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Looking at the envelope lying at the front door of the house he was squatting in, Mick couldn’t help the annoyed yet fond curl of emotion in his chest upon reading his messily scrawled name. Of course Snart- not even three days settled in Iron Heights –had (presumably) managed to get one of the guards to sneak messages to the outside world and through a strange and unusual sequence to get them to Mick’s front door. How Snart knew where Mick was holding up and laying low while waiting for Len to break out, Mick had no idea, but it still ignited a certain fondness that was reserved only for the thief.
However, that fondness dissipated as the realization hit to what the envelope actually contained and Mick grumbled agitatedly. He thought he’d get a week minimum before the crisp white envelopes would start rolling in. Mick had foolishly hoped there would be no envelopes this time around, that’d he’d have a nice, quiet break while Snart got himself out of prison.
He should have known better.
This was Leonard Snart after all. No amount of hiding, changing burner phones, and staying off the radar would stop Len from making sure Mick fulfilled his end of the bargain- a bargain they struck up as teenagers.
Mick will forever be bitter that Len kept the icy blue colored paper and red crayon contract a six-year-old Lisa had made and counting it as a legally binding contract, which was hilarious coming from Len who never gave two shits about the law…unless he could manipulate it for his own purposes.
But Mick and Len had made a pact and Len was going to make sure they kept that pact until they were both dead in the dirt. He even put it in his fucking vows, thinking Mick wouldn’t notice the little-added bit thrown in, but Mick could tell, especially when certain words didn’t translate into Hebrew. It was a nice try, though.
The thing was Mick and Len had an arrangement as old as their partnership. With their penchant for illegal activities, they found themselves behind bars far more often than they’d like (but far less than the authorities would like). Each of them had certain obligations that needed regular attendance and couldn’t be accomplished from a tiny 6 x 8 cell in Iron Heights, although Len was working on fixing that. Regardless, they made an agreement to pick up each other’s duties and obligation when one was on the inside. Eighteen-year-old Mick, still impulsive and horny, agreed instantly when Len brought it up. It made sense at the time when Mick thought it meant taking care of Lisa or keeping an eye on certain projects or even just bookkeeping. The glimmer in Len’s eyes when sixteen-year-old Len had stupid, stupid eighteen-year-old Mick sign the paper and crayon contract should have clued Mick in on there being another layer to this agreement. Back then (and actually, still to this day), Mick had been more concerned about getting into Len’s pants.
Most of the time, Mick took the fall if escape was only an option for one. It was easier for Len to break Mick out than Len to break himself out (although not impossible as he has proven time and again) and Mick was well suited for prison life, much more than Len who preferred to keep out of the authority’s reach. There was also the little-added fact that Mick would rather sit in a cell than do the specific task inside the envelope that had just arrived on his doorstep.
Bending over the pick up the envelope, Mick groaned at the thickness, knowing it meant there was just that much more work he had to do for Len. Seriously, he was going to find that damn contract and burn it when Len got back to him.
He tore open the envelope as he sunk onto the couch, grabbing the (stolen) laptop and powering it on. Inside were six handwritten pages. Each page filled with the tiniest scrawl to maximize the space, front and back. There was not a single white spot on the damn page and it was damn near impossible to see where one word started and another word ended. If it wasn’t a mess and frustrating task, Mick would find the humor in Len’s conservatism of paper use. Mick growled in frustration and grabbed his reading glasses from the coffee table because there was no way in hell Mick could ever read Len’s puny, scrunched handwriting, much less know what the fuck it is saying with its made up words and phrases.
With the laptop balanced on one knee and the papers resting on the other, Mick began the painful art of transcribing Len’s papers. Mick hated it because it took fucking forever, but would forever be grateful that Len edited everything before sending it Mick’s way because Mick was not going to fucking look up the proper way to spell words in the Klingon language; he may be doing this inane task for husband, but even Mick had limits to how far he’d actual go with it. He’ll just take whatever Len put down and knowing Len, it was perfect. No need to do more work than he already had to.
It took a day to transcribe everything, much to Mick’s utter dismay. Mick would have been fine it that was all he had to do for Len but no, that was only the very beginning. Because of course there was always more, another step when Len was behind it.
Next, he had to upload the damn thing to the fucking website. Mick remembered when the website was first online and Len sat him down to spend two hours going over the function of the upload website, which was full of glitches and low functions at its inception. Len’s lessons included having Mick memorize passwords, usernames, correct tagging systems, and basic HTML. He even tested Mick because that was just Leonard’s way when doling out any sort of job, even one as simple as uploading documents to a shitty website. Len was nothing, if not thorough and detailed when it came to any job. Every time Mick protested or lost focus, Len whipped out the contact quicker than the Flash and Mick had to snap his mouth shut and refocus. And that’s not to say Len never made it up to Mick, oh, he did, but Mick had to wait until Len weaseled himself out from behind bars before they could do any of that. (If Mick were being honest, that was perhaps the one benefit of doing this whole ordeal.)
Once Mick finished uploading it, Mick had to deal with the fans. It was one thing that Leonard Snart, Greatest Thief of Central City spent his free time writing Star Trek fanfiction, it was another thing that Leonard Snart, Greatest Thief of Central City also was one of the most established and popular Star Trek fanfiction writers. Len was basically the whole fandom’s mother, had been there from the near beginning.
And people wondered why Mick laughed whenever anyone even suggested that Len was cool and suave. Mick knew exactly the type of person his husband was and knew the exact number of Star Trek DVDs and books Len had accumulated over the years. In any given safe house, Mick could find at least ten to fifteen different Star Trek merchandise ranging from clothes to mugs, both because Len was obsessed and couldn’t help the his sticky fingers.
Mick remembered the first time Len showed him his writing- or really Mick found it and Len had to explain it to him. It was before the internet was as accessible and Len had taken to writing in journals and shoving them in places he didn’t think Mick would stumble across…little did he know that Mick actually cleaned the air filters every few months and was bound to run into the journal stored in the vents. Mick might not have understood what the fuck was going on but he wasn’t about to shove off Len’s interest when he saw how into it Len actually was. Who was Mick to judge when he spent hours staring into a flame? It was Mick’s acceptance that Len was able to coerce Mick into adding “update fanfiction” to Mick’s list when Len was on the inside.
Mick wants to say that if updating and transcribing were all he had to do, he wouldn’t complain (as much). But because Len had to create infamy in everything he did- Len had a fucking following. Every day, Len was flooded with notifications, comments, asks, people wanted to talk in Klingon and about the newest movies. Len took it like it was nothing, half the time doing a whole other thing at the same time. Mick was not so lucky.
Usually, Len dealt with all of this on a regular basis (every night before going to bed) and usually Mick didn’t have to touch it was a ten-foot-pole but when Len was locked up and it fell on Mick’s shoulders, it was like every goddamn Trekkie was out there looking at Len (TheCaptainKirk) for answers.
It should be mentioned that Mick didn’t know much about Star Trek. It just wasn’t his thing. Lisa claimed it was because Mick was into Star Wars and there was the forever dispute between the two series which Mick didn’t even understand because Len liked both just fine. Len claimed it was because Mick was more into ninjas and action movies than sci-fi (which was a closer guess). Really, Mick just didn’t care about the complexities. Even Star Wars lost his interest when he found out it was more than just three movies and they’ve expanded the universe into more movies and other mediums. Mick liked things simple, easy. He didn’t want to spend hours discussing whatever a Spirk and a McKirk was. He certainly didn’t want to spend hours talking to strangers with weird names on the internet about it. Especially not user AllenLovesSpock who Len seemed to have too long of a history with, his asks and messages being filled with comments from the user who had been following Len for who knows how long (and no, Mick was not jealous of his husband talking to a random Trekkie, Lisa).
Mick knew the cycle of Len’s incarceration too well and hoped Len spent some time on the inside figuring how to get himself out of there because every week, like clockwork, a thick envelope was going to be delivered to Mick, no matter where he ran or hid and if the pages weren’t transcribed and fully uploaded by the time Len stipulated at the top of the first page, Mick would have more to fear than just disappointing Len’s 3216 followers.
One time Mick spent too long transcribing one of Len’s longer updates, back in the early days, and two minutes after Mick was scheduled to post, the anonymous users and insistent messages came in ranging from sadness, to sympathy, to anger, to worry- so many that Mick published what he had written down just to make them silent.
But Mick did his best, his best for Len because Len had a stupid little contract and a tiny stupid smile on his face that made Mick do it. He had done it the other times Len got locked up and he would do it again until his fingers were bloody stumps on the keyboard.
And when Len eventually showed up on Mick’s front porch with a lazy smirk as if he had just been on an afternoon walk and not in prison for two months, Mick couldn’t help sweeping Len into his arms for more reason than one.
“Miss me?” Len drawled but there was a hint too much fondness in his tone for Mick not to think it genuine.
“You have twenty-eight different asks, three in languages I can’t fucking read,” Mick growled in Len’s ear before releasing him. “Better get started.”
Len sidestepped Mick to enter the house, one hand wrapped around one of Mick’s suspenders and yanking him along. “’Think I still have time to make it up to you.”