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The job starts swimmingly enough, Len can smugly admit, despite the protests and grumblings of several of his cohorts. They had gotten into the precinct no problem, uniforms serving as the best kind of invisibility cloak and ensuring they were exactly where they needed to be.
“Why are we doing this again?” Simmons whispers angrily, mopping at the floor with extreme prejudice. “You’re telling me there isn’t a better way to infiltrate this place?”
Len raises a sardonic eyebrow at him, unimpressed. He catches sight of a whirlwind of a man rushing in their direction and sweeps his mop in a grand arc across the floor. “Watch and learn,” he drawls, counting down the seconds in his head. “This is how it’s done, old school.”
The man draws ever closer, not even paying a lick of attention to his surroundings, and Len grins to himself.
Five, four, three…
-x-
Barry’s running late.
Again.
While normally not too big of a problem, mostly because everyone tends to be a little more sympathetic about his woes of public transportation, today’s his semi-annual review, and Barry wouldn’t put it past Singh to literally have his head on a platter if he so much as steps a single toe out of line.
Barry checks his bag for the thousandth time, hurriedly nodding to the officer on door duty today—Mitchell again, he must have done something to piss Singh off recently—while making sure everything is still in its proper place. A very small part of his mind notes that one of the two new janitors mopping close by really is very attractive, even in that ridiculous blue jumpsuit, although a larger part of him is berating himself for sparing even a single thought to think that, because he’s got neither the time nor the faculty to be distracted by hot janitors with their smirking faces and bared necklines and obvious musculature and—
The world suddenly tilts on its axis and Barry tilts with it, his vision going blurry and his stomach flipping, and he briefly registers that the floor was wet (obvious, Barry, the janitors, hello) and that, like an idiot, he must have slipped and is now falling to his most certain doom—
And then the tilting abruptly stops, and it takes Barry more than a few moments, suspended in the air a couple of feet from the ground, to realize that one of the janitors (the cute one, his mind traitorously supplies) has caught him mid-fall, wrapped one strong arm around his back securely and grabbed his hand, holding his arm up so that his bag doesn’t crash and spill its contents all over the wet floor.
Barry opens his mouth to apologize but wheezes instead, the breath completely knocked from his lungs at the forceful impact and arrest from his fall. He stares up into the amused face of his savior, immediately drawn in by those hypnotizing blue-green eyes, and finds himself breathless for an entirely different reason.
“Careful,” the man says, eyes twinkling, and Barry’s eyes flick down to catch the beguiling smirk twisting his lips upward. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Barry whispers, entranced. He shakes his head, clears his throat roughly, and tries again, feeling his cheeks heat in embarrassment. “Yeah.”
The man tugs on Barry’s hand, righting him effortlessly with a little flourish and a twirl, and smirks again at Barry’s wide-eyed look. “You really should be more careful,” he admonishes lightly, and Barry nearly swoons at the man’s voice, deep with amusement and concern (though he’ll go to his grave insisting he’s lightheaded from the abrupt rush of blood to and then from his head).
“I—sorry,” Barry says stiltedly, blinking as he attempts to regain his equilibrium. “I—I wasn’t looking where I was going.”
“I can see that,” the man says, lips curving up even more, and Barry can feel his blush deepen.
“I’ve got a lot on my mind,” he says, maybe a tad too defensively, judging by the eyebrow the man quirks at him, and he sighs. “But no, of course, that’s no excuse, I am so sorry—let me make it up to you.”
“Oh?” The man’s other eyebrow raises to join the first, and Barry wishes that smarmy look didn’t work as well as it did for him. “And just how do you plan on doing that?”
“Um.” Barry wracks his blank brain for a second, then snaps his fingers as an idea comes to him. “Jitters!”
“Excuse me?”
“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” Barry elaborates, and he’s about to say more, but the watch on his wrist starts beeping shrilly. “Oh—shit—I gotta go, my review starts in five—but yes, coffee, I’ll buy you a coffee, that is definitely a thing I should do—so, Jitters, seven tonight, we can meet there? I’m sorry, I really gotta go, sorry again—”
“Go,” the man says bemusedly, “and I’ll be expecting you at seven.” He grins at Barry again, and Barry’s blindsided by the expression for three seconds that he really can’t afford to spare before shaking himself out of his daze.
He rushes off with little more than a parting flustered smile for the man—you never even got his name, part of his mind complains at him—but that almost doesn’t seem to matter, because the man hadn’t seemed opposed to the idea of a coffee date with him—
“Good luck with your review!” the man calls after him, and Barry turns back briefly to see the man wave slightly as he smirks and replies to something his fellow janitor is saying.
And he just asked someone out on a date, Barry realizes belatedly, an actual, honest-to-god date, and he did the asking, and the man was attractive, really attractive, and snarky, and agreed to meet him for coffee later, Iris is not going to believe this—
“Mr. Allen!” Captain Singh booms upon his entry into the bullpen, and Barry cringes a little before pasting on a smile.
“Captain!”
Singh checks his watch, then lets out a low, impressed whistle. “With three minutes to spare, Mr. Allen—you never cease to amaze me. Go ahead and get yourself situated, we’ll meet up in your lab in ten.”
“Yes, sir,” Barry says gratefully, and he pushes all thoughts of coffee dates and unfairly attractive janitors to the back of his mind, focusing on the task at hand.
He can call Iris later, during lunch, and freak out then—he can already feel it, the anxiety building in the corners of his mind, and he has a feeling he’s going to need all the help and reassurance she has to offer.
-x-
“Really, Snart?” Simmons jeers at him once the man—adorable, Len decides, unfairly so, especially as flustered as he was—is out of earshot. “Scoring some ass while we’re on a job?”
“Coffee, not ass,” Len corrects absently, “and I did my part.” He holds up the lanyard he had very carefully swiped from the man’s pocket—a CSI, not actually an officer, perfect—and smirks at the gaping look of incredulity that flashes across Simmons’ face before he harrumphs and crosses his arms, grudgingly impressed. “This’ll get us where we need to go just fine, with plenty of time for coffee after.”
“You crazy, mixing business with pleasure like that?” Simmons scowls, but Len ignores it, too used to the prickly uptightness of the men not familiar with his particular method of pulling heists. “Is that kid even legal?”
Len hums consideringly, pulling out the wallet he also snatched and looking at the driver’s license. “He’s twenty-five,” he says, eyes roving over the card.
“And you stole his wallet,” Simmons huffs, throwing his hands into the air exasperatedly. “Why am I even surprised?”
“I really have no idea,” Len replies absently, drinking in the man’s grinning face in the tiny picture, committing every detail to memory.
Bartholomew Allen.
What a name, Len thinks wryly to himself, but he finds that he’s looking forward to his impromptu little date tonight, perhaps even more than what they’re planning on scoring here.
He thinks that seven o’clock can’t come fast enough.
But, it won’t do to get distracted now. He pushes all thoughts of coffee dates and ridiculously attractive CSIs to the back of his mind, focusing on the task at hand.
After all, he’s got a job to do. He can worry about everything else later.