyebrow. “Maybe you haven’t heard. How interesting.”
Lisa manages not to roll her eyes. She’s not letting a man like Hartley think he has any power over her. She gives him the barest of shrugs, and walks away again.
“A little bird’s been singing,” the smug bastard says. “A white one.”
She feels her smile harden, her eyes on the door. “Sara Lance?”
“Indeed. She’s been talking to Team Flash, or so I hear. I’m only a consultant, though, so...”
Her hands haven’t shaken like this in years. She stills them against her sides before she turns around. Then she reaches out a black-manicured nail and points it at him, with a stab of delight as he swallows. “Spit it out, Hartley dear, whatever you’re getting at. Or there’ll be a gold limb in your future. Mmm—I wonder which one.”
He forces out a chuckle, and she tightens her other hand around the gold gun. “I’m so sorry for wasting your time, Lisa. I just heard that Leonard Snart is back. Thought you might want to be au fait with that.”
She startles at the sound of shattering ceramic. Looks down to see her coffee mug in pieces at her feet.
“Hey, sis.”
Lisa freezes at the drawl.
She’s been making coffee in the corner. Behind her, the bastards walk through the door like they—well, they never owned the place. Like they never left.
She doesn’t even know why she’s hung on to the Brook Street safe house, the last of Lenny’s old bases. Sentiment, maybe.
Sentiment is a mistake. Lenny taught her that.
Yesterday she got on the phone to STAR Labs and threatened whoever picked up, till they squealed. She doesn’t even remember who it was. Not Cisco. Once she knew it was true, once she’d screamed at the Rogues to get out, she just… waited.
From the corner of her eye, she sees her jerk of a brother stroll over and perch on the edge of the table, shoving her museum blueprints out of his way. Don’t touch my stuff. He looks down at the plans, raising a condescending eyebrow.
(He never thought she was as good as him. Well, she’s showed him. Central City is more afraid of her than it ever was of him.)
She turns around.
“Looks like you’ve been busy.” There’s the smirk she knows so well. She wants to slap it off his face. Refuses to let herself think how much she’s missed it.
Mick has been lurking in the open doorway. He steps inside, wary eyes avoiding hers as he stalks to the fridge. Her surrogate brother hasn’t said to a word to her since he told her Lenny was dead, and now he can’t even look at her.
But Lenny can’t look away, some kind of challenge in his eyes. “How’ve you been?” His drawl was never that broad for her before.
When Lisa was fifteen, her brother left. He was getting better offers from new crews, people who didn’t put him through what Lewis did. Years later, she went looking for him. And, sure, there was distance between them. There were guilty glances, shrieked recriminations. But that never stopped him throwing his arms around her.
And now he’s staring her down like he... doesn’t care.
She wants to scream at him to get the hell out of her safe house, but the words won’t come.
They move warily to the couch like strangers. Lisa stands behind the chair.
(Never let them get between you and the door.)
“Three years, Lenny.” The force of it hits her in the chest as she says it. “I didn’t even even know you were back...”
He scoots forward in his seat. “This is what we do, Lise. Drift in and out of each other’s lives. You know that.” He’s a picture of practiced nonchalance, one leg draped over the other. But even Leonard Snart has tells, if you know where to look for them. A tapping foot. Eyes darting around when he thinks she isn’t looking. He’s wound tight as a broken watch.
She laughs, a reflex. Nothing about this is funny. “No, Lenny. We don’t go off travelling in time—and I’m still not sure I even believe that shit, by the way—without a single word to our only family. Who knows what could have happened to you. You could have...”
He did.
Her brother lets out a tired sigh. “I don’t know who spoiled you like this, but it wasn’t me. So stop acting like a brat, Lise, and say ‘welcome home’.”
Her fingers tighten around the cold bottle that Mick has pressed into her hands. She’s longing to smash it against the wall. But, perfect aim or not, it would cross a line that they—don’t. “Please do try to remember I’m not a kid anymore, Lenny.”
“You were less annoying when you were ten,” he grumbles at the ceiling.
She taps a razor-sharp heel, channeling the Golden Glider. Her name should make people shudder, not raise bored eyebrows. “Three fucking years,” she mutters again.
“Could be worse.” Of course Mick chooses that moment to pipe up. “He could still be dead.”
“Do you really think—” she stalks a step towards him, hunched over in the corner of the couch— “that this is the time for quips like that, Mick?” His eyes widen like he’s been threatened by a man twice his size. Something vicious twists inside her, wants him to hurt like she does. “Do you wanna tell me why, for years now, you could only be bothered to call me once, to tell me my brother was dead?” She ignores the pain in his eyes, the dip of his head in shame. “Guess I should be glad you made that much effort. I had to find out he was back—” she throws back her hand towards Lenny “—from the Central City rumor mill, like I was no one. My brother, Mick. The only one I… had...”
The next sound she makes is closer to a sob.
“Lise.”
Behind her, there’s a hand on her shoulder. She flinches.
In his dangerous voice, Lenny says, “Get out, Mick.”
Mick doesn’t need to be told twice, but he shoots Lisa a regretful glance back from the door. Whatever’s happened in the past three years, it hasn’t all been kind to him.
Lisa somehow makes it to the couch, staring at Mick’s half-empty beer, her arms wrapped around her legs. Len’s voice, that until twenty minutes ago was all she wanted to hear in the world, is a buzzing noise in her ears, like a dying wasp against a window. She’s trying to tell him he can shove his ridiculous attempts at explanation up his ass… but she can’t breathe.
He left her. Forever, without a word of goodbye.
(Again, says a mean little voice in her head. It sounds like Lewis Snart.)
Lenny’s sitting on the coffee table in front of her, eyes full of worry, just like he looked at her when she was eight years old and bleeding, and she doesn’t need his fucking pity. Not when this is all his fault.
His hand is on her knee, and she shoves him away—and, shit, her hands are shaking again. No. She’s Lisa Snart. There’s no criminal more feared in Central City. Her brother, all of them, they can get fucked. None of them gets to hurt her.
They don't just get to leave her.
He’s talking like he’s one of those dorky do-gooders from STAR Labs, and one more stupid excuse pushes her over the edge—some crap about a timeline and free will.
“Fuck you!” she yells, pushing past him. Her heels echo on the warehouse floor as she runs for her bedroom—the only space in this shithole with a door.
Which she slams in her brother’s face.
It’s only a few minutes later that she hears, “Come on, Lise,” from the other side of the door.
She blinks at blurry stocking feet stretched out in front of her, there on the floor in front of her mattress. She lost her shoes somewhere.
There’s nothing between her and the door.
Of course her cold silence doesn’t deter her brother. He’s the master of those. “You know you got mold out here, sis?” comes his damn voice again. “Guess there’s a leak somewhere.”
There’s a little rap of knuckles against the door, and the sound of him sliding down to the floor on the other side. “So, uh. Don’t know if you’re listening, but I’m gonna keep talking anyway, okay?”
She ignores the tears running down her face. She hates to think what her makeup looks like, but at least she knows how to cry without making a sound. She’s Lewis Snart’s daughter. She chokes on a caustic laugh at the thought.
“Remember when you were real little, and you wanted a pony? You were obsessed. Talked about ‘em, drew pictures of ‘em...”
She almost lets a laugh escape. Yeah, she remembers. Her mom had just left. For months, everything was about ponies—an escape from cruel reality.
“I even got you a little horse riding helmet, remember? And one day you got so pissed because I hadn’t got you a pony yet, where is it Lenny… And I had to break it to you that stealing a horse was a bigger challenge than I was up to, at thirteen.”
Because horses cost money that they didn’t have. And because she was five, and he didn’t want to break her heart just yet.
“Think that was the first time I ever really disappointed you.”
Lisa’s fighting to breathe. A lifetime full of reasons to learn better, and she can still be broken by feelings. She wants to tell Lenny he never disappointed her, but they both know that’s not true.
“‘Course, I can think of plenty of times you were madder at me. Remember when Dad was too drunk to go to your third grade parent-teacher night, and I went instead? Oh god, that fucking teacher who took against me. Mrs Harson, was it?”
Hillson. Bitch. Trailer trash, she called them, when she thought they were out of earshot. Her brother went back and told her off.
And all Lisa did was explode at him for embarrassing her in front of Scott Parker. God, she really could be a brat.
“You were pissed at me a lot.” Light knuckles rap along the the door again, probably not expecting a response.
Yeah, she was. He was the nearest, safest person to be mad at. She knew Lenny wouldn’t call her names, or...
He sighs loud enough that she hears it, muffled through the door. “Right up till you were fifteen.”
Oh. That’s where he was headed with this.
She sniffs and runs a hand across her eyes. Her voice comes out ragged when she finally answers him. “You left then too.”
She always knew her brother wasn’t a good guy. He was in juvie when she was six, and working for the mob when she was ten. But he stole tiny horse riding hats for her, and yelled at her bastard teachers, and made sure she ate even if he didn’t.
And he left her alone in that house.
“But, hey.” She keeps talking, a venomous urge to lash out uncoiling inside her. “At least that time you had the decency to leave a note.”
She hears him breathe out hard. “Yeah. You can still be mad about that too, if you want.”
“I’ll be pissed about whatever I want without your permission, thanks,” she yells back. She doesn’t know if she could handle hearing that he’s sorry.
There’s a brief silence, and then he hums. “I should really look for that leak. You don’t want that black stuff getting any worse. Gets its tendrils into the walls, and then you can’t root it out. Corrupts a place.”
“You died, Lenny,” she snaps, raising her voice through the door, a line in the sand between them. “And no one told me you were back.”
Fuck it, she’s crying again.
He’s suddenly, eerily quiet on the other side of the door.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she says. Her voice comes out broken, and she hates it. “Next time you leave… you don’t come back.”
After a moment more, she hears a soft, “Can I come in?” She doesn’t say no.
The old door squeaks on its hinges. She tries not to imagine what she looks like, sitting there on the floor—small and pathetic, probably. The Golden Glider, brought this low. The Rogues would never follow an order again.
Lenny hovers in the doorway, something lurking in his eyes that hurts to look at. Nothing good ever followed, when her brother was that afraid.
“Either sit down or go away, jerk.”
His lips twitch in reply. He gives her a wary glance as he comes over, but drops down next to her in front of the bare mattress that serves as her bed. He has to put a hand out to stop himself from falling.
“You might have to consider retiring from the not-quite-hero business soon, old man,” she wisecracks, to a tiny snort next to her.
He sighs, and she can’t stand the sadness in it. “We can’t cross our own timelines. Mick was in Central City a month ago. And then he went back to the Waverider, and then I…” He swallows, a tense ripple of his Adam’s apple. “We couldn’t come back any earlier than this. I tried to get word to you. Don’t know who I can trust anymore.” His eyes drift up to the little window high in the wall, speckled with raindrops. “God, Lise—you don’t know how much I wanted to break every rule in the fucking book and just come back to 2016. Tell you that I... wasn’t leaving you forever.”
She sulks beside him, glaring at her wriggling feet. Thinks back over the past three years, how much older and colder she’s had to become. “You could have figured something out.”
“I could have,” he murmurs, and she blinks at him. Leonard Snart doesn’t often admit he might have been wrong. Not even to her.
She reaches up and swipes an angry hand across her face, just as he reaches for her other hand. She doesn’t push him away.
Staring down at their interlocked hands, his voice wavers when he asks, “D’you hate me for leaving?”
“Which time?” The jab is meant to hurt, but she regrets it as soon as it's out.
He doesn’t answer, distant eyes drifting back up to the window.
Damn it. There’s no one else in the world who can make her this mad. They’re both stubborn bastards, and they’ve shut each other out for years at a time over less. But he’s never died before. Between him and the fight, she’d rather lose the argument. She’s tired, and sad, and she hasn’t hugged her big brother in three years.
“I hate you a little,” she admits. “Jerk.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, in that same reluctant tone.
“Good.”
He chuckles. And, fuck it. She reaches over to hug him. There’s the familiar, brief freeze of his skittish muscles, and then he sinks against her. “I missed you,” he whispers into her shoulder.
And, god, she wants to answer, Not as much as I missed you. But she can’t be that vulnerable, not even with him. She just hugs him tighter.
He pulls away, eyes narrowing. “What do you want?”
“Huh?”
“To cheer you up. Name it.”
She gives him a wry grin. This is an old dance between them. Lenny would screw up, and gold jewelry would appear in her room after the very next job he pulled. She ponders what to ask for this time. Diamonds? Or there’s that gorgeous Galvan dress in the window of Annie’s Boutique, just begging to be stolen...
“Ice cream,” she decides. “With you,” she adds, in case he’s missed her point. He can be dense like that.
Lenny raises an eyebrow. “Ice cream it is.” With a nervous tilt of his head, he adds, “Can Mick come, or do you still hate him?”
Her laugh is a bright tinkle. “I guess I can chew him out just as well over mint choc chip as anywhere else.” Her brother helps her up, and she slides her arm into his. “Remember when you used to steal me popsicles and we’d eat them in the park?”
“‘Course I do. Do you know how hard it is to steal from an ice cream truck?”
Lisa grins, but her scowl is threatening to return. She slaps her brother against his side, just hard enough to hurt a little. “You’d better stay around this time, you hear me, jerk? No dying, heroically or otherwise.”
“Ow.” He shrugs, and an old, cold indifference crosses his face. “Got a job to do.” Then he glances at her, something deeper showing through. “But... I'll stay in touch. Really.”
She nods. Good enough—for them. “And you can’t have the Rogues back,” she gripes, pulling him towards the door.
He arches his eyebrows. “You can keep ‘em. They were never exactly the criminal underworld’s finest.”
“We’re an elite mob to be reckoned with!” she protests. “The whole city’s afraid of us!” But her voice comes out as a whine, an echo of her fourteen-year-old self arguing that she and her friends were totally old enough to go to a nightclub, while Lenny laughed out a please.
He smirks as he opens the door, guiding her through with a brotherly hand on her back that makes her smile. “Does Axel still forget his shoes at heists?”
“That was one time.”
“Uh huh. And Mardon?” Lenny’s voice echoes around the empty warehouse. “Still rotting in Iron Heights, or is he back to making temper-tantrum hurricanes when he should be focusing on grabbing the loot?”
How does he always manage to make her feel twelve years old? “I’m whipping them into shape,” she protests.
He tilts his head at her, eyebrow raised. “I hope you don’t mean literally.”
And oh, how she loves making him squirm. “Mmm,” she purrs. “Maybe in one or two special cases.”
“...I don’t wanna know, sis. So. Ice cream?”
“Ice cream.”
He glances up at the roof again, holding up one finger. “You know, I should just take a look at that mold for you. Don’t want you getting sick if it turns out to be the nasty stuff. My toolbox still around here?”
Lisa sighs. He doesn’t seem to notice, still narrowing his eyes at the tiny black patch. It’s nothing worth worrying over, but that’s her brother. She considers telling him she’s not a kid again, then gives up. “There’s a pile of crap in the back. It’s probably in there.”
“Hey, sis,” he calls back, as he strides off through the warehouse. “If you ever get bored of the Rogues… how d’you feel about time travel?”
She feels herself light up like it’s her birthday morning and he’s stolen her something in gold.