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Compasses.
They’re odd little things, guiding people on their journeys. Each person’s is unique. Not just because some people have more than one needle, and other people never develop one, either, but the style of each is unique to the bearer.
They’re found on the underside of a person’s dominant wrist. And from the moment that someone is born they will point the way to one’s soulmate. Most people don’t try to follow them – you never know whether your compass is pointing west as in across the street or across the nearest ocean, after all – but it’s terribly common to see couples in the supermarket glancing at their wrists to track each other down after splitting up to get the groceries faster.
And Time Travel has a rather odd effect on Compasses.
Rip Hunter, for example, was born Broken. His compass was still, frozen in place for as long as he could remember. His soulmate – the match to his heart – had died before they could ever meet. Instead he trusted the Time Masters to give him direction.
Until Calvert. Until he landed the Waverider in 1867 – his first visit to this century – and it wasn’t until he was in the saloon that he noticed his Compass had moved. Not the aimless spinning that every Time Master’s wrist showed while they were in the Time Stream.
It took him an embarrassingly long time to realize who the needle was pointing towards.
Jonah Hex…
But he was supposed to go home, he promised Miranda he would marry her – she’d given up everything for him, for them – and he didn’t belong. He was a Time Master, he couldn’t…
The mark on his wrist couldn’t be what guided him. No matter how often Jonah’s rough calloused fingers brushed against it.
(And Jonah had known he wasn’t right from the beginning. His needle had spun and spun and spun the way it did when your soulmate isn’t born yet. Until the day Rip arrived in town, clearly too old to have just been born, but that was definitely a relief for Hex.)
When he goes home to Miranda, to the woman he’s supposed to marry, it breaks his heart to see the needle stilled. Jonas, they call their son, because Miranda’s just like him. Broken in their era, but she lets Rip honor the man who should have been his North but with whom he could never have stayed.
Sara doesn’t like to think about Compasses. Hers has spun slowly and then faltered to point steadily in one direction or the other and then begun to spin again periodically her entire life. And it hurts to think about what her match’s wrist must look like. Was the needle still Broken or had it begun to spin again after the Lazarus Pit? (And what did it mean for her if their needle no longer spun?)
Time Travel at least gives a few hints about why that might be, though Rip is worried about the implications of Sara’s North being a time traveler. And given their relationship with the Time Masters who can blame him for the concern?
But then the Time Bureau is created.
And she meets Ava.
Ava who is Directionless but beautiful and smart and to whom the elegant needle on her wrist always seems to point.
Ava who doesn’t have a Compass because the clone-slavers that made her took that away from her. Ava who is a Time Traveler but not an enemy. (Usually, anyways. Once they’ve figured out that whole ‘adult communication leads to healthy relationships’ thing.)
Mick Rory’s probably the least effected of the crew with regards to Compasses and Time Travel. Mainly he doesn’t have one. His wrists are bare. It bothered him some when he was younger but not so much anymore.
It’s not that he doesn’t like romance – he enjoys being Rebecca Silver too much to claim that – and he does enjoy sex but the first one just isn’t for him. (Like dresses – pretty but not his style.) And he likes it that way.
Aromatic or some shit like that. And well, Len never cared or thought it was weird that he was Directionless – neither do any of the other goodies that coming onboard the Waverider have made him care about.
He likes his friendships with Haircut and Amaya and Pretty and the New Girl too. (And, Len’s family, always has been.) And he likes the warm, content feeling that sometimes bubbles up when he’s drinking his beer and watching the idiots around the ship.
Who needs some stupid arrow to point the way when he’s already got what he needs and he’s smart enough not to let them go easy again?
It takes a few jumps for Martin Stein to realize anything is up with his Compass. Their early jumps were mostly within time zones where his Clarissa was alive. And it is obvious that whilst they are in the Time Stream most of their needles would spin. It was like standing on top of magnetic north, in a way.
With access to every second that one’s North had ever lived – and every parallel possibility – then of course the Time Stream would make it nearly impossible. Unless one’s soulmate happened to be on the same vessel as yourself. (An interesting investigation that none of the pairs that have come onboard have been willing to cooperate with as of yet.)
It still makes his heart freeze in his chest for a moment the first time they travel far enough into the future for his Compass to be still. And it’s a relief to return home and know that she is there, waiting for him.
Carter is her Compass and Kendra is his, they are soulmates and bound together, there was really no other way that it was going to be.
Kendra was still growing used to knowing who her North is, and the fact that she can use her needle to find him when they lose him. And it hurts so badly when the Waverider lands and her compass is Broken.
But it hurts worse those eras where there’s a version of her love alive out there, somewhere.
When her Compass points in a direction and all she wants to do is go. But she never does. Her Carter is gone. If…if they can win this maybe that Carter’s Kendra will never know what it is for their needle to lie dead against her pulse?
(And when Savage is dead and she and this new incarnation of Carter have found one another she is content to leave the Waverider with her North.)
Jax hasn’t met his North yet. He knows they’re alive somewhere in twenty-sixteen though. His compass has always steadily shifted a few degrees this way and then that way, never moving too quickly, the way that most peoples’ do all his life that he can remember. According to his Mom it spun when he was a toddler which means his North is a few years younger than him.
Obviously it spins when they travel to the past, and is still in the distant future.
He can’t bring himself to worry too much about it though. If he meets them then he might fall in love with them but that’s a long time off. (He does wonder how he’ll explain the way that their compass spent years spinning for long periods of time while he was a Time Traveler after Clarissa mentions that’s what hers did when Grey was gone, but honest communication and all that is important.
It’s one of the things that her really admires Clarissa and Grey for and wishes he could’ve kept a secret but psychic link and all that – the fact that they are so stupidly in love even now and they talk to each other. Even if Lily makes faces when he tries to articulate that, since Grey might know through their link but it’s only fair he tells Clarissa too, because while she loves her parents it is more fun to tease them for being mushy.
Ray’s never paid much mind to his Compass. (That’s a lie. He knows they’re probably in Central City because he’s traveled often enough to see when his needle reverses and Central City’s the only place that he’s ever seen it move enough throughout the day for him and his North to be relatively close to each other.) But he never really figured on it mattering.
A lot of people don’t find their North’s – or meet them – or their North is platonic, not plutonic, which is cool too. And there’s also lots of people who don’t have Compasses – some of them are various shades of aromantic but others are not – and they fall in love and live quite happily all the time too, and then having your Compass ‘Broken’ – it’s not a term he likes, it feels too dismissive of people’s ability to survive – isn’t a sentence that dooms you to a life alone either.
Ray meets Anna and her Compass is still. She worries about the way the needle on his wrist trembles but they love each other. Deeply, truly. He’s happy with her. Until everything shatters.
And he can’t help resenting the way his Compass still points.
Felicity helps. Some. He knows who her North is after just a few meetings, she doesn’t cover her wrists when she works and Oliver Queen is what it always points to. Even though she doesn’t love Ray, loving her softens the cutting edge of his grief. And six months trapped in a glass box, certain you’re going to be killed, gives one plenty of time to think.
He’s not searching for his North when he finds him. Hadn’t even noticed where his needle was pointing. (Ray’s not paid much mind to it, and he was wearing long sleeves.) Not until Jax looks at his wrist while they’re in the Time Stream.
“It’s spinning, weird,” Jax comments, and shows Professor Stein who checks his own Compass.
“Yes, well, Time Travel,” Rip dismisses. “Gideon can find multiple time periods when your particular soulmates would be, your needles react to that.”
Ray pulls up his sleeve to look – he was wondering what it’d look like, because whatever else his Soulmate was born first because his needle has always been steady. Syd’s used to spin when they were very small but it grew steady when they were four.
But his needle isn’t spinning. It sits steadily pointing across the bridge to where the others are.
“Kendra’s and mine are steady,” Carter’s checked his wrist and Ray can see Kendra quietly check hers too.
“Yes, you two are soulmates,” Rip reminds them. “Your immediate presence in our relative timeline supersedes your presences in the other time periods.”
Ray stares at his wrist a little – wide eyed – because that means that if his Compass is steady his North is here and…he doesn’t know what to do about that.
Especially not when Leonard Snart got up and stalked across the room with all the grace of a stalking snow leopard and the needle dutifully tracked his progress.
Captain Cold was his Soulmate.
“You okay there, Ray?” Sara had paused to ask because even if they weren’t very close they trusted each other, they were both part of Oliver Queen’s backup dancers after all, even if Ray was the very, very last option on the list.
He’d slapped his hand over his needle and reassured her with a smile even he knew wasn’t believable that he was okay.
What’s worse is that he actually likes spending time with Snart. He likes their bantering – likes the way that Snart can’t quite hide that he wants to be a good person but doesn’t know how to, that’s an endearing quality – likes watching Len plan a scheme and the way his attention focuses like a knife. He likes Leonard.
Falling in love with Len is ridiculously easy. And being able to find him when they’re on a mission is actually kinda useful. (Even though it’s mostly Len tracking him own and scolding him for his Princess Peach impression.)
For Leonard Snart having a Compass never mattered much. He knew they were younger than him – he was already eight when his needle stopped spinning. But he wasn’t the sort of person that got their happily ever after, and as he got older he had Lisa to look after and enemies enough he wouldn’t want to risk having a North. (Having Lisa and Mick in his life already made him feel like Smaug, waiting for the arrow to find that chink in his armor, he didn’t need to make it bigger.)
Not that he managed to stay cold towards the world anyways. Barry Allen and his damned faith in Len’s ability to be a good person – to want to do good- had done that.
What he’s not prepared for is meeting his North. Ever. But especially not trapped on a space-and-time ship for a suicide mission to save the future. He’d have preferred not to make note of the way his needle remains steady instead of spinning. So he would really prefer it if he hadn’t noticed the wide-eyed stares that Raymond Palmer was giving him.
There is no way that they could do anything for each other.
But…Raymond’s self-sacrificial to the point of suicidal. Grief and loneliness mark him almost as strongly as they do Len and Mick but in different ways. They’re harsh and bitter in their masks, Raymond smiles until that’s the only thing people see. (So they don’t notice the way his hands fidget nervously, the tired circles around his eyes, the shift of his weight back and forth, the way he sometimes freezes up on the Bridge for just a moment with his eyes locked on the glass, the way he sometimes hunches up to shrink his large frame into something smaller and less noticeable.)
Raymond is fun to tease. And not terrible to look at. And he’s loyal. Stupidly so, maybe, but it’s the only thing that Len has ever really always valued. No matter how bad he got. It’s why he’d do anything for Lisa, why Mick is so important.
Sometimes North’s are just platonic but he can feel the affection growing for Raymond before he’s even really accepted what Raymond is to him.
And, the sunny idiot thinks that Snart can be better. That Len can be a good person. A hero.
And he doesn’t really have a choice about that when Raymond does a fantastic impression of a damsel in distress. (How many prison breaks has he had to stage at this point? And, sure, they probably weren’t needed because no matter what else he is Raymond is a genius but it’s faster this way.) No matter what else Raymond is he is his. Len’s.
And – what surprises Len even more – is that he’s okay with being Raymond’s too.
Falling in love isn’t easy. But it’s worth it.
Len still definitely wants to punch Barry when he catches the speedster smirking at him during the disaster that is their little anti-Dominator ‘team-up’ because Len has glued himself possessively to Raymond’s side and is not letting Team Arrow have any time with the Atom.
Raymond was rightfully stolen (by the Legends, and then, by him) – Oliver and Company can’t have him back.