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If you pick up your phone once in your goddamn life, kid, let it be now.
Thank God or Destiny or whatever, the phone picks up on the second ring.
“Len? Are you back?” Even in the middle of the night, Barry’s voice is so bright and full of hope that it hurts. It reminds him of the warm spark of potential that he’d allowed himself to feel at the beginning of this thing, before it had all gone to shit.
“Yeah, Scarlet. Listen, I need your help.”
A sound of rustling fabric on the other end, like the speedster just sat bolt upright in bed, sheets pooled around his waist. “Anything,” he says breathlessly. He must have picked up on something in Len’s voice, but he doesn’t really want to think about how he sounds right now.
“Those… containment cells in your lab, the ones you were using to hold the metahumans. I’m guessing some of them are still operational.”
“Ugh, Len.” Barry sighs, and now that the initial urgency has faded it’s obvious that he was asleep. “We’ve been over this. We’re not holding anyone long-term, just —“
“Not what I’m calling you about at 2:45 AM, Barry.” Len cuts him off. “I need to use one of them.”
“You — what?”
“Long story. Meet me at STAR Labs. As soon as possible.”
“Right. I’ll be there.” The Flash, who has no manners, hangs up without saying goodbye. Len allows himself one rueful glance at the backseat of the stolen van he’s calling from, before locking the vehicle and taking his usual back way into the lab building. The security system is still a joke.
He’s cooling his heels in the lab’s central cortex when a familiar rush of wind and crackle of electricity greets him, followed by an armful of sleep-ruffled Barry Allen in sweats and a t-shirt. He bites down on his own lip, not letting himself be tempted to enjoy a moment of blissful ignorance before everyone’s on the same page. When Barry pulls back enough to look at him curiously with those Bambi eyes, Len meets them directly.
“You’ve probably guessed that we’ve got some delicate cargo out back,” he acknowledges. “Tell me about these cells. I know you’ve had breakouts before.”
“Well, yeah… but they were inside jobs,” Barry says cautiously. “Who is it you need held? A metahuman? Someone working with Savage?”
This isn’t the moment to be dramatic. Best to stick with the direct approach. Only, when Len tries to tell him, his vocal cords don’t seem to be working. He turns half away in frustration, face closed off, before biting out “Come see for yourself.”
By this point Barry has clearly caught on that this is serious, because they ride the elevator down in heavy silence, absent the kid’s usual monologue of stray observations. It’s his own weakness that makes him reach out for one of Barry’s hands as they leave the building and walk over to the van, only letting go to unlock it and shove open the sliding door. A light turns on inside and Barry lets out a little sound like someone just stepped hard on his foot.
“Len…”
“Don’t.” Shit, his voice is actually breaking. He can’t look at Barry, doesn’t know what he needs from him right now beside the obvious logistical assist. So he looks at Mick, a massive dead weight laid across the back seat, chest rising and falling in shallow, sluggish breaths. Alive, but in a deep sleep that he won’t come out of for a while. That setting on the cold gun had been just enough to slow the Flash to a manageable speed. On a baseline human, well. It just makes things a lot slower.
“I’m not… I’m not asking any questions.” Barry’s voice is holding steady, miraculously. Len glances sideways at him and sees that his hands are clasped tight together. Like he wants to touch Len, but he knows this isn’t the moment. It would be kind to reach out and put a hand on his back, just the leather of his glove against Barry’s cotton t-shirt, to demonstrate that the connection there is still open. Len doesn’t.
“This wasn’t part of the plan,” he finally says, and it’s somehow both redundant and vague. “The plan” hasn’t meant much for a long time and they both know it. The plan was to keep this casual, another of the sundry don’t-ask-don’t-tell liaisons that both he and Mick had enjoyed and overlooked over the years. The plan was not to let Barry Allen do this to him, not to let him crack open his ribcage and let in everything he’d trained himself for years to keep out, not to leave him and the Flash standing on one side of the sliding door and his husband laid out on the other.
“I know,” Barry says quietly. He turns away from the van to face Len at a three-quarter view. The streetlights cut across his face, making the hollows under his eyes look deeper. Len’s the one who’s just lived a rough month in two days, but he notices that Barry, too, has aged too much in the time they’ve known each other.
“This is my — no. Whatever happened, it’s my responsibility too, that you took a chance on this mission. If you regret that, I’m not going to tell you not to be mad at me.” He hesitates, head inclined slightly to offer Len a penitent look. “If… you don’t want to see me anymore, I’d understand. But I’m not going to say it’s my fault, because, Len. Just looking at you I know that whatever you did, it was because it was the right thing to do. And I can’t feel bad about that.”
It sounds so black-and-white, the way he says it, so easy. Nothing could be more wrong. Sometimes there are only bad options, but that doesn’t mean the least-bad option is somehow right. Or that someone else wouldn’t have found a better one. Maybe some people only get bad options, and to look for the good ones that aren’t there does nothing but prolong everyone’s suffering.
He sighs heavily, eyes flickering between Barry, eyes shining with faith in the harsh light, and Mick, lights out on the dubious upholstery of a hotwired white van.
“He’s heavy,” he says warningly. “Could probably use two of us.”
“Yeah,” says Barry. “Of course.”