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The jump to 2167 leaves Taer al-Asfar—no, Sara, she’s Sara—blinking back dark spots. The lights on the bridge glare down, a hangover from shots she didn’t take. Her teeth ache like she suddenly developed eight cavities and then drank coke straight out of the fridge.
League training kicks in. She breathes once, twice. She pictures the discomfort leaking out of her like sand from a punctured hourglass.
She glances at Kendra, sitting next to Ray. Kendra raises a hand to her temple, presses it there like she hurts, too, her lips parting to reveal the white of her teeth.
Kendra. Hurting. Kendra hurting. Kendra hurting, Kendra hurting. Kendra’s throat under Sara’s hands, her eyes wide; Kendra on the dark rock floor of Nanda Parbat, blood on her collar and her wings and her lips red above her white teeth.
Fuck.
Rip says something dramatic about the Kasnia Conglomerate. Gideon advises they get sleep, you as well, Captain, and Rip sighs in a way that means he won’t. That’s all the license Sara needs to lift her safety bar. She waits until the professor and Jax walk off, just long enough to turn her escape into an exit, and follows them out.
Snart catches up with her in the hallway.
“Assassin,” he greets, in that cool, drawn out tone.
“Crook,” she says back, because this is scripted and scripted is easy and she really can’t handle more than easy right now. She keeps walking, trying to remember the way to her room. “How’s the hand?”
He lifts his wrist, wiggles his fingers. “New.”
“And Rory?”
“In the brig.” Snart’s voice doesn’t change, but his gait falters. She glances to his face—pale, with creases beneath his flinty eyes. “Oh, don’t worry. Mick and incarceration are old pals.”
Okay. So they’re not ready to talk over the Chronos-is-Mick reveal yet.
That’s fine by Sara. She has the mother of all migraines swelling like a water balloon behind her eyes, and her pain-evaporating hourglass only has so much sand in it.
They reach the door to her quarters. She looks at him, about to send him some strong conversation-over signals, when something in his gaze stops her. His sneer seems tacked onto his face with the stability of a single pushpin.
And, like. His partner—or maybe more, they’ve all heard things they wish they hadn’t late at night—just revealed himself to be the jacked-up tin man that’s been chasing them and chopped off Snart’s literal hand. And while it’s been two years for her, for Snart it’s been mere days since he made the decision to leave Mick for dead in the first place. How many pushpins is she expecting the guy to have?
The door to her room slides open. She steps inside and looks back.
He glances away, lip curling. Prideful bastard won’t ask.
She sighs. “You just gonna stand there?”
He narrows his eyes.
“Leonard, I don’t have the energy for this. In or out.”
And something in her voice must sound a couple pushpins short of a corkboard, too, because his smooth brow creases. He steps forward. “If I do, you’re not gonna go all Nanda Parbat on me, are you?”
She tenses. “No,” she grits out.
“Mm, touchy.”
“Shut up.” The door slides closed behind them. Gideon raises the lights. Sara winces. “Lower, Gideon.”
The lights dim.
“You alright, Canary?” Boy, he’s laying the drawl on thick.
“I just spent two years in the 1950s,” she snaps. “What do you think.”
He lifts his hands in mock surrender.
She needs… She needs something. Sleep, maybe. Yeah. Escape from this shitshow—and her aching head—for a while. She pivots, landing on the drawers still full of her old clothes. Crossing to them, she scrounges around until she lands on her night sweats and a baggy sleep tee that she stole from Laurel. (G-d, Laurel. She hasn’t seen her sister in two years and she can’t wait to get back to Star City.) She reaches for her shirt hem.
“Moving quick, aren’t we,” says Snart. She tosses a look over her shoulder, finding him still by the doorway with his arms crossed. He watches her appraisingly.
She glares at him. She doesn’t have the brain processing power for banter right now, and this isn’t some kind of booty call, he has to know that, he does know that. If he wants to gawk, he can. If he wants to leave, he can. She honestly, really, truly, does not have the capacity to care.
He shifts his stance slightly, in something maybe like understanding. His gaze drops to the floor.
She turns back around. In brisk movements, she strips off her clothes and changes into her pyjamas. After rummaging through the drawers a little more, she finds a baggy pair of sweats. She holds them up, a silent offering.
“No thanks,” he says. He blinks a slow cat’s blink. “I’ve slept in worse than jeans.”
She nods. The pants fall back onto the messy jumble of garments.
What she should do—really should do—is one of the meditation exercises the League designed to treat her bloodlust. She’s had to do them increasingly less often; Ra’s estimated that by the end of the year, she would only really need to do them once every couple months to stay in check. Still, with so much changing so quickly, it would probably be a good idea now.
Oh well, sucks to suck. She’s not gonna.
Instead, she takes the couple steps to her bed, falling onto the thin foam cushion with little grace. She bites back a groan at the jolt to her…everything. Then she bites back another groan as she realizes that one of them will have to lie closer to the wall, without easy access to the rest of the room, while the other will have to choose between having an exposed back to the door or an exposed back to the other person.
It’s shitty assassin calculus, but she sees his lips tighten and bets he’s doing the same math. That makes her feel less fucked up. Not that Captain Cold, the scourge of Central City, should probably be setting any of her benchmarks, but whatever.
She props herself up on one elbow. For a long, tense moment, they both consider in silence.
“Tell me I should trust you not to kill me,” he finally says.
She blinks. That’s not even in the ballpark of what she expected. “I…” Kendra, on the ground. White teeth under red lips. Blood and steel and I serve Ra’s al Ghul bubbling under her skin. She closes her eyes. “Len….”
She hears a footfall as he takes a step closer. “Not Taer al-Asfar or whoever you were back in 1960. Sara. Tell me I should trust Sara not to kill me.”
He always says her name funny, the first a drawn high and nasal. It’s so distinctly him, so distinctly a way that her name is pronounced as part of the Legends.
She realizes this is part of what convinced her not to be alone, to let him into her quarters. He says Sara and it reminds her of who she’s supposed to be at this moment, like when Kendra said White Canary and suddenly pierced her League fugue—or whatever it was—as ably as Sara’s sword had pierced her wing.
She’s not Taer al-Asfar anymore.
She’s the White Canary. She’s Sara.
And Sara’s first friend on this g-dforsaken time ship was Leonard Snart.
“I don’t know if you should,” she says. “But you can trust me.”
He looks at her. She looks back.
He’d said, trust you not to kill me. She’d noticed that, the limitation of the terms. General trust is bigger, harder. She offers it anyway.
“Fine,” he says. He shucks his leather jacket. “Scoot over.”
She pulls in her legs so he can clamber up onto the bed, fitting himself between her and the wall. She doesn’t touch him. He trusts her not to touch him. If he can trust her like that, so soon after being horrifically betrayed by one of the two most important people in his life, then yeah, she can trust him enough to watch her back while she faces the door.
She lays her aching head down on a pillow. He shifts behind her, breathing measured and even. For a few minutes, she lies there, awake. Then she isn’t anymore.
-
Pain lances through her, head to toe. Heat sears on her skin like a thousand sun-scalded seatbelts all pressed against her at once. She bucks, fighting the hands holding her down, but manacles shackle her ankles and wrists to the rough stone. The metal cuffs chafe and cut into her skin.
She tries to scream but can’t.
“Discipline your mind,” says a familiar voice. “You can master pain, or it can master you.”
She tries. She really tries—she pictures hourglasses, disassociates her body from her mind, focuses on thrusting every feeling from her head until the hollow inside her skull smooths into polished glass. She is League. Nothing can touch her.
Hasn’t she done this before?
But then a blade—no, multiple blades tear into her, carving through the flesh and fat. Blood wells up on the incisions. Her field of vision churns until she’s not seeing from her own eyes, she’s somewhere above her shoulder, like those video games at the movie theater arcade that her mom never let her play. It’s dizzying, being apart from herself, but she hardly has time to consider before the wounds scream again through her mind, and she can feel everything, still, as well as if she were confined in her body.
A spear rams through her. The point punctures muscle with a wet, sickening jolt. As an electric pain spikes up to her brain, her consciousness winnows down to that single point, that sharpened pike of steel. She stays there, balled up in the tip.
Then the world explodes outward again, light and sound and color and hurt, so much hurt. Her smooth glass mind shatters with the effort of taking in so much fractured stimuli. Jagged edges crowd her until she feels like she’s climbing from a burning building through a poorly broken window.
She’s seven years old, concussed with a broken arm after a reckless dare involving a bicycle and a ramp.
She’s twelve years old, wrenching her ankle after a flopped landing at dance class.
She’s sixteen, clutching her ribs after an encounter with the jilted girlfriend of one of her recent condom purchasers.
She’s nineteen, body foaming with cold and arms impossibly sore from treading water.
She’s twenty– twenty– twenty–
And here her mind skips, a scratched CD, and she unfurls back into the pooling, blurry chains. The spear and the swords and the red-hot iron reignite under her skin.
Twenty—twenty-eight—thirty.
Blades, a grenade, a ‘38 bullet. Arrow, arrow, arrow. Burning water. The anesthetic of dark rock walls, the lantern fixtures fifty years shinier than she remembers. A League trial rips away the numbness like a dried bandage from a wound. Pain detonates inside her skull.
And then the floor gives way beneath her and she falls, like she’s been standing at the top of a spiral staircase that’s suddenly become a water slide. Her life swirls around her.
Thirty, twenty-eight, twenty, nineteen, sixteen, twelve, seven—
She bites her bottom lip, hard.
-
She wakes up to blood in her mouth. She registers the copper taste dully, distantly. In the same perfunctory way, she feels the thin cushion against her chest, the raised mound of the pillow below her head.
She lies there, blinking into the dark. For a few moments, she has no idea who or what or where she is. She runs the tip of her tongue against the wet split in her lip. It lines up perfectly with her front two teeth. She fits them into the groove.
A rush of memory slams into her like an ocean wave she turned her back on. She lies still, awash with Sara and Taer al-Asfar and Canary and White Canary and Sara. When the brunt of the initial recall drains away, she’s left only in a buzzing, cold paralysis.
She can’t move.
She has the sensation of pinpricks flaring beneath her skin. As she waits, they begin to gather, congregating in lines and circles. They fuse into strips and welts, and now they’re hurting, fuck, they hurt. Panic bubbles in her mind, heady and blurring.
The pain grows. Within minutes, it intensifies to nearly unbearable, enough that her mouth fills with fresh wet copper. It’s a constipated kind of pain, the sort that promises to end if something happens, if she clears a blockage or crunches a dislocated joint back into place.
Her body doesn’t match up. Very few League members landed serious hits on her during the past two years, so her skin and tissue are uninterrupted by the marks that should mar it, that do—did?—mar it. She lives in two selves at once as her head begs her to reconcile them. It doesn’t match, she doesn’t match, and it hurts. Eventually, the tension builds enough for whatever lock there’s been on her muscles to snap. She pushes herself upright.
Her fingers fumble along the bedsheets for the knife she keeps under the pillow. She closes her hand around the hilt and pulls it free.
The deeper things, the healed breaks in her bones and the thick knots of scar tissue, she can’t do with a knife. Maybe she can remake them later, once the other agony ebbs. For now, she lifts the hem of her shirt and presses the sharp of her blade two inches up and to the left of her belly button. It sinks in. If she does this, she knows, her mind will stop screaming. Everything else in her body will stop screaming.
She begins to drag it to the side.
Distantly, she recognizes speech around her. She hears it but doesn’t listen. She can’t listen. She needs to do this. Half of her is still in the dream, falling down that slide and dipping into each excruciating moment of every life she’s ever lived. She needs to do this, if she does this this’ll stop.
Hands reach for her knife. Flinching, she bats them away.
He’s saying something. He’s saying something and she should know who he is, should understand the words falling out of his mouth, but she doesn’t and she doesn’t care. She finishes the first cut—knife wound, Prague—and lifts the blade to start the next one.
Arms lash around her midriff, binding her elbows to her sides. Her fingers clench around the hilt. She thrashes, trying to free herself, and if she had the lucidity to draw on an iota of her two rounds of League training he would be on the ground in seconds. Instead, she clumsily tries to jab the knife down into her restrainer’s side, only to be foiled when he wraps his hand around her wrist and squeezes tight. The knife hits the floor with a thud.
Doesn’t he realize what he’s doing? Unborn scars bulge in hundreds of spots beneath her skin. By stopping her, he’s hurting her. This hurts. It hurts so fucking bad. Black sparks dance in her vision. Her throat burns. Someone’s screaming.
More voices clamor at the door. Hands bang against the metal.
(Jax, she’ll learn later, and the professor. Ray spends that night in his room, knees drawn to his chest and rocking back and forth, back and forth, unhearing on the cold floor. Kendra’s curled up under her covers, headphones in her ears, playing 2016 Top Hits at full volume.)
The person holding her barks something. Another voice replies, and the banging stops.
Someone is still screaming.
Why are they screaming? She’s the one being flayed alive.
Oh.
Is that her?
She closes her mouth. The shrieking stops.
Shit.
She has no idea how long she lies there, struggling against the constraining forearms. Sweat turns cold on her chest, face, and neck. Her breaths slow into drawn, ragged pants. The edges of the room harden out of the darkness. Eventually, she feels the warm press of sleeves against her skin and thinks—Snart.
“You with me, Canary?” he asks. His voice is rough. This isn’t the first time he’s tried this.
She nods. She might be embarrassed later, but not now.
With a sigh, he releases her and scoots away. Her back feels cold with his absence. She looks down and realizes he’s confiscated the knife. It’s a vain hope, given that she has three more hidden on her person, but the gesture matters. She moves a hand to her stomach. Her fingers land on the damp patch of cotton. She needs to get lemon juice on that quickly, she muses, if she doesn’t want to permanently ruin Laurel’s shirt.
The phantom pains have faded, for the most part. Her new cut stings, and some of the ouches Kendra had dealt her in the trial ache, but they feel practically pleasant in the aftermath of...whatever that was.
“Thanks,” she mumbles. She shifts so her back is to the bed, angling her head so she can see his face.
“’Course,” he says. “You know, you gave the poor kid quite a fright.”
“What?”
“Jax. He and the old man got very concerned when you started screaming. They only just stopped thinking of me as a murderer, you know.”
His voice is just a bit too detached, his eyes a little too focused on hers. It’s the closest she’s going to get to an admission that he was concerned for her, too.
“No way to pass it off as a really wild night?” she asks.
He raises his eyebrows, unimpressed. “And lose all my new criminal credibility?”
She sighs. She reaches up to scrub at her face with her non-bloody hand.
They sit for a while, quiet.
Leonard breaks it. “Mick…he used to hurt himself, too.”
Her eyes flick back up to his.
“Maybe he still does. If his Time Lord owners let their lapdog have a lighter.”
“You used to stop him?”
He lifts one shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “Sometimes. Mostly I just helped him get cleaned up after.”
“You stopped me.”
“You’re welcome.”
Sara tips her head back against the bed. “I don’t know why I did that. I’ve had…” She frowns, unable to properly categorize the episodes that’ve followed her in some form or another since probably the Gambit. “But this was different.”
“Ms. Lance,” chimes in Gideon’s cool, modulated voice, “I believe that what you experienced was a side effect of your time drift. Ms. Saunders and Dr. Palmer underwent parallel, if less severe, reactions as well.” She pauses. “Your, ah, personal history may have contributed to your distress.”
Sara grits her teeth.
“And there you have it,” Leonard says. “Shouldn’t have dawdled so long in the good old days.”
“Yeah, I’ll make sure not to dawdle next time your dead partner decides to hijack the ship.”
“Glad to hear it.”
She reaches out to hit him, but she’s kitten-weak. Her strike lands embarrassingly lightly against his shoulder, and she winces besides.
He glances down at her midriff, where the bloodstain has grown. “As much as I wouldn’t mind some peace and quiet, we should get you to the medbay before you pass out.”
“A fine idea, Mr. Snart,” says Gideon.
“It’s not deep,” Sara argues. “I don’t need the medbay.”
“Right.”
“I don’t.” She lifts the hem to show him, and yeah, okay, the blood doesn’t look great. The cut really isn’t that deep, though. “I have first aid supplies in the closet.”
He assesses her. She doesn’t know what he sees, but she hopes it’ll be enough to convince him not to force her into the open, vulnerable hallways.
“Help me get cleaned up?”
“Fine,” he concedes. “But don’t hit me when I clean it out, or else I’m sticking you in with Mick.”
She wants to toss out a quip in return, but exhaustion makes any rejoinder too much effort. Besides, he really has been uncharacteristically kind.
“Thanks,” she says instead.
As he pushes himself to his feet, though, she does resolve to use the next acceptable opportunity make a dirty joke at his expense about her and Mick sharing the cube. Knowing him, it’ll only make him smirk.