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The night they defeated Vandal Savage, there was a quiet on the Waverider.
Although the ship was still parked in 2016, her outside slightly charred from Rip’s trip to the sun, no one had gone home. Instead, there had been a moment, standing on a rooftop when the Waverider re-appeared and Rip walked out, where they all just looked at each other. No one spoke. No one moved. But they all understood one another perfectly, just for a moment. It felt a whole lot like peace, although none of the scarred and bloody heroes standing there could put a name to it.
Their job was done. The war was won. So what came next?
“We did it,” Kendra said softly, breaking the golden moment. Her face was drawn in disbelief, looking between them, even as her lips tugged up, into a smile that wasn’t quite certain enough of itself to become a grin. “We really did it.”
“Did we?” Jax asked, looking to Rip. “Is it done? Is he gone?”
Rip just nodded numbly, mouth moving slightly, but words apparently escaping him. He looked like a solider fresh from war, and in a way, he was – shell-shocked after winning a battle he didn’t expect to win. Rip struggled for words, so Sara saved him, seeing this and speaking up.
“It’s done. We won.”
Rip had looked at her then, with tears in his eyes, tears he never let them see, and nodded once, gratefully. The sun was setting behind him. It had been a very long, very hard day, and they were all so very tired. Slowly, they all walked back into the Waverider.
Somehow, they all ended up sitting around Rip’s office, weighed down by a lot of emotions. No one wanted to go home. Outside, their families waited, oblivious to the enormity of what had happened that day – of what they had achieved. They had won, but at a cost. Vandal Savage was gone. Their mission was over. They were elated and devastated; triumphant but having lost so much; broken and tired and shining like stars, these people who had saved time itself.
Sara watched them all quietly, legs curled up beneath her in the chair closest to the door, looking in on the room. To her, they were amazing.
Mick was sitting opposite her in another of the chairs, gun on his lap, absently cleaning it with a cloth that was so covered in grease and soot she wondered if it wasn’t in fact a counter-productive measure, because there was no way that thing was making the gun cleaner. His eyes were unfocused, hands lazily playing with the gun, as if he were deep in thought, or somewhere far away in his mind. She wondered if Len was there. It was easy to forget Mick was broken, too.
Her gaze shifted to the members of her team that still held brightness and laughter inside of them; Ray was searching through the bookshelves, setting hourglasses’ on their heads, spinning the globe; fiddling with anything he could get his hands on, essentially. There was one of those bright smiles on his face, like the world couldn’t hurt him. He still looked at it with wonder instead of fear, curiously delving into the future instead of fearing it. Ray Palmer was a good man.
Off to one side stood the Hawks: Kendra and Carter, together again, and the sight was a strange one – they stood in full armour, although they had removed their helmets, and were speaking in hushed tones across the room. As Sara watched, Carter leaned forwards to brush a strand of hair out of Kendra’s face, and she blushed, looking down with a smile so gentle it could make flowers grow. It was good to see Kendra smiling again: out of all of them, after all the lifetimes spent running, she deserved something happy at the end. Even as she smiled, however, Kendra was sparing a quick, sad glance towards Ray, her eyes swimming with longing.
Sara figured they were leaving soon. Their war was done. It had been a long time coming, and Kendra and Carter were off to try living for once – but she also knew that Ray would never leave, the fight was in him, the need to do good – and if it meant hurting Kendra by making her choose, Sara knew that Ray would step aside with grace. He would stay, they would go. The Waverider would get even emptier.
That thought hurt, so she blinked, eyes swinging to Jax and the Professor. There, finally, was joy. Jax was beaming despite himself, and kept shaking his head slightly, muttering ‘I don’t believe it’ to himself, and pride seemed to burst free of him and food the room. That kid – he hadn’t wanted to come, but he had risen to the challenge, and chosen to stay to help people – to him more than anyone, this was a victory. This was a sign-post to his future, where he proved to everyone and to himself that he could do it, that a kid with a bum knee and a good hand for mechanics could save the world.
Jax was grinning, looking to the professor every few minutes, who was sitting with a similar expression of amused disbelief, but his aged eyes were shining with a different kind of pride. He had seen the end of battle before; he had lost another partner on a mission to save the world. Martin Stein kept looking up at Jax, as if to make sure he was still there, and touching the younger man’s shoulder with pride, like a father would. It made Sara smile to see, and Jax noticed, throwing her a grin of such blinding victory she returned it without thinking.
That left Rip.
Their captain was sitting at his desk, one elbow on the table propping up his head. His eyes were unfocused. Numbness seeped out of his every movement, a deep-rooted shock at being there, that his fight was done but he was still around – but there was something lighter about him, too. The darkness behind his eyes, the grief there – it had shifted, somehow. It was no longer haunting him; Rip looked free of the weight that had hung around him for the entire time she had known him, the albatross he wore around his neck gone. To her, it seemed that he could breathe more easily now.
As she watched, Rip looked up. He caught her staring, but didn’t blink, holding the gaze as he met it, his weary eyes confirming her suspicions – he was better now. Or starting to be. The brown depths she met were exhausted, and Rip would probably sleep for a month after this, but there were no longer screaming with an unspeakable grief. They were warm, reaching out, asking not to be alone anymore. In a mirror, a slow smile stretched across his face: Rip never grinned, he never smiled widely with his teeth, but his rare, closed lipped but genuine smiles were all the more special because of that.
Loudly, despite herself, Sara began to laugh.
It tore its way out of her chest, cracking into the room like thunder, and she did nothing to stop it – because this was madness. No human could feel as much as she was feeling and not crack. Her sister was gone, and that was still a knife in her chest, but so was Savage, and she was alive, and she was still fighting, and all the stress and grief and heartache and hope and relief and pain she was feeling was too much for one soul to contain, and her body acted without her minds permission - and Sara Lance laughed. It all left her, all those swirling emotions, sinking to her ribcage and soaring free as she laughed so hard she gasped for breath.
It was only when she stopped to suck in deep breaths, wiping the tears from her eyes, that she noticed the strange looks the rest of her team was giving her. Rip’s smile had dropped, but he didn’t look angry, just amused. That just made her smile more.
“What are you laughin’ at?” Mick asked, looking disgruntled.
“It’s just . . . we won. We did it.” Sara shook her head, swiping her hair out of her face, feeling tears pricking at her eyes as she regarded all of them, her mouth still set into a wide, gaping grin. She couldn’t stop. It was laugh or cry, do or die – and she was ready to live. “I never . . . I never thought we stood a chance, really.”
“Nice to know you had so much faith in us!” Jax threw out, but he was laughing, too.
Sara kept shaking her head, the incomprehensible truth and relief of that like a drug, leaving her strangely detached and yet hyper-aware, laughing at the wonder it was to just be breathing. “It’s not that. I just - I thought we’d lose, or we’d be fighting for a long time, perhaps forever – but it’s over. We did it, saved the world . . .” She grinned at them. “Isn’t that amazing? We did that. Us. All of us.”
Sara Lance looked around at them, her little family: her people. “We saved the world.”
Then, Mick started to laugh. And Mick’s laugh was a low chuckle, a rumble that somehow filled the room despite that, and then Ray was laughing, and Jax, and Kendra and Stein and Carter, and even Rip at his desk laughed softly a few times. They laughed loud, long, uninhibited by the weight of the world. They laughed because it was the only thing left to do. They laughed until they ached because it meant they were alive, they had made it, and they were still there to see in the sunrise. No one had expected that.
A bunch of assholes who should never have known each other had somehow, inexplicably, grew together as a family, and they had saved the entire world.
If that wasn’t laughable, she didn’t know what was.
*
The team slept for a long time, after that. It had been a long few months, and they slept like the dead until they woke, slowly congregating back at Rip’s office at some point in the next day. Rip himself had been there for a while before any of them arrived; he had slept, but he woke feeling more rested than he had in a year after just a few hours, finding himself standing in an empty office in the early hours. It was the real world outside, and dawn was approaching. The sound of laughter still rang through the room, in his mind, and his heart ached less for being in there than it used to.
Rip looked around the room. Finding himself alive was as much a shock to him as it had been to anyone else. Since the start of this mission, he had only seen one end for himself: dying to stop Savage. In no predictions of his own future did he see himself living through it – what’s more, choosing to live. For them. It was not what he expected, not at all.
“You look like you’re thinking big thoughts,” Sara’s voice said. He wheeled around to see her leaning against the door, arms crossed, one side of her lip tugging upwards. “Penny for them?”
Rip’s reply was simple: “I’m alive.”
“Yes,” she replied, looking at him strangely. “You are.”
“That’s big.”
Sara nodded, “It is.”
“I don’t know how to feel about it,” Rip admitted. He blinked, coming back to his senses – talking about being alive, when Sara had just found out about her sister – he pulled a hand through his hair, ashamed. Looking away, he added. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that I’m ungrateful for being alive, or that I don’t want to be here. I just-” He shook his head, slightly. “I never expected it. To still be here.”
“You thought you’d die fighting Savage,” Sara deducted. She was watching him carefully again, head tilted to one side, and Rip could hardly bear to look at her under that scrutiny, feeling like she could see right through him. Instead of letting him off, she pushed. “Did you want to?”
“No,” Rip answered quickly. Then he added. “I don’t know. I didn’t want to die - I just couldn’t imagine a future. Not for me. Not without them.”
“And now?”
“And now . . .” Rip looked up, seeing her. Sara, who had just lost her sister. Sara, who needed to know that there was a brighter day to wait for; that a loss didn’t have to mean an end. So Rip admitted something so terrible he had never said it aloud, because he felt a twist of guilt at the words, as if they were a betrayal. “Now I have no idea what the future holds. I have no plan, no mission – I’ve never had that before. Right now, the future is a mystery . . . and I want to see what it has to show me next.”
It was a punch to the gut, to say it aloud. But it filled him with a giddy excitement at the same time, the little voice in his head that always said leap before look, the part of his soul that had ran out into the stars in search of adventure and wasn’t done exploring yet, not while there were people to save and things to see and a whole lot of time to discover.
Rip wanted a future. To say it made it true; he saw the conflict in Sara’s blue eyes as she watched him, the battle of grief and hope. He knew it was hard, because he had stood where she had. But Sara had always been stronger than he was, and her blue eyes cleared. They sparked and shone with hope, as she angled her head towards him and asked.
“Want some company, when you’re finding that out?”
Rip’s only answer was a smile.
*
Rip was in the kitchen. That sight enough was strange to Sara, who walked in, wondering vaguely if this were a dream, to find their captain sans coat and wearing a blue apron, several pans sizzling contentedly in front of him. She paused in the door, took in the sight, blinked until red spots appeared on her closed eyes to check it was real, and then cleared her throat loudly.
Spinning around so fast Sara tensed on instinct; Rip froze when he saw her there, seemingly as thrown at the sight of her as she was of him. For a moment, they just looked at each other. Then Sara cracked a grin and began to laugh at him, and Rip made a face in turn, rolling his eyes and returning his attention to the food.
“You won’t want any, then,” he said smugly. Although his back was now to her as Sara took a seat at the countertop, she could picture the smug victory on her face – he knew her true weakness: food. Sara scowled a little.
“I didn’t say that,” she mumbled.
“I’m sorry? What was that?”
“I said you’re an asshole and I’m taking some food whether you give it to me willingly or not,” Sara smiled sweetly. He had turned towards her, pretending he couldn’t hear, but his eyebrows jumped up at her words, twitching into a puzzled expression. In one hand, he held a spatula, which was pointed in Sara’s direction a moment later.
“Don’t mock the chef. But yes, I made enough for everyone.”
Sara chuckled as he flipped what appeared to be fried vegetables in one pan, the other hand using the spatula to turn over eggs in another. There was a splattering of all kinds of food matter on the front of Rip’s apron; his sleeves were pushed up untidily to his elbows, and there was a streak of what looked like white flour running through his brown hair. She contented herself to watch him for a few minutes.
Rip moved fluidly around the kitchen, managing every part of the meal at the same time, flicking between his pans without pause, unthinking. He looked natural, moving around, like he could do it blindfolded. Between that and his more casual clothing, Rip looked more relaxed than she had seen him in an age, as cemented by the lazy smile which flitted across his features at odd moments, hazing over his determined face with peace.
Sara told him so. “You look good, Rip. Happier. How come you’ve never cooked before?”
“I have, obviously.”
“Jerk. I meant why have you never cooked for us?”
Rip stopped moving. Giving a little shrug, he turned off the nearest hob, flicking the eggs onto the plates already laid out beside him and flicking the towel he was using as an oven glove over his shoulder, so it lay there as he assembled the rest of the plate. “I didn’t know any of you, not well, anyway. It never even occurred to me. And in case you didn’t notice, I wasn’t doing too well when it came to self-care.”
He laughed hollowly at his own joke, speaking casually. Rip’s nimble hands flicked the contents of the remaining pans over the plates, placing vegetables and crispy bacon strips and home-cut fried potatoes beside the omelette he had already slid centrally onto the plate. As he put the pans back onto the hob, they clanged slightly in his rush to scoop up the finished dinners, placing one in front of Sara before stepping back, watching her eagerly.
Although it was obviously what he was waiting for, she didn’t take a bite of the steaming food, not yet. Instead Sara blinked at him, at the little spark in his eyes, and nodded. “Then thank you for doing it now.”
“It was no problem at all, Miss Lance. I enjoy cooking; I’d missed it, actually-”
Rip was cut off by Sara making a noise of surprise as she bit into the omelette. It was still slightly too hot but her eyes flicked shut as she took the bite, exclaiming in shock as they flew open. Sara looked from the omelette to Rip, who looked positively terrified.
“Ho-ly shit.”
Sara was grinning widely, only held off from tucking into the food with reckless abandon and shoving as much of it as possible into her mouth by Rip’s face. He looked shocked, wincing slightly and raising his eyebrows as if to ask in a good way or a bad way? Sara nodded vigorously. A smile appeared at that, and Rip busied himself with his own plate, joining her at the counter a moment later.
By then, Sara was taking bites as big as her own fist, humming happily with every mouthful.
Rip sat quietly opposite her, cutting his own food into much more reasonable pieces and eating them with a not very well hidden smirk. “I’m glad you like it.”
“I do! Holy Hannah, Rip, I didn’t know you could cook!”
One of his eyebrows quirked up at that. “Haven’t we already been over this?”
“But I mean you can cook well. This is delicious. I wasn’t even planning on eating but I could eat this all day. I thought – well, to be honest, I thought you’d be a mess of a cook-”
“Thanks very much-”
“-but this is awesome!” Sara finished, ignoring the sarcasm of his interruption to sigh happily. She had foregone cutlery and was grabbing pieces of fried broccoli straight from her plate, gesturing to him with one before she popped it in her mouth. “How are you so good a cook? Do they teach all Time Master’s to be five-star chefs, or it’s that an elective?”
Rip laughed a little, shrugging modestly. He dropped his gaze to his food, playing with it for a moment. “I did have a son, Sara. I had to cook for Jonas sometimes. I’m not completely inadequate, you know.”
He said it lightly, as a joke, but she felt a twinge of guilt. It was clear that memories still had the power to inflict injury open him, especially concerning his family, and that he still wasn’t used to not being a dad anymore. She wondered if her own dad had felt the same way, after she . . .
Sara cut off the thought quickly. She couldn’t think about home without a hand clenching around her heart and squeezing.
Her discomfort must have shown, for when she looked up again, Rip was watching her carefully. He asked softly, “What do you mean you weren’t planning to eat?”
“I, uh, I wasn’t hungry, that’s all,” Sara shrugged. It was a lie. She had gone to the kitchen intending to grab beer and a protein shake to keep her going, her churning stomach not wanting anything more. Not wanting to give this away, she returned her gaze to the food in front of her, which no longer seemed so appetising. The world was shrinking away from her again, leaving only the sharp absence and numbness of the past few days. Making a show of it, she forced down another few bites, although now they tasted like sawdust in her mouth. “You see? I’m fine. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“Sara-”
She shook her head, decidedly not looking at him as the tone of Rip’s voice echoed previous lectures. “Please don’t.”
“You have to eat. I know you don’t want to, and it seems pointless to right now, but you have to,” Rip pleaded, putting down his own cutlery with a faint clunk of metal against the surface of the counter. He leaned across it slightly, waiting for her silently to lift her gaze to him – and Sara found only understanding waiting for her there. “I know how hard it is, the first few weeks. That’s partly why I offered to park up the Waverider for a month – yes, so the team could go home and rest – but also because I thought it might be easier for you if it wasn’t so crowded on here.”
Sara blinked. “That was why . . .”
Rip nodded. “I remember . . . when I found Miranda and Jonas, I – I hardly remember that first week. I was here. I stole the Waverider and took off to kill Savage, but I didn’t have a plan yet, so I ended up just . . . drifting.” His gaze wavered, and Rip swiped a hand across his eyes quickly, a new steel appearing there. “I raged. I screamed. I wept. I rarely ate, or showered, or slept, and I made myself quite ill for it. I barely had the energy to get up most days.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing,” he said sadly. “I let myself wallow in it for far too long, I’m afraid. It hurt me badly, and I fell into habits I couldn’t shake for months.”
“Watching the video,” Sara guessed. She was watching him tentatively. Rip talked about his past more often than he probably thought he did, wore his heart on his sleeve, but he rarely mentioned those first failed attempts to save his wife and son, nor those weeks immediately afterwards.
“Yes,” Rip agreed. “I’d watch it for hours on a loop. I’d forget to shave or shower. I stopped cooking and survived on space rations. And it’s dangerous, Sara, to let that numbness take a hold. I stopped being scared, which made me reckless, and I stopped caring about myself. I don’t want you to feel the same.”
Sara was shaken. The same numbness he spoke of, she had felt slowly sinking into her own life for the past few days. It was true, she hadn’t eaten properly since that first night, nor had she showered. In fact, she was sitting in the kitchen wearing three-day old pyjamas and her hair was unbrushed, and Sara didn’t like how familiar everything Rip was saying was sounding. She pushed her plate away and began to rise, but Rip rose with her.
“Sara, please,” he said softly, holding out a hand to her. “You don’t have to go through this alone like I did. Let me help you. Even if it’s just by listening, or cooking if you like, or sharing a drink. You’re always looking after everybody else – look after yourself now. Don’t be alone.”
Rip stood, his hand in mid air between them, open palmed. It was an invitation for her to take it, to accept his help and his friendship, a hand that could pull her back to the world when Sara felt it slipping away.
Looking at the hand, Sara flashed back to a moment years ago, when she had returned from the ‘dead’ the first time – she had stood in a hospital, hiding from her family, and Oliver Queen had held out a hand and asked her to believe in a future where she could stand in the light. He had been right. That time, she had taken the leap of faith and taken his outstretched hand, and without that gesture, she might never have spoken to Laurel again in the first place.
It may have hurt her less now . . . but she wouldn’t have sacrificed all those moments with Laurel for all of the world. She would never have held her sister again. She would probably be an assassin still, not a hero, and she certainly wouldn’t have been standing on that ship right then, with a friend, who was trying to save her just like Ollie had been.
Slowly, Sara pulled her eyes up from the open hand to Rip’s face. Like Ollie, he had eyes shining with compassion without judgment, someone who had shared pain and understood all too intimately how she was feeling. It was like looking into a mirror, looking at Rip. And if he could make it – maybe she could too.
‘Please’ Rip’s mouth moved soundlessly, mouthing the plea. He never blinked, never wavered, just waited for her to decide.
Even Sara was half surprised to find her own hand slipping into his, taking it and holding it tightly. Rip’s gaze dropped to look at their interlaced fingers, then returned to her face, nodding firmly. He didn’t try to hug her, or to hold her, or make any move but to hold her hand firmly, and that was enough. It was a start.
You’re going to be okay, his eyes seemed to say. He believed it. If he could believe in her so much, Sara thought, maybe she could, too. She didn’t let go.
*
“Do you watch movies?”
Rip jumped at the sudden noise, looking up to find Sara at his door. There was something worryingly glazed about her eyes, which usually cut sharp as swords and shone like diamonds, but the fact that she had come to try and pull herself out of the darkness spoke louder. She needed something to pull her back.
The question itself was an odd one, so he answered simply. “Of course I do. I’m from the future, not another planet.”
“How do you know they don’t have movies on other planets?”
The response was snapping out of Sara’s lips before she even seemed to think about it, blinking a little as she said them. She seemed to come a little more into herself, even looking interested as she fixed him with a look.
“I don’t, I guess. Maybe we’ll ask the first aliens we meet, how about that?” Rip replied, trying a smile. This didn’t seem the time for deep conversation, as it wasn’t always what they needed. Sometimes, just talking to someone about anything – stupid things – was something.
“Okay,” Sara nodded in agreement. Then, still needing something, her body language aimed towards him, like she wanted to walk into the room, she asked, “What movies do you like?”
She tried a smile that died on her lips, and he was on his feet in an instant, crossing the room. Sara’s eyes asked not to be alone. It was painfully clear that she just needed company, and he was happy to oblige, if it helped. Rip paused close to her, taking in her face before shrugging. “I have a few old Westerns in my room that are good. Want to watch one with me?”
Sara nodded, face flush with relief. “I was hoping you’d say that. Meet me in my room?”
Rip aimed his warmest smile in her direction. “I’ll be there in a flash.”
“Don’t let Barry hear that,” Sara joked lightly, a small laugh coming from her. It still sounded wrong, lacking the vibrancy of her hearty laugh that used to echo through the ship, but it wasn’t fake or forced. She walked away, and Rip all but ran to his room, grabbing My Darling Clementine from a shelf and pausing at the kitchen to grab movie snacks before heading to her room. He figured that if he could tempt her with popcorn, at least he knew she had eaten something that day.
The door was open for him when Rip got there. Sara was sitting on her bed, laptop in front of her, and put the DVD he handed her into a slot, placing it at her feet and settling back on the bed. When he hesitated, she rolled her eyes and patted the bed next to her, shuffling over a little to make more room for him.
“Come on, you won’t catch anything,” she said dryly, jerking her head to indicate for Rip to come closer. “And I won’t understand what’s going on if you don’t explain it to me. I never understood the point of Westerns, although I can see why they’d appeal to you.”
Ignoring her teasing, Rip nervously sat on the bed. At first, he left a space between him and Sara, not wanting to make her uncomfortable. A black screen opened to the film’s credits, however, and Sara huffed, shutting off the lights in the room so only the small screen threw her into relief as she shifted again, moving until she was leaning against him.
Sara’s hip was against his and she was sitting against him, his shoulder propping her up, and she asked quietly, “Okay?”
“Okay,” he confirmed, nodding.
Before an hour was out, he and Sara were munching their way through the popcorn and assorted snacks he had brought with him, the film’s score interrupted by the crinkling of packets, although he didn’t mind one bit. With something to focus on, Sara slowly returned to him, coming around as if from sleep; she began to ask questions and criticise the realism of the film, snorting “there’d be way more blood” at several points and taking handfuls of popcorn. In turn, he relaxed into her company, becoming accustomed to the weight of her on his shoulder, and eventually shifting his arm until she was tucked under it.
By the end of the film, she was sleeping silently under his arm, and Rip didn’t have the heart to wake her as the credits rolled. Stretching as best he could, he pulled a grey blanket at their feet to cover them, falling into an easy rest beside her not long afterwards.
*
It was six days post-Savage that the strangeness faded, that they were alive and their mission was complete. It had been a week that seemed to exist outside of space and time, for Sara. Nothing felt real – it was a week of battle aftermath, a time of quiet and peace after all the noise of the fight. There was nothing to do but sit around the Waverider, and she didn’t leave at all in that first week, confining herself to the familiar rooms and halls of the time-ship. There was no rush. There was nothing to fight.
For an entire week, she allowed the numbness that was so easy to sink into to take over.
Sara sat in her room and stretched. She worked out twice a day. She cooked, she ate, she made conversation she didn’t remember after with Rip. He looked as out of it as she felt, floating through life without emotion or thought.
Sara let this happen, because she wasn’t ready to think about it, not yet.
It was still there, at the back of her mind, for every second of every day, the gnawing, biting, scraping grief that made her hands shake and the food she had spent four hours cooking go untouched. The darkness was there, the shadows in the corners of her eyes, but threatening to take over her entire vision when she thought too much of Laurel’s face or tried to out-think time to find a way for Len to survive the Oculus, too. There were gaps where they won. She would sit for hours and stare at a blank wall, and only notice hours had passed when something distracted her. There were blank spaces in her memory where it got too much.
For that first week, she managed not to break down. There was emptiness, but she didn’t weep, she didn’t fall to the floor and cry; she held on by her fingertips to reality and prayed she would be able to hold on. Sara Lance didn’t want to cry. She feared that if she started, she might not stop.
But the prickling behind her eyes spiked until she could not hold back the flood as that week ended.
Later, she could even put her finger on what had set her off – it could have been anything, she supposed; she had been cracking at the seams all week, waiting for the inevitable moment where the peace broke, and she exploded. Everything that she felt swelling inside of her – the regret and pain and emptiness – no human could hold all that inside of them for long. It was too much.
One minute, Sara was in the cargo bay, a punch bag in front of her, laying into it with bandaged hands. The next, her vision was blurred and she was awake of a gasping, choking sound dully echoing throughout the room, but it took her a minute to realise it was coming from her.
Time passed. She wasn’t sure how long. Sara kept hitting through her tears, the bag swinging, half-stumbling into it as she fell forwards, lungs burning for air. The world was closing in, and she was taking her best shots to keep it at bay and loosing. She was thoughtless, or in fact so consumed with thoughts of Laurel that all else faded in white noise. Sara knew her fists were hitting the hard bag, knew the bandages were slipping on her sweating hands and her breathing was too ragged, could see spots of blood beginning to appear on her knuckles as she continued to launch a furious flood of blows, soon dripping down her palms and to the metal grating below, landing with a hiss as they touched the hot surface.
Reality blurred and faded, until her surging grief and the punching bag were the only things in the world – and then she broke. Something snapped inside. Sara fell against the bag and screamed. The sound was inhuman, animal, tearing itself free of her and loosed into the world like a malignant spirit, roaring eastward and westward to the ends of the earth. It echoed strangely through the hollow metal space. It scratched her throat raw. The scream was not so much something she was doing, but a part of her, an ugly dark part of her soul that wanted to sink into nothingness rather than face a world without Laurel Lance in it.
The scream could have been a ragged quick shriek or a prolonged, agonised wail, she was not sure. Time had stopped existing. It was happening, and then it wasn’t, and she was slumped against the punching bag, sobbing. Having broken her loop of punching by screaming, Sara felt exhaustion creep into her bones, feeling her hands begin to sting, but the rest of the world still felt far away, separated, like she was looking out through a thick fog.
Nothing was real, and then through the fog, she heard her name.
Someone was saying it, over and over, until eventually Sara lifted her weary head to find its source. Rip was standing a few feet away. His hands were outstretched towards her and there was a sharply pained look on his face, torn with concern, wide eyes shining with emotion as her gaze met his. Rip was still saying her name, taking a tentative step closer. Sara nodded. In a moment, he was by her side, an arm wrapping tightly around her as Sara fell into him, letting herself be held and supported as Rip held her, renewed tears falling thick and fast down her cheeks.
They fell to the floor together. Sara felt Rip’s arms around her, his chest against her side as she sunk onto her knees, a thumb rubbing her shoulder as a soothing voice spoke to her. She didn’t know what Rip was saying. It didn’t really matter. He was there, that was all that counted. Rip held her as she cried, until there were no tears left, only a hollow core, sitting on the grating of the Waverider as the bag swung above them.
All Sara knew was that without the warmth of Rip’s hands holding her, she didn’t know if she could have swallowed down the darkness that day, but he held her and carried her home, until exhausted she rested her head against his shoulder. Her breathing steadied, and her hand found Rip’s; he took it and squeezed gently. They didn’t say a thing, no words were needed – they stayed sitting that way for a long, long time.
*
Rip wasn’t at all surprised when Sara strode into his office with a determined look on her face and announced that they were going to break open his best bottle of whiskey.
Since her breakdown in the cargo bay five days ago, they had been seeing more of each other; Sara made an effort to come into his office and talk or would drag him down to the kitchen if he stayed in there for too long without eating, and yesterday had even told him that they were going to meditate together, sat on the floor, and waited for him to join her. Rip would never admit that it had helped to clear his head, least not to her, and had grumbled about his aching hips afterwards from sitting cross-legged for so long.
Now, she was breaking open his French Revolution bourbon with a gleeful look on her face, pressing a glass into his palm a moment later.
“What are we toasting to?” Rip asked, looking up at her. Sara was across the room, and the next moment a grating sound which set his teeth on edge emitted from the scraping legs of his chair being dragged over to his desk, where she sat opposite him, looking all too proud of herself.
“Absent friends,” she decided thoughtfully.
Rip clinked their glasses together, taking a sip with a nod to that. “To friends, wherever they may be.”
“Do you have friends?” Sara asked, looking at him curiously, quite taking him by surprise. Every time he opened his mouth to answer, however, she added another exception. “Apart from us, I mean. And Gideon. And Jonah Hex, who I’m still betting was more than a friend.”
She gazed at him expectantly, and Rip forced down a smile. “No comment.”
“I’ll just ask him next time we see him, you know.”
“What makes you think we’ll see Jonah again?”
“I doubt you’ll be able to stay away from him,” Sara replied, still smirking. Eyes flashing, she took a gulp that couldn’t have been easy to swallow, but she did so with a grin, challenging him. “And that wasn’t what I was asking – friends, do you have them?”
Rip dropped his gaze from her to the glass in his hand, setting it onto the desk in front of him. Face pensive, he could feel her eyes still on him, burning, but focused instead of tracing the rim of his glass with a finger. It was a hard question. Rip’s life had never been ordinary, and while he supposed anyone else on the ship could tell story upon story of times with friends, he struggled to find a concrete memory.
“I knew the other children at the Refuge,” he answered finally, still not able to look her in the eye. “I knew my colleagues with the Time Masters. Miranda – Miranda was my friend, before she was my wife. And after, of course – but I suppose that no, I don’t have friends in the same way you do. I’ve met people throughout time who I liked, sometimes a great deal, but I never stay in one place for long enough to have friends, per se.”
Finally, Rip forced his eyes reluctantly to meet hers. There was no judgement in Sara’s gaze, only a slight turn of her head, tilted to one side. She blinked, then said. “Until now.”
There was no doubt in her tone, no hesitancy, and Rip felt his heart grow three times the size.
“Until now,” he agreed, unable to stop his lip from turning up, unable to stop the hope that surged through his bounding pulse. Mirroring him, Sara’s lip quirked up in turn, and then they were smiling at each other from above their glasses, smiling more than either of them had any right to.
It took Sara only a moment to change tack, settling comfortably back into her chair, twinkle in her eye. Folding her legs up beneath her, she sighed contently, and the tiredness falling away from her face before being replaced by ease; she closed her eyes and sipped her drink, and Rip couldn’t look away from her.
“Tell me a story, Rip,” she said softly, after a minute of quiet. “All those places, all those people – tell me about them. If that’s alright, of course. Please.”
Sara still had her eyes closed, and Rip was secretly thankful that she missed the way he never looked away from her. Then, finding the words came more easily than he expected, falling out of his mouth in stories he hadn’t told to anyone since Jonas asked for bedtime stories, Rip began to speak.
*
Sara found one of Leonard’s jackets in the washer, and found herself staring at it for almost an hour before she moved. It was warm in her hands, and while the rational part of her brain knew it was just from the machine, a part of her wanted to believe it was from him, lingering there, as if he had just stepped out of the room.
She wished he could step back in.
But Len was gone, he wasn’t coming back, and a pack of cards sat unused on her bedside table. They would not be opened for a long time. Slowly, Sara shifted the jacket in her hands, shrugging it on without thinking. It was miles too long, the sleeves dwarfing her own arms, but she hugged it closer to herself anyway, closing her eyes for a second. When she stood like that, Len could almost still be there.
Her eyes snapped open at the sounds of footsteps, and Sara wheeled around to find Rip approaching, the tails of his coat flying and falling dead when he paused suddenly, seeing her there. He went as red as she felt, looking down at the coat around her which she was hugging to her chest and quickly dropping her hands to her sides, flushed, eyes on her sneakers. Sara felt like she had been caught in an intimate moment, and could barely bring her eyes up.
It was Rip who spoke first. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you-”
“You didn’t disturb anything! I was just . . .” Sara trailed off, finding there was no answer. She was just missing him. Missing her friend, her something, and what they might have had. Missing someone who should have been there with her, and would have been if he were able. “I just . . . I found it, and I missed him.”
Sara felt the care slip away from her, spreading like ice through her, and hated the irony of that. It carved away the progress of the last few days, and suddenly she was standing at the Occulus and not able to save him, all over again.
“It’s okay, Sara,” Rip said softly, pulling her away from those dangerous thoughts. He was watching her gently, curiously, “You’re allowed to miss him, too. He was important to you. Laurel was important to you. One doesn’t eliminate the other. You’re allowed to grieve them both – you should grieve them both.”
Sara, feeling small, balled the loose sleeves in her hands and looked up at him, feeling something warm slide down her face. She was tired, tired in her bones, and she needed to hear that more than anything. Rip was there for her, again, and she didn’t know how she would have acted if it weren’t for him, constantly pulling her back from the edge but also telling her that everything she felt was okay and real.
“But Laurel was my sister,” she said, helplessly. Although she hated how small her voice sounded, the words themselves rang true; for two weeks, she had been fighting herself on that one. She thought that Laurel should be the main person on her mind, and felt guilty each time her thoughts shifted to Len, who she had known for a blink of an eye, compared to her sister.
“And you and Leonard were . . . together?” Rip was asking this time, guessing but unsure of the answer.
Sara shook her head. “No. We weren’t . . . we might have been, one day. I liked him. I didn’t know how. I kissed him, back there-” Sara hadn’t told anyone that, and there had been no witnesses to know. It felt like an admission of something big, but Rip’s gaze remained unchanged, and she bit her lip until it drew blood when she paused. “He was my friend: that I was sure of – we might have been more, in another world. I feel like that future was stolen.”
“I’m sorry,” Rip said, quietly; now his face did change, twisting with guilt. “None of you should have been there.”
“It wasn’t your fault. Len made his choices, and I made mine. I’m proud of them.”
“I’m sorry that you lost him, all the same. I know what it’s like to feel the future slip away from you.”
Sara nodded, looking away again. It was getting hard to breathe, thinking about Leonard, and she was beginning to lose the sound of his voice in her head. She breathed in the smell of the coat, and turned back to him. “I think I want to be alone for a little while. To think. I – I’m okay, I promise. I just could use a little time.”
Rip nodded solemnly, “If you need me-”
“I know where you are,” she finished, lips twitching as she nodded. “Really. If I need you, I’ll come to you, Rip. You know I’m grateful for that, right?”
“You don’t have to be grateful, I just don’t want you to be lonely,” he replied. As he left, Rip stopped close to her, placing a hand on Sara’s shoulder. It squeezed comfortingly, and Sara lifted her own, covering his hands with hers for a moment, and then Rip was gone, leaving her with ghosts and a coat.
She didn’t feel as haunted as she might of, but instead thought of Len in a way that left her laughing after long, fingers itching for a fight and memories of her friend filling her head. She missed him, she missed him dearly – but Len was gone. It was time she started to accept the things she could not change, and so Sara took off the jacket, folded it neatly, and left it in the laundry room. Her heart felt lighter with each step away.
*
Jonas had his mother’s eyes, Rip’s hair, and could range between their personalities minute to minute. He laughed easily, would sit and read flight manuals happily for hours, and could name every major constellation by the age of six. They used to promise him that one day he would reach those stars, before he went to sleep. The boy would fall asleep smiling, and Rip’s heart broke for his uncertain future, even back then.
Rip’s son was so much better than him, so unencumbered by the world and optimistic despite the war; less blood-stained than Rip was at that age, when he died. Jonas was supposed to be the one to survive this, not him. Jonas was supposed to shake the stars, live on; to find new hope and rise and rise and do so many great things – now, he would never get the chance to. He was just a boy . . .
For a year, Rip had gone dead inside when thoughts of his family came to him. When he first found them, then he had screamed and wept. The weeks after, he had broken down more times than he could count. But then he had a hope, no matter how small, to stop Savage, and forced it down, instead feeling nothing so he was neither hoping too much nor feeling too much.
Feeling nothing had kept his heart at bay for a year.
But Savage was gone now, and there was no hope. His family were gone. There was no way to bring him back. These were the facts. For the first time in a while, Rip pulled out his silver pocket watch, stared at the photo of his son, and stated them to himself over and over in his head until he believed they were true. Of course, if it was real, it meant that all hope was gone, and going dead inside was no longer an option to his mind, which dealt in absolutes.
On or Off. Do or Die. Fight or Flight. Hope or Despair. Right or Wrong.
He wasn’t sure when he had started crying. It had been a year since he had last let himself be weak in that way, and behind the dam of his eyes, enough had welled up to flood entire cities.
A steady flow dripped silently down his face as he shuddered, Jonas’ small face watching him, the smile frozen on his face in the photograph. That was all Jonas would ever be. He would never grow up, never change; he was trapped within in image, between childhood and adulthood in a war he was no part of except to die. The smile didn’t change. Jonas would always be smiling, in Rip’s mind – but that image was distorted again, by the sight of his body, which had seemed so tiny in Rip’s arms, so fragile –
Rip was only aware of his own gasping, of how loud he had grown, when someone else entered the room. Footsteps approached, and he didn’t have to ask who it was – it was Sara, his shadow in all things these days, including grief.
Arms appeared around his shoulders, as a weight placed itself on his back, warmth spreading from the presence. Sara stood behind him and hugged him from behind, leaning over to place her head on his shoulder as he wept, bent over to reach as he sat at his desk, her arms wrapping tightly around him as he shook. Sara didn’t speak – she couldn’t have missed the watch in his hands and between them, words were no longer needed. She held him as he wept, as he had her.
Grateful beyond words, Rip held the watch with one hand and reached up with the other, clasping her hands where Sara’s were locked around him. Her breath brushed his ear, and he grabbed her hand, holding it tightly, for dear life. She had his back, too. Sara moved closer, increasing the warmth and the weight on his back with the hug, and the hands in his own gripped just as desperately. With great, shuddering sobs, Rip let the world crash down around him.
Sara stayed with him the entire time, holding him, until the tears stopped. Then, Rip watched with dead eyes returned to him as she pulled him up, turning him around. One look at his face and her own creased in worry, tucking herself into him again a moment later, arms around his waist. Rip felt his own land on her back, as if from a dream.
“Stay with me, Rip,” Sara pleaded. “Stay with me.”
Between heartbeats, the world returned. Rip was standing in his office, chest aching from crying, and Sara was hugging him. She needed him. He needed her just as much, if not more, he figured. For now, they had each other.
“I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”
*
Three and a half weeks post-Savage, the Waverider was still parked in 2016. Rip had announced it the morning after the fight – he said they all deserved a break, a long one, to see their families and be home, wherever that may be. Sara had tried not to meet anyone’s eyes as he announced it. Rip proposed a month, in which he would wait for them there, and they could come and go as they pleased.
Jax, Stein, and Ray had immediately headed for the hills. Jax had called almost every day, and told them his mother was very happy to have him home; Stein had called once, to announce that the next week they would all be attending a dinner at his or Clarissa’s, and made it clear that ‘no’ was not an option to the invitation. Ray had been flitting between Star City and S.T.A.R Labs, apparently overjoyed to be with technology and friends again. Mick had left for a while, claiming he was off to find Lisa Snart but that she didn’t want to be found, and they had heard no more from him since. The Hawks had asked to stay on the ship, to talk things through and decide where to go from there, which internally confirmed Sara’s suspicions that they weren’t staying for long, but she said nothing. They stayed to themselves a lot, rarely eating with them and vanishing for days into Kendra’s bedroom.
She stayed because home without Laurel wasn’t somewhere she could be, not right then.
And Rip stayed because he had nowhere else to go.
Some people would find that sad: Sara was just glad that he wasn’t alone, and that she didn’t have to be, either. Things were hard, but they had each other. Somehow, that was enough.
Sara was eating her way through her third bowl of cereal when Rip walked into the kitchen. Looking surprised to see her there, he stopped, glancing from the oversized sweater she was using as a dress to the half-empty box beside her with a raised eyebrow.
“If I don’t eat this, Ray will,” she joked, mouthful of Cheerio’s. “He goes through this stuff like a rabbit. I’m doing this for his own good, I swear - it’ll go straight to his ass otherwise.”
Rip’s face did a funny spasm. He twitched, trying to hold it straight, before a strange scoffed laugh passed his lips. Fighting with every word, he choked out, “Is that so?”
Sara nodded assuredly, tapping the seat next to her at the counter. “Grab a bowl.”
Rip did just that. Sara hid her surprise. It wasn’t that they hadn’t been talking – it was a big ship, and while she and Rip ate together some nights, or he came to find her or she went to his office for a drink, they had both need a little space in the aftermath of . . . winning. It was still a strange thought. She knew she needed a little time to breathe, to grieve, and Rip needed the same. When they saw one another, it was as two friends who deeply understood how the other felt, and rarely needed words to communicate that; it was companionable quiet, soothing quiet, and she was grateful for it. Rip had given her space without letting her feel lonely.
Now, she didn’t want to be alone anymore.
“Here,” she said, pouring him a bowl. Sara tipped the open bottle of milk she had in front of her on top of the cereal, before sliding the bowl towards him sideways across the countertop, like a bartender in the Wild West movies. She had been there now; she knew it wasn’t a thing that really happened, but she smiled at the thought anyway. “Sugar’s on your left. I’m going to start the Captain Crunch next.”
“Oh?” Rip asked, nodding his thanks. There was a startled look on his face still from the direction of the conversation, torn with amusement. It was a conflict: Rip’s face twisted, like he wanted to laugh but he wasn’t sure how to do it, stiff from lack of use. He hadn’t been casually happy in a while, Sara concluded. He wasn’t used to smiling and laughing easily again yet.
“Mmmhnn,” she answered as she chewed, keeping her deductions to herself. She was confused enough about how she was feeling, without trying to psycho-analyse someone else. “What is it with all the cereal, anyway? Not that I’m complaining.”
“I got it when I decided to ask you all to come onboard. I thought it would be practical – no cooking involved, easy to do, and who doesn’t like cereal?”
There was such earnestness in the way that he said it that Sara burst into laughter again. She leaned over her bowl, hastily swallowing so she could laugh and almost choking, feeling Rip pat her on the back as she half coughed, half laughed. When her throat cleared, she giggled a second longer before looking over to him.
“Really? You thought we were gonna live off cereal?”
“Not permanently!” Rip protested, mouth falling open at her choking outburst. His hand stayed on her back as he answered. “It wasn’t the best made plan, if I’m honest. I took you lot-”
“Hey!”
“-and tried to save the world! I wasn’t really thinking about what you’d eat. But then you were here, really here, and I panicked and thought cereal was the best way to go. It was an impulse buy!” Rip argued, but there was a lightness to his tone that suited him, eyes alight in a way they were usually dull. He was still struggling through his smiles, working for them, but Sara found that they were quite worth waiting for. Rip finished with a slight pout, turning back to his bowl and grumbling into it, “You’re the one eating it. So I wasn’t bloody wrong, was I?”
Sara couldn’t stop laughing. Rip’s complaining only made it funnier, in fact, that there were six hundred boxes of cereal in a storage room, because apparently he thought they had the metabolism and diet of college students, and would get through that much. The fact that Ray alone had eaten thirty boxes was an outlier. But the honestly of his confession made it all the better – it was a kind gesture, an excessive one, but a kind one, and it was hard to believe there was a time that she had thought that Rip was untrustworthy. He was a giant dork, was what he was.
Sara opened her mouth to tell him so, but what came out instead was: “Rip? Don’t ever change.”
Then she was eating her cereal again joyfully, as Rip griped and munched before her, the knot in Sara’s stomach loosening, a build up of pressure in her chest expelled in her laughter. It was a simple moment, eating cereal with her friend, but that was it for her. Before that, she hadn’t been sure, but now - Yeah, she thought, yeah, I’m going to be okay.
The afternoon ended with Sara inventing a game involving flicking Cheerio’s across the countertop, and seeing who could get one closest to a cupcake Ray had also left there, like some sort of Cheerio-Curling Championship. If Rip’s was closer, Sara was not going to admit it, and they argued about inches for hours after, the captain eventually rolling his eyes and calling it a night when Sara proposed they start a Cereal-Olympics.
*
Rip knocked on the door gently, three times, before he took a step back.
The doors to Sara’s room were closed, as they usually were these days. Before, she had left them open – he would walk past and hear laughter or music; hear her chatting with Kendra or playing cards with Snart; drinking with Mick or teasing Jax. She had always been so open, spilling out light into the ship – now, the ship was emptier, and darker, and her doors were closed. It was cold in the corridor where he stood. The absence of her warmth stood out more starkly there.
She had not been the same since Laurel. It had been a month since they killed Savage. That meant to her, it had been a month since Laurel died – and he didn’t like the thought of her being alone so often, like he had been a year ago, after Miranda and Jonas. He had no one to even try; but she did. She had him.
Sara’s face appeared as the doors slid open, blinking in surprise to see him standing there, but face relaxing into a tired smile in an instant. “Hey, Rip. Is everything alright? Are we going somewhere?”
“Oh, no we’re not,” he said, shaking his head. They had only been back with the team, travelling, for two days. Rip had thought this through in his mind: envisioned coming here, checking on her, letting her know she wasn’t alone – but reality was always harder than imagination allowed, and he found himself tripping over his words, heart stammering. “There’s no mission, we’re not in danger-”
“So why are you . . . ?”
“I just – I thought you might want some company. I know it can’t be easy and, well, I don’t know. It seems stupid now. But when I was where you are now, I didn’t have anyone until I had you; you helped me, and what I’m trying to say is – I don’t know. I just wanted to see you, and make sure you were alright.”
Rip finished lamely, and for a terrifying, still moment, in which his flustered heart stopped altogether, Sara just stared at him.
“Why?” she asked, head tilting to one side.
“Because I was worried about you,” he answered earnestly, “I didn’t want you to think that you were alone.”
A soft, slow smile spread across her features after that. It wasn’t the cracking, loud grin which was her usual expression, but a quieter, closed-lip smile, weighed down with a grief he understood. Rip had worn that smile all too often. But it reached her eyes, which shone with warm, as she stepped aside against the doorframe, nodding at him.
“Come in.”
“Right,” Rip nodded quickly, walking into the room. He passed her, and allowed himself a wince at how weak his words had sounded to the empty room, fixing his expression before he turned back to her, fingers interlocked before him. Sara was still leaning against the door, watching him, but pushed herself up by moving her hip and walked towards him, eyes darting across the room as she did.
She went a little red, tucking a strand of hair behind her hair. Sara added, with a slightly sheepish smile that didn’t fit the confidence she outwardly showed to the world, “Sorry about the mess in here. I know I should clean it, I’ve just been busy-”
Rip hadn’t even noticed the room itself – he was much too pre-occupied with noticing everything about her.
The edges of Sara’s eyes were red, and there were trails in her mascara where she had been crying. Her face was paler than usual; it occurred to him how much Sara seemed to glow – with her freckles and her golden hair and that smile that could rival sunlight, how could she not? But now, the light was dimmed and she looked ill without the vibrancy, her hands small and trembling, her nails with red specks of blood embedded underneath them, matching the perfect crescent mooned scars on her palms. Everything that Sara Lance was in his mind was still there – the steel, the warmth, the contradiction of a woman who was still the strongest person he had ever known – but it was muted by her grief, dimmed from the sun to a candle.
“Sara, you don’t have to worry about that,” Rip said, cutting her off. The room was nothing – it was just that, just a room – she was the light inside. “It’s your room, it’s your home. You don’t have to apologise for anything here.”
To his surprise, Sara looked the opposite of reassured. Her eyes filled with tears. Although she turned, trying to wipe them away quickly, he noticed, stepping closer.
“Are you alright? Miss Lance-”
“Sara,” she corrected, giving him a look through tear stained eyes.
“Sara,” he echoed, watching her carefully. “Please, don’t do what I did. Don’t lock yourself away and let it eat you up inside, the grief you feel. Tell me.”
Sara stood for a second. Then, the proverbial flood began, of words and tears, spilling out of her and dropping to their feet.
“It's just that I don’t have one, not anymore,” Sara said, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes and spilling down her face. They splashed her freckles and dropped to the floor, and Rip’s hands ached to brush them away, so it took all of his strength to keep them at his sides. “My mom lives away, and my dad – he doesn’t need me, he’s . . . used to me being gone. Laurel was who I was going home to, always . . . so where do I go now? I don’t have a home anymore.”
She finished with a gasp, the dawning of those words sharp in her eyes, like saying them aloud had made them true. Panic swelled within them as she blinked, shaking, and it hurt Rip to look at her, but he couldn’t look away, and the simple truth was – she was wrong. So that was what he said.
“Yes, you do. You do have a home. Of course you do.”
“I don’t,” she said and shook her head fiercely, consumed by her own emotions. “Laurel was my home.”
“I understand. And I’m so, so sorry,” Rip said, because he could not hold back any longer. Reaching over, he gently wiped the tears from her face, as he had done once before on the day Sara found out about her sister, back when the grief was raw and sharp where now it is just sad. Because this time she didn’t cut at the edges, his hands stayed on her cheeks as he leant forward, moving until he could see right into her eyes, tears swirling there, and he could see her – only her. “I know . . . I know it’s not the same. And I never mean to replace your home. But if you want it, you have a home, here. The Waverider.”
The last tears falling free before her blue eyes cleared in confusion, Sara blinked up at him. “What?”
“As long as you need it, Sara – you always have somewhere to go.”
“You mean it?” Sara asked, as Rip stepped back, hands falling to his sides as his cheeks coloured, looking at his feet to give her a moment. When he looked back up, her gaze was still unflinchingly locked on his, searching for an answer.
“I do,” Rip replied, smiling slightly. Wasn’t it obvious? Sara had filled this old ship of his with so much light, she had made it – made him – better. That he would turn his back on her when she was the one who needed that support and compassion was unthinkable. Of course his home was hers, if that was what she needed – “The Waverider can be your home now, for as long as you wish to stay, mission or no. Your home can be here. We can be your family. Sara-”
He was quite knocked off guard by the mass that hit him, Sara’s arms tightening around his neck a moment later. She was so small, under his uncertain hands that came to rest on her back, not the scary assassin or his right hand woman, but a woman who had been through more in her life than any of them, and who needed people above all else. Sara was a social animal. The way she made friends on the ship, formed attachments with everyone including him, despite his best efforts to keep her at arm’s reach, proved that. She needed people and love as much as she needed air, thrived off it – and he wondered how long it had been since somebody had done something as simple as to hug her.
Rip’s grip on her tightened a fraction.
“Thank you,” Sara said. The whisper in his ear, her lips brushing against his cheek as she spoke. She didn’t need to say anything else; he knew.
Sara’s head was on his shoulder, her breath warm against his face, and when he held her that tightly, he could feel the beating of her heart against his chest. Something changed in that moment, for him at least. If Sara hadn’t been hugged in weeks, he hadn’t been in a year; the last time Rip had engaged in physical contact that wasn’t being punched in the face, he was holding his family’s bodies as London burned around him. They had still been warm, as if they were just sleeping.
Since then – he didn’t get tender moments. Until Sara.
For Sara, her grief was fresh, a wound still bleeding; but his was old, a scar, and one that had closed forever the night they defeated Vandal Savage. In a dream, in heaven, if such a place existed, he had held his family close as the Waverider plummeted into the sun, and a door closed in his heart. The last stage of grief – acceptance. They were gone, but he had stopped their killer from hurting any more families, from anyone else having to feel as he did and stand in the ruins of their life; he hoped that was enough to sleep well at night.
Miranda and Jonas, they had been his future.
Then there were gone, and the future was gone, and all he saw when he looked ahead was Vandal Savage and an end to this rage and grief that compelled and consumed him and dying bloody. He didn’t think he had a future without them. He didn’t think he could go on – right until the moment he did. Rip had survived that night. So the past month had been trying to work out what living meant; what having a future again meant. It wasn’t an easy thing to discover.
Rip didn’t think he had really believed he had one again, until that moment, holding Sara close and knowing that no matter what came next, he was happy she would be there with him to see it.
He closed his eyes, held her close, and found his lips twisting into a small smile.
Hope. At last. So, that was what it felt like.
Rip remembered now.