Archive of Our Own

Goodness.

It’s such a…dirty…word.

It makes Leonard think of story book princesses and fairytales rife with joyous, romping woodland creatures.

Singing pigeons and dancing rats; it’s the stuff of night terrors. And goodness…

Goodness is The Flash, with his compulsive need to save everybody, all the time.

It’s that vigilante in Star City, the one with the Robin Hood kink and a clear vendetta against honest crooks everywhere.

And its Ray fucking Palmer, with his round brown eyes and his insatiable enthusiasm for everything, ever.

Goodness is dreary. Goodness blows.

Goodness is going to ruin his life.

But maybe he’s getting ahead of himself.

“Why are you lurking?”

“Is grumpy the only face you know how to make? Or do you put it on special, just for me?” Ray asks brightly. He pokes at Leonard’s cheek, because god forbid he didn’t make a nuisance of himself at every given opportunity.

Leonard swats him away, but it requires too much effort, the movement ineffectual. A muscle jumps in his jaw, and he is reminded, yet again, that he hates his life and Ray.

Not necessarily in that order.

“Do you want something?”

“World peace.”

“Something from me?” Leonard clarifies, glaring as much as he can.

Which isn’t half as much as he’d like. 

“You mean you’re not the arbiter of world peace?” Ray gasps. “I feel so misled.”

“Boy Scout, I swear-“

“You should never swear,” Ray says solemnly.

He’s an idiot, Leonard thinks. He acts like this conversation – like all their conversations – are some fun game of verbal sparring instead of…of…what they are.

Huffing his frustration, Leonard enunciates, “What is it I can do for you? Short of ending poverty, sickness, and war?”

“Now you’re getting it.” Ray flashes a toothy grin. Cue the woodland creatures, because when he does that, he is every inch of him Prince Charming. “Rip requires your technical expertise.”

Leonard swallows.

Oblivious, Ray prattles on, “I’m insulted he didn’t ask for mine. I’ve taken Gideon apart three times-“

“I’m sure she loved that,” Leonard mutters.

“-and she’s better than ever now, isn’t she?” Beaming – actually beaming, every move he makes is straight out of a Cheerio’s commercial – Ray suggests, “Maybe Rip doesn’t know that our skillsets fall in line. We could help him together!”

“No can do, Raymond.” Leonard guides Ray out of his bedroom, careful not to touch him. He always has to watch that – it gets so much worse; the moment they make contact. “I’m on special assignment.”

“Neat. What kind?”

“The special kind,” Leonard repeats.

“But I’m a genius,” Ray says, with about half an ounce of arrogance and three gallons of goodwill. “We could get it done faster.”

Leonard smirks. “Some things are better when you take it slow.”

He sees Rip waiting, standing in the doorway to his own room, where he’ll press Leonard against the wall, or that desk of his, littered with books, and this…unpleasantness…with Ray will fade to the back of Leonard’s mind.

His bones itch with how much he wants it.

He’s moving past Ray subconsciously, trying to edge around the curves and angles of the other man’s body, all his focus on Rip; the pulse of his heart and the bright of his eyes.

Except Ray doesn’t know when to give up.

Dubiously, he says, “I don’t know about that.” He chews on his lower lip, dragging Leonard’s attention to how easy it would be for him to do the same. For him to take Ray’s mouth, all that babbling genius, and make him moan. “Slow doesn’t make history books.”

“Yeah, well.” Leonard practically has to pinch himself to look away, back to Rip, and the promise there. Rip, who will make Leonard forget this; Ray and his damnable lip-biting, and everything that accompanies it, for a little while. “Neither do we.”

A little while is all Leonard really needs.

The day that everything goes to hell, Leonard’s something resembling happy.

Before that, he’s bored.

He’s been bored for a while, but there’s nothing to be done about it. Central City is and always will be home.

Leonard’s got other options – there’s an entrepreneurial type in the Maghreb that owes him more than one solid – but ripping Lisa from the cradle of the city that raised her isn’t on the agenda, and he’ll be damned before he goes anywhere permanent without his baby sister. Lisa has spent too much of her life feeling abandoned and overlooked for that to be feasible, and besides, Leonard gets antsy when he can’t check if she’s okay.

So for a while, the tedium of Central City is all he has.

It isn’t ideal. Metahumans are unimaginative, and always getting in the way. And being the biggest fish in this crime-pond is nice and all, but much good it does him while Barry Allen’s out there, posing for action figurines and saving everyone from themselves.

Then Rip Hunter comes prancing in.

He presents an interesting solution. Leonard gets the chance to be something other than bored, and Lisa will never even know that he’s left. That’s the promise; here and back in a split second, with a whole world of adventure in between.

The team gig is a bit of a drag, but Leonard can play nice for a little adventure.

Mick takes some convincing.

Eventually he falls in line. He always does.

Life’s doing that thing it never does, wrapping itself up in a neat little bow.

Leonard’s rolling with it, blood pumping, basking in the shining sun. As he approaches Rip, his five year old self is simmering with jealousy at the thought of a real, honest to god spaceship.

Then he sees Ray Palmer, and that’s when the earth opens up and swallows him whole.  

“You talked to him.”

Leonard grunts his agreement, chasing Rip’s pulse point with his lips. He kisses his way down the other man’s throat, ignoring Rip’s rumble of laughter as he continues, “You had an entire conversation, I saw.”

Too much talking. Not enough skin, Leonard thinks, biting at Rip until he gasps, a mild, surprised thing.

He’s so proper, this academic of a man in a space pirate’s clothing.

“Not that I care,” Rip begins, delicately, carding his fingers along Leonard’s scalp.

Leonard nuzzles into it and murmurs, “You seem to care quite a bit.”

He shoves Rip’s long coat down Rip’s arms, and it goes, easily, an ill-fitting costume. His shirt is next, button after button, a painstakingly slow show.

“I don’t. But if I did,” Rip’s head falls back, giving Leonard even better access, the long, pale stretch of his neck there for the taking. “If I did, I’d tell you you’re being childish.”

“Mind your own business, Captain,” Leonard commands, and when he closes his mouth over Rip’s, he doesn’t get a single argument.

Wait, wait. He’s being dramatic.

The earth doesn’t actually grow teeth and eat Leonard Snart.

What it does is spit forward a cacophony of noise, overriding Rip’s rah-rah-team speech with light and sound and fucking fireworks – fireworks – that blind Leonard completely, just like all the old stories always said they would.

There are orchestras playing something, but it might as well be the theme song to Titanic for all Leonard can actually process it, because he’s also overwhelmed by the smell of daisies and those fricking fireworks and the electric buzzing through every part of his body, screaming he’s here, he’s here, your soulmate is finally here.

Which. Uh. No.

Leonard Snart does not have a soulmate – has never wanted a soulmate – and he’s certainly not about to start now.

He staggers, a little, doing his best not to fall to his knees like those morons in every soul bond romcom Lisa’s ever forced him to watch.

Sheer willpower keeps him going. Sheer, stubborn – wow, Ray’s eyes are incredible the way they’ve gone all molten and – no, no. No.

It’s a chant in Leonard’s head, a constant mantra of denial.

“You okay?” Mick asks, gruff in his concern, but he won’t put out a steadying hand.

Mick would never do anything to make Leonard appear weak; that’s how the lions get you, with their teeth and claws. In juvie, weakness is a death sentence, and in prison, sometimes it’s even worse.

“Dandy,” Leonard snarls back, and the offer for help is rescinded, drawn back inside of Mick with the same ease it emerged.

But in Leonard’s own head, he’s frantic, trying to figure out what the hell just happened, and why? Why him, of all people?

He knows who Ray Palmer is. He knows the names, addresses, and social security numbers of the top hundred most powerful men in the continental United States, obviously.

For reasons.

Ray’s never been high on Leonard’s hit list, though. Clearly-not-dead former-head of a tech conglomerate, friends with Star City’s own version of Robin Hood, and a high tech super suit of his very own? That’s a recipe for vigilantes up in Leonard’s hair, and he’s never been much interested in fights he can’t win.

It’s probably why he’s never had to meet stupid Ray’s stupid golden eyes like this before, the idiot giving him this sweet, soppy look that completely does not belie the part where they’re inexorably both fucked.

Fucked, fucked, fucked.

Leonard grits his teeth and clutches his gun. He could try to end this tragedy-in-motion in seconds, with a well-aimed shot to Ray’s face. They say it’s impossible, but what if it’s not? That’s a romcom Leonard would sit through, this soulmate messiness sorted before it even starts.

The gun inches higher in Leonard’s hand.

Ray Palmer smiles at him, the fireworks receding into the background. But Ray is still there, and his smile is devastating, and his eyes are goldgoldgold, and oh, yes. Leonard lowers the gun and revels in how he is so fucking fucked.

He’s fucked, but then he handles it.

Soulmates are prisons, they’re chains weighting people to destinies they can’t shuck off. Leonard’s seen more than enough jail cells in his lifetime, thanks.

He searches for a solution, and it’s easier than he thought to find:

The way he figures is, you can’t have a soulmate if you refuse to have a soulmate.

First chance he gets, he bundles Captain Hunter, with his sad panda eyes and his insolent mouth right off into his bedroom and shows the man why exactly Leonard Snart is the team’s most valuable player.

It goes about as well as can be expected, which is to say that Leonard keeps him coming back for more – the good Captain’s insatiable – and if he cringes every time he has to walk out of Rip’s room into the real world, who can even blame him? Everyone else on the Waverider is so bright. And cheerful.

It has nothing to do with hiding from Ray. Even if he is a doofus and a smart mouth and more attractive than any one man has the right to be, and Leonard would steal him an entire bank vault full of diamonds if he thought it would impress him – but it wouldn’t, not a whit – it’s not a single bit about him.

Not.

One.

Bit.

Besides, the team settles into a strange synchronicity, after those first few weeks. They’re figuring out how to live with each other, everyone wearing kid gloves, and Ray’s not the massive, world crushing problem that Leonard thought he’d be. Ray is friendly, but never overly so – although Leonard doesn’t know how much friendlier Ray Palmer can actually get – and he doesn’t try to broach the subject of their…unique bond. Not even once.

Thank the time masters for small favors, right?

Leonard probably shouldn’t find it as irritating as he does, shivering every time Ray so much as breathes in his vicinity, the memory of Ray’s eyes gleaming golden emblazoned on his brain.

They’re not gold anymore, so memory is all he really has. According to the internet, where Leonard fervently hopes no one will ever, ever check his history, the first meeting is always the most intense. But supposedly, the effect can flare back up at other times, emotionally or outwardly, such as a resurgence of the gold eyes, during times of heightened emotion.

What this mostly means is that Leonard goes out of his way not to experience anything like heightened emotion within a hundred yards of Ray. And frustration aside, it’s working.

The team flits around the universe, trying and failing to stop Vandal Savage, and he and Ray rub against each other the wrong way, sometimes, but they never rub each other the right way, which is something. Ray never turns around and requests the heart to heart Leonard both anticipates and dreads.

Rip keeps putting out. Eventually, Ray starts dating Kendra.

Everything is good.

Everything is not good.

“What are you doing here?” Leonard asks flatly, glowering at Ray.

His hands itch to touch him, and Leonard informs them under no uncertain terms will they do any such thing.

Ray is oblivious and irrepressibly sunny, like the Disney prince he is. “I told you. I’m a genius.”

“I asked him along,” Jax says, face pinched as he glances between them. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Leonard crosses his arms. “I’d think you mind. Isn’t he shtupping your girl?”

From his peripherals, Ray is a blur of brown, from his big, round eyes to his shock of hair. He’s long-limbed and earnest, straight from the wildwood, and Leonard swears that whoever is in charge of this soulmate thing made a huge mistake.

“Girls are not property,” His royal highness objects in a patented professorial voice. Ray makes sure to sound very stern while adding, “And Kendra and I are on a break.”

“Trouble in paradise?” Leonard purrs.

If he’s happier about the news than he should be, then no one has to know.

Ray shrugs, broad shoulders folding in a little. He puts on a bemused face and says, “I think the ring freaked her out.”

“The what now?”

Leonard is not in the habit of choking on his own spit, but that’s – that’s – well, okay, that’s just swell. His own soulmate would rather get hitched to Bird Girl than Leonard.

Never mind that Leonard’s been dodging him for Rip for months.

Jax lands three stiff hits against Leonard’s spine, knocking the phlegm right out of him. “You okay, bud?”

“Peachy keen,” Leonard snarls.

He doesn’t care. He completely, entirely does not care.

But a ring?

“You’re a little pale.” Ray presses the back of his hand against Leonard’s forehead, checking for fever. Leonard flinches, the sensation of sunlight sinking into his bones immediate and unbearable. “Want to clock out? I’ve got this.”

“No way.” Jax shakes his head vehemently. “Snart uses words normal humans can understand.”

Frowning, Ray says, “I can talk in normal human. I was studying with Kendra.”

“It’s not studying if your tongue’s down her throat.” Leonard shoves Ray’s hand away.

He’s prickly all over, outraged with himself and with Ray for being so…so…undeniable and there. He wants to help Jax play electrical engineer and then get as far away from the other man as he possibly can.

Short of throwing Ray out the airlock, there aren’t that many places to escape on the Waverider, but Leonard’s got a carefully constructed diagram for just these types of occasions.

Jax couldn’t sense the tension in the room if it kissed him on the mouth. He says, “Thanks for the visual. And way to judge. You can’t keep your hands off Captain Hunter for more than five minutes at a time.”

He starts to say something else; possibly an in-depth recap of the last time he walked in on Leonard and Rip getting frisky, when Ray interrupts. “Wait. You and…Rip?”

Icily, Leonard asks, “What of it?”

“Nothing. Uh. Nothing of it. I just-” Ray swallows. He looks sick, somehow, nauseous and wan. “Didn’t know.”

Leonard puffs out air, doing his best imitation of apathetic, when really he wants to punch whoever made Ray sad. Except that was him, so it’s a vicious cycle of really confusing.

Leonard silently hates everything.

“Guess you’re not such a genius after all.”

Ray’s lips turn down, doing things that no adult’s face should actually do. His lower lip almost trembles.

Leonard has a spare second to feel bad, or something resembling it, because he doesn’t do feelings, when Ray bursts out laughing. “I’ll show you. Jax, what do you say we get started?”

“You really think he and Kendra are over?” Jax takes a long swig from a bottle of water, his gaze trained like a laser on the back of Ray’s head.

Gideon won’t reboot. Leonard supposes the fourth time dismantling her is the charm.

“I think I don’t give a whit,” Leonard replies coolly.

“Kendra…she’s really great, though. You know?”

“Down boy.” Leonard scratches at his chin, examining Jax through narrowed eyes. “You’ve got some drool. Right here.”

Jax gives a long-suffering sigh. “I’m asking you for advice, Cold.”

“Do I look like your dad?”

“Your hair line’s receding,” Jax answers. The little snot. “Would it kill you to help a brother out?”

“Ask Dr. Frankenstein.”

“Gray’s in the common room,” Jax intones, in a voice that says Leonard should know very well what that means.

He does, because the good doctor has developed an addiction to a reality show from 2180 that is basically Vandal Savage’s answer to the Hunger Games. No one likes to talk about it, because Stein has scary bat-hearing and gets mighty defensive – he’s watching for science, he says – but an intervention is in the works.

Leonard rolls his eyes skyward and tries not to feel a pervading sense of gloom about this whole time adventure, team thing. 

Jax doesn’t care that he’s having a mini-existential meltdown. He wheedles, “Come on. Please?”

“Since you beg so nicely. You want my advice? Love deludes people, and I’m a big fan of sanity.”

“Really? Sanity?” Jax frowns at the halls of the Waverider. “Here?”

Muscles play under Ray’s t-shirt as he fiddles with the wiring in the small, square panel that blocks any of them from crawling back into Gideon’s core processing unit. Pointedly not observing that demonstration, or imagining how nice it would be sans the shirt, Leonard sneers, “Have a problem with our new home?”

Jax glances back at Ray, but probably not for the same reasons. “Not as much as you do.”

“I’m not catching your drift,” Leonard drawls, even though he is.

Acutely.

“You should be nicer to him, is all.” Jax shakes his head. “I doubt anyone looks at us and thinks, squad goals, but. We’re all each other has, now.”

“Beg to differ,” Leonard replies, but he finds that he can’t say more than that.

He misses Mick.

And his sister.

And he hates being a human on a ship full of metahumans and PhDs. He’s used to being the smartest person in the room, when the room is full of crooks. The Waverider has been…unique.

Not necessarily in a good way.

“Yeah, but.” Jax rolls his eyes, clearly over their conversation. “You don’t beg as nice as me.”

“What does it feel like to be such a moron?” Sara pops a piece of popcorn into her mouth. “I’d like to know. For science.”

“If for science becomes a catchphrase around this ship, I’ll kill someone.”

“I’d like to see that. For science.”

“You’re uppity today.”

“I’m uppity every day,” Sara rejoins. “Which doesn’t explain why you spent the morning scaring poor Jax half to death.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Right. You didn’t tell the kid you’d help him finesse his engineering skills and then proceed to throw actual tools at his head?”

Leonard was aiming for Ray, but he’s not telling Sara that.

“You broke Gideon,” she continues casually. “Rip’s homicidal.”

Rip also told Leonard that under no uncertain terms will he be getting any until Gideon’s been put to rights. He decides not to relay that information to Sara either.

Through a mouthful of popcorn, she mumbles, “Seriously, what’s got your panties in a twist? Wait, no, let me guess. He’s freakishly tall, way, way too into wrenches, and he doesn’t know when to shut the hell up.”

“I think the tool of the day is actually the ball peen hammer,” Leonard replies with a completely straight face.

Sara snorts, guessing, “Does that mean I’m close?”

“Your keen observational powers must have made you a real catch in the League of Assassins.”

“That and my ass. I mean, it’s stupendous.”

Leonard shrugs, because that’s not a thing he can disagree with in any way.

Sara laughs, much too pleased with herself. She throws a kernel of popcorn at Leonard before carrying on, “This thing with you and Ray – you’ve got to get over it.”

“I don’t have to do anything. I’m a grownup, and I make my grownup choices all on my own.”

She shakes her head, blonde hair splaying all over the place. “No, destiny makes your grownup choices for you, and that doesn’t seem to be sitting well.”

“I don’t believe in destiny.”

“That’s right.” Sara pats his arm, entirely unconvinced. “Fight the man.”

“That’s sexist.”

“Men are oppressive.” Sara shrugs. “Like destiny. And heels.”

“I’ll take your word for that last one.”

“You’re lucky though,” she says wistfully, and Leonard takes it that she doesn’t mean because all of his shoes are heelless and flat.

“Are you about to get all girly on me?”

She punches his shoulder in a decidedly non-girly manner. Outwardly, Leonard doesn’t do much more than wince, but inside there’s a lot of ugly-cry going on.

He makes a mental note not to piss Sara off anymore. Or at least not as often.

“Look, you might think having a soulmate is romantic bullcrap, but for some of us, its…earth shaking.”

“Spoken like a woman who knows.”

“Maybe I do,” Sara says coolly. “And if I do, it wouldn’t really be your business, would it?”

“Yet my love life is front page news.” Leonard digs a hand into Sara’s popcorn, coming up with a fistful that he shoves in his mouth. He grumbles, “Hardly seems fair.”

“You had the misfortune of meeting your soulmate in front of our entire team,” Sara counters. “I thought you were having a coronary.”

“Funny how you and Rip are the only ones who keep giving me grief about it.”

“Oh, that’s because we’re the only ones who noticed.”

“Sure,” Leonard agrees, because he has thought it’s strange how Mick kept mum, before he went all psycho crazypants.

That’s the technical term for brainwashing by time overlords, according to Gideon. Leonard asked, for science.

“I’m not even entirely sure Ray noticed,” Sara continues.

“Yes, apparently - wait, what?”

He tries Rip’s room first, aiming to relieve the ice building high inside his lungs.

Ray doesn’t know.

Ray is his soulmate, and he hasn’t got a clue. There were fireworks, the orchestra, the whole shebang, with Leonard’s feet glued to the ground, helpless to move or shout or say hell fucking no. But Ray, the Disney prince incarnate?

He didn’t feel a thing.

Leonard barrels into Rip, fingers clench in the front of his coat, and for a few minutes it’s good. Rip’s hands graze the curvature of Leonard’s ribs, and they are cool, arctic even, the ship’s climate control always set somewhere slightly south of frigid.

Leonard takes a deep breath of recycled air, mixed with Rip’s exhalations, and tells himself he doesn’t mind. That he doesn’t miss the way Ray’s touch melts into his bones, even if Ray has never touched him like this. Because Ray doesn’t know, and everything tastes like hoarfrost and ash.

And then it gets worse, because Rip struggles his way free from the crush of their mouths, and he says, “Gideon, what are the chances that Mr. Snart will score, today?”

Silence greets the inquiry.

Rip nods, satisfied. “Oh, yes, that’s right. Gideon can’t answer me because you and your confounded teammates broke her.”

“Jax helped,” Leonard replies mildly.

Indignant, Rip rests his palm dead center on Leonard’s chest. “Perhaps Jax can help you fix her.”

Leonard scowls, Rip’s green eyes rife with contention. “Now isn’t the best time, Captain.”

Rip’s hand doesn’t move, his fingers spread across the thrum of Leonard’s icy heart. “We’re on a time ship, Captain. Make time.”

Leonard stumbles back, the rejection unexpected. He laces his gaze with iron and glowers defiantly at Rip. “Fine. We’ll patch Gideon right up.”

He’s practically shivering when he backs out of the room, but whatever.

The cold never bothered him anyway.

That night, he walks around in a daze, and he can’t shake the idea that the whole world is holding its breath.

Everything is a constant drumbeat, a mantra reminding him that Ray doesn’t know. Ray hasn’t made Leonard sit down and talk about – emotions, or whatever it is that they’re supposed to be talking about in this situation – because Ray doesn’t even know they’re…the thing. That they are.

Leonard swallows, anger chilling his veins. It’s not that he even wants Ray – or anyone else – up in his business. If it gets around the ship that he’s soul bound to Prince Charming, people will probably start expecting things of him, like charity work and sex in the missionary position.

But.

He’s spent months driving himself to the brink of insanity, and the reason for it has been blissfully ignorant. Leonard gave up on the idea of fairness somewhere around age five, but this still rubs at him the wrong way, prickling under his skin like ice cold needles.

He doesn’t enjoy being the plot of an epic novel, the ultimate soulmate movie. This is the saga of Ray and Leonard in parts.

Like most sagas, it’s not complete without a little tragedy.

Leonard hefts his cold gun and says, “It stops here.”

Sleep-dazed and aching, Ray asks, “What does?”

He blinks blearily up at Leonard, clearly very confused about why he’s standing in his room around oh dark thirty.

“Everything,” Leonard says, finger on the trigger.

He misses.

Of course he misses. Soulmates are incapable of causing each other physical harm, according to Lisa’s movie collection and the internet. But Leonard still needed the satisfaction of checking.

For science.

Ray acts utterly betrayed, his mouth gaping open and closed like a goldfish out of water. “You shot me! Why did you shoot me?”

Leonard is displeased to find that he’d quite like to kiss the stunned look off Ray’s face.

“I didn’t shoot you,” Leonard says pointedly, eyes on the thick layer of ice coating Ray’s wall.

Ray’s gaze flicks to the wall. Exaggeratedly loud, he demands, “But why?”

“Wanted to see what would happen.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I prefer unhinged.”

“I’ll unhinge your jaw,” Ray says, a vein pulsing in his forehead.

“Try,” Leonard dares him, because at least a good old fashioned brawl would make him feel better.

And also less like tumbling Ray onto his back and licking into his mouth until mad is the last thing the man could ever be.

“Okay, no.” Ray holds up a hand, fingers briefly clenching into fists, then releasing. “You’ve had a stick up your ass the size of Wisconsin since the first day we met. What’s your problem?”

It’s interesting that Ray can actually muster up the ability to sound that enraged. Leonard is positive anger violates the Eagle Scout code. “Careful,” he warns. “They’ll take away your merit badges.”

“You think this is funny? Of course you think this is funny. You’re a bad guy.”

“Villain, I think, is the preferred terminology. I like rogue,” Leonard offers. “It makes me sound charming.”

“Yeah, not finding you very charming right now.”

Straight from the mouth of Prince Charming himself. Leonard scowls. “I left my singing pigeons at home.”

“What does that even mean?”

Leonard jerks his head to the side, because he doesn’t answer dumb questions.

Ray’s shoulders droop. “What’s with the Wyatt Earp routine? I don’t love being shot at. Explain.”

Leonard has no plans to respond to that plea, either.

Mostly because he doesn’t have a good answer. I’m pissed as hell that my existence hasn’t tortured you the way yours has tortured me doesn’t seem appropriate.

“No? Nothing?” Ray asks. “Nothing forthcoming?” He shoves a hand through his thick, dark hair. The splay of his fingers draws Leonard’s eyes, and he thinks about following the line of them with his tongue. Ray rambles on, “Obviously not. That would be rational.” He makes a painted noise. “I don’t know what I did to make you…No. I’m saying this wrong. I like you. Did you know that?”

Leonard stops salivating over Ray’s ridiculously gorgeous hands.

He cannot have heard that right.

“You…like me?”

Ray smacks his own forehead and sighs. “I know it’s sick, considering how often we fight. And that tears at me, it does. But being around you also gives me the strangest sense of peace. So, what I’m saying is, don’t shoot me ever again. Because…I like you. And I’d hate to have to put on the suit and kick your ass.”

He follows up with a brilliant smile, one that makes Leonard’s entire body ache with how much he wants. It’s the actual definition of cheating, if this were a game.

Leonard hates to lose.

Ray waits, clearly expecting this announcement to be greeted with a fitting olive branch in return. Leonard decides on the juvenile option instead. “Thanks, but not interested.”

“Excuse me?”

“Your come on was cute, but it didn’t really work for me, so I’m going to have to pass.”

“That – was not a come on. Why would I flirt with you?” Ray’s face screws up into a bewildered pout. “I love Kendra.”

“Please,” Leonard bristles, the drag of his voice from his throat an audible groan. “You watch her like she’s a science experiment. Tell me about your life in 1693, Kendra. Tell me about the exotic bugs of ancient Egypt, Kendra.”

“I sound nothing like that,” Ray objects, face darkening. Maybe he’s remembering how Kendra dumped him. “Why do you even care? You’ve made it pretty clear-“

He aborts whatever he’s about to say, and Leonard knows, knows that his next words were going to be that he is selfish. He’s selfish and arrogant and he doesn’t care about anyone – all honest, brutal, legitimate words.

Except Ray cut has himself off because somehow, impossibly, Leonard’s done enough on this ship to make him think it isn’t true.

“Let me make this clear,” Leonard hisses. “Whatever you think you know about me is wrong. I’m not your teammate, or your partner, or your friend-“

“Right, you’re not anything to me,” Ray agrees, angry in earnest now.

It says something that it wasn’t the ice gun to his face, or very close to it, that got him riled. It’s Leonard, rejecting him, and his dumb peace treaty, and everything he represents. It’s hurt that makes Ray livid, red splotches on his neck and his lips white with repressed fury.

Leonard stares at him and thinks, yes.

This is what love is. This is the kind of love he’s always understood.

He grits out, “Glad we’ve got that sorted,” throws his gun over one shoulder, and leaves.

Rip sinks to his knees, his lips pressed against the sharp angle of Leonard’s hipbone, the taut skin over his belly, and lower. Leonard watches Rip kiss over his cock, fingers gripped tight in the Captain’s hair. He wishes it was a darker shade of brown, but wishing has never done anything for him in the past, and it doesn’t start now.

“You’re feisty today,” Rip says against his skin. The words tremble through Leonard’s dick, hum against his thighs. “Did something go wrong between you and Mr. Palmer?”

Leonard does not want to think about Ray right now. He doesn’t actually want to think about Ray ever.

He bucks forward against Rip’s mouth until the Captain takes him in, obliging his ill humor with tight suction and more than a little tongue.

Groaning, Leonard digs his fingers into Rip’s scalp.

This is so much better than thinking.

He turns the gun over and over, analyzing the play of light across the surface of the metal. Cisco does good work. Leonard would never tell him that; the last thing the kid needs is the ego boost. But still.

He’s talented.

That’s what Leonard’s thinking when Kendra wrenches the gun from his hands, hawk goddess strength making it easier than it should be.

“Talk,” she commands.

“Must I?”

“Snart.” Huffily, she folds her legs under her as she sits, gun balanced carefully across her knees. “Heard you decided to redecorate my old room.”

“Were you planning on moving back in?”

Kendra eyes him, measured and serene. “That would be awkward, considering he’s your soulmate.”

Leonard is determined not to flinch.

He does it anyway. “Who squealed?”

“Gideon. She told Ray, and Ray told me, and you already knew.”

It’s not a question.

Gideon. Leonard frowns. He’d thought they’d reached an understanding about his internet history, if understandings are a thing a person can have with artificial intelligence units. She must be a little pissy about the whole breaking her thing.

Drama queen.

Leonard stretches his legs out in front of him, leaning back on his palms, for lack of a gun to play with. He peers sideways at it, but Kendra’s got her bird-claws dug in pretty tight. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

She chuckles then, a dry, but light thing. “You think you’re such a badass, Captain Cold.”

“Expound upon why I’m not,” Leonard challenges.

Kendra’s game. Mercilessly, she says, “Every time something makes you feel inadequate, you run. You brush it off, move forward, find a new plan, a new scheme, some way to shake off all the icky feelings.”

“Isn’t that what people are supposed to do?” He raises his eyebrows. “Move forward?”

“We’re not sharks. We don’t stop breathing if we lose momentum. Sometimes you need to stop. To figure things out.”

“Sounds to me like you want to set me up with your boyfriend.”

Kendra shakes her head, and there is too much sadness written into the lines that form when she frowns. “I know what it’s like to lose a soulmate. I won’t take anyone else’s away from them.” She hesitates. Then, “Ray’s looking for you.”

Ray is in the ship common room, partaking in Stein’s unhealthily addiction. They’re rooting for a man in a loin cloth, wielding a blood-tipped spear. They’re rooting really, really loudly.

And these are the good guys.

Leonard exhales, wondering why he didn’t stay in Central City, where some men control the weather, sure, but at least future-Survivor isn’t considered primetime entertainment.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Hold on,” Ray says. “This guy’s about the stab someone in the eye.”

Gideon’s got all the episodes stored in her logs; it’s not like he can’t rewind if he misses something. Wearily, Leonard prompts, “Now, Raymond.”

“You’re in trouble,” Dr. Stein intones, eyes glued to the television.

Odd man.

Reluctantly, Ray uncrosses his long legs and lopes out of the common room after Leonard. He says, “I know what you want to talk about, and let me start by saying, this could have gone better.”

“You’re not wrong,” Leonard agrees. He takes a left, into his room, even though the idea of having Ray so close grates on his nerves more than anything else ever could. 

Ray throws himself on Leonard’s bed, sprawling backwards, which doesn’t help at all.

He’s clearly never heard of personal space, or etiquette, or asking for permission, the rich bastard. Leonard glares.

Conversationally, Ray says, “We’re soulmates! I mean, that’s fun.”

Leonard glares some more, because why not?            

Ray completely misses the hint. He pats the space beside him with a complete lack of diplomatic tact until Leonard sits. He settles onto his own bed with caution, avoiding Ray’s starfish limbs and the angles of his heat.

The Waverider has never much felt like home, but he’s also never felt so violated in his own room before.

Ray tilts his head up towards Leonard, neck straining, eyes lit with hope.

“I thought Anna was the closest I could ever get to…to what we are. But you’ve known,” he concludes. “From the beginning, probably. And you never said- anything.”

“Usually,” Leonard enunciates, gaze narrowed. “Soul bound don’t have to announce it to their other half. Genius,” he adds, vindicated in his ridicule.

Ray stares at him with an untenable combination of fondness, exasperation, and pity. Lisa looks at him that way, sometimes, like her big brother makes her feel so much at once that she’s uncertain her heart can bear it. It was always too much, coming from her.

It’s too much, coming from Ray.

Abruptly exhausted, or maybe it’s all just catching up to him, Leonard tells him, “Relax, Raymond. You didn’t hurt my feelings. Pinky promise.”

“How can you joke about this?”

“Practice.”

“I’m sorry.” The way Ray says it is – wounded. He’s hurt. He’s bleeding out right there on Leonard’s clean sheets, and it’s not something Leonard even wants. He can keep his apologies. “You shouldn’t have had to…to, acclimate yourself to being alone.”

“No skin off my back.”

Silence expands in the spaces between their bodies, and Leonard can’t deal with it.

When they fight it is fire and lightning in his veins, an overwhelming wave of ire that makes him see red and want to shove Ray’s face into something sharp and damaging. But now that they’re finally not, it’s ridiculously easy to forget they ever have.

Leonard has never known that companionable silences could truly be that; companionable, his entire being bolstered just by another human’s presence. It’s almost…peaceful; Ray chewing on his lip, searching for words, and Leonard determinedly not doing anything about the part where Ray is laying on his bed, chewing on the plush of his damned lip.

Almost.

“I was wrong, you know. You’re not anything to me,” Ray finally says, in a small, quiet voice. It’s an echo of what he said before, the sheen of ice painting his wall. “Anything…Except, apparently, everything.”

“This doesn’t change anything.”

“Doesn’t it? It changes a lot for me.”

“I don’t know what this quiet moment of reflection you’re having right now is, but get your shit together.” Leonard’s jaw tightens. “Nothing has changed.”

Ray switches tack. “It’s not that nothing happened. For me. It was weird that the city was setting off fireworks in the middle of the day, but Central City is…”

He waves a vague hand meant to indicate bizarre, and Leonard can’t contend that. They have a holiday to celebrate the Flash, of all things, and that’s still less ridiculous than a walking, talking shark, or a psychic gorilla.

“And-“ he reaches up to touch Leonard’s cheek, but when Leonard winces, he pauses, hand hovering in midair. “Your eyes were gold. But I thought that was the sun. Your eyes are like that, when you’re standing in the light. You have nice eyes.”

Leonard refuses to feel even slightly mollified. But somewhere under his breastbone, light is beginning to leech out, this vague, spindly thing that is warming him in a way he never knew he could be warmed.

Ray says, “I understand if you need time, or space, or time and space. We’ve got plenty of both, right?”

Leonard is resigned to it, sick of struggling against the way that Ray washes over him in waves, the way that all he’s wanted to do since the moment he first saw him is right within his grasp.

He can actually hear whatever it is he has with Rip flat lining.

Rambling in earnest, now, Ray says, “In fact, if you don’t think you can stand seeing me anymore-“

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Leonard says, cupping Ray’s chin, and he is talking to them both when he says, “Stop overthinking it.”

He claims Ray’s mouth for his own.

It’s a kiss – Ray’s mouth is chapped and touched with wintergreen – but it’s also nothing like any kiss Leonard has ever experienced before.

It’s how he felt as a kid, watching constellations arc high over Central City, Lisa’s familiar warmth beside him as he taught her the names for Ursa Major and Cassiopeia.

It’s the flicker of hellfire and anticipation that Leonard gets when he’s planning a heist, tempered by the certainty that this one he’ll pull off, no question, no problem.

It’s his heart spiking into the stratosphere, but they’re already there, hovering in time and space on an actual spaceship, and inside Leonard’s never really gotten over the absolute, giddy joy of that, his bones shot through with starlight and sun warmth, liquid and perfect. It’s Ray, every stupid, heroic, wonderful, good part of him. Ray and Ray and Ray, forever.

The void of the universe surrounding them screams neon, everything but Ray blurry and luminescent, and then he pulls back, panting, his eyes golden, glowing, molten.

The hollows of his cheeks are shaded dark blue, dusky with shadows, mouth bruised and yearning. He touches his forehead against Leonard’s and says, “Yeah. Okay. I think we’re soulmates.”

Leonard would laugh.

He would, but he’s going to be busy kissing Ray for the rest of all eternity, and he really wants to get started right now.

Goodness blows.

Leonard’s probably going to spend the rest of his life trapped under its crushing weight, doing philanthropic works and trying – and failing – to live up to Ray Palmer’s unrealistic expectation of what a hero should be.

But goodness is also the nicest thing Leonard Snart has ever felt, Ray’s arms circled around him in a bubble of warmth and a feeling that must be – can’t be – is – happiness.

The surety of it is breaking Leonard to pieces, destroying his life and remaking him into something new.

And he’s okay with it. Now, Leonard understands that Ray might be a prison, but he’s the first one that Leonard’s ever been able to choose.

Which he will, every time, completely and wholeheartedly. He’s spent too long fighting against the way Ray’s fingertips draw sunshine from his skin. Knowing what it can be, what every day after this will be?

There is absolutely no way in hell he’s ever giving Ray up.

After all, there’s such a thing as being too good.