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“Mick’s cold is making him snore like a dying elephant,” Leonard says, by way of explanation, standing in Kendra and Sara’s doorway wrapped in his comforter at roughly 1AM, local time.
(1AM, November 7th, 1968, Belgium. To be precise.)
“Well these beds are pretty small, Lenny, you’re gonna have to snuggle if you wanna share,” Sara’s sharpening knives. In bed. Of course.
Leonard fixes her with a dead-eyed stare and meets only flippant impishness of a breed he’s becoming unnervingly fond of in Sara. He refuses to smile, even dryly. “I’ll take the floor.”
“Sure, if you can find a spot,” Kendra’s bunk is across the room. She’s curled up with a blanket and a book, like a civilised person. Why in the hell is Sara sharpening weaponry at this time of night? The light can’t be good for her eyes.
“This is… interesting,” Leonard takes a cautious step inside – he’s never been over the threshold before. Aside from the sign tacked to the door that reads ‘Lady Birds’ in Kendra’s neat cursive, he hadn’t noticed much interior decoration going on. Still this has very definitely become exactly the living space he would expect to somehow contain both an undead assassin and a reincarnated hawk goddess.
Sara’s half of the room is entirely covered in weaponry, dirty clothes and discarded food wrappers. Kendra’s is sparsely but tastefully arranged around an antique dresser and the bed, with an actual to goodness wall hanging and candles. Leonard is almost certain that it smells like cinnamon in her half but somehow not in Sara’s.
“We’ve found that operating a strict zoning system kinda works for us,” Kendra supplies, helpfully, over the top of her book.
“No kidding,” Leonard nudges a katana aside with one foot, making room for himself.
“I got that,” Sara crawls out of bed, tipping her knives into an upturned crate and grabbing the katana to put it up on its stand on the wall.
“Exactly how many sharp objects do you have onboard?” Leonard eyes her, droll from beneath his comforter.
“A lady never tells,” Sara tosses her hair, winks at him (which is… distracting) and then climbs back into bed.
Leonard briefly considers making good on her offer of snuggling, but then decides against it. That’d be weird, right? Snuggling. Not that Leonard ordinarily has any objections to weird. He’s a supervillain. He has a gun that shoots weaponized ice and an extensive list of temperature related puns kept in a back pocket to use at convenient intervals, because his illegal alias is literally Captain Cold and who would pass up that sort of opportunity?
Weird is admittedly what he does best.
But the snuggling would be weird in a human intimacy kind of a way and that’s not an area Leonard wishes to branch into right now, thanks. His hands are full with time travel and immortal despots and Mick Rory’s dead elephant cold, which is making the man exceptionally ill-tempered, even for Mick. Leonard doesn’t want to also think about cuddling up to Sara Lance, however tantalisingly strange and broken she is.
He sleeps at the foot of Sara’s bed, though he angles his head at Kendra’s half of the room so he can smell her cinnamon scented incense. He’s a man of small comforts.
+++
Kendra has the longest bathroom routine of any of them and it becomes a problem very quickly.
“For the love of god, Big Bird!” Sara hammers on the door with far more venom than Leonard could be bothered to muster so early in the morning, “some of us have to pee!”
“And shower!” Martin Stein is clutching his towel and his head ‘n shoulders shampoo and makes a truly delightful sight in button up silk pyjamas; Leonard needs coffee before he can feel actual amusement, but this is still a fun diversion from his own full bladder.
“I’m so not gonna have time to shave,” Jax is rubbing his chin, uncomfortably.
“Kendra!” Sara tries again, delivering the bathroom door another hefty thump.
“If you’re calling me Big Bird,” Kendra wrenches the door open to glare at the, “then I’m calling you Tweety Pie.”
“What?”
“You know? I taught I taw a puddy cat – he’s little, and yellow, and annoying.”
“Kendra, seriously, I have to pee.”
“Hey, it’s alright for you!” Kendra jabs an accusing finger in Sara’s face, “you’re blond! Your hair looks good no matter what you do to it! This – ” she waves a hand at her own tresses which, Leonard thinks, are nowhere near as unruly as she fears, “- takes work. And product! Expensive product! So whilst we’re on the subject, stop stealing my shampoo!”
“Can I steal your shampoo?” Leonard inquires, unnecessarily – he’s already been stealing it and will continue to do so with or without her permission. Not that he especially needs hair product, he keeps his head closely shaved because it requires such minimal effort to maintain, but he likes to smell good. He has standards. And Kendra’s is by far the nicest of any of the hair products to have made their way on board since their arrival.
Kendra levels an eyebrow at him that would be impressive were Leonard himself not, you know, an actual bank robber.
“Can’t you step out for thirty seconds?” Sara demands, “I’m not kidding, I actually need to use the bathroom for it’s, like, intended purpose.”
“I just need to get my eyeliner right – ”
“So use the mirror in our room!”
“The light’s not good enough!”
“Oh for god’s sake,” Leonard brushes past them both into the bathroom, and before they and the rest of the gathered queue can shriek their indignation he re-emerges with Kendra’s liquid eyeliner and a washcloth. “Allow me.”
Kendra arches another eyebrow, but acquiesces as Leonard hands her the washcloth so she can take off what she’s claiming to pass for makeup application.
“Turn into the light, please,” he lifts her chin, peers into her face for a moment to assess the appropriate angle of approach, and then deftly applies two perfectly winged lines. “And you’re done.”
Sara nudges round him to look into Kendra’s face, her expression approving. “Damn, Leo.”
“Please don’t call me that.”
“Huh,” Kendra bounces back to the bathroom sink to look into the mirror. “You’re so hired.”
Leonard remains unmoved – hands her back her eyeliner. “You should also stop over-plucking. Eyebrows are sisters not twins, Kendra.”
Kendra snorts, pads out and down the hall, back to her and Sara’s room. Leonard watches her departing back, ignores the looks he can feel from Sara, Stein and Jax.
“Who do you think taught my sister to put on her face? Our father?” He strolls past them all back into the bathroom and bolts the door before anyone can get past him, enjoys Sara shrieking her outrage whilst he relieves himself.
+++
“Can you do mine?” Sara demands, sometime later, waving a stick of eyeliner at him.
Leonard doesn’t look up from his book. It’s one of Stein’s – particle physics. Dry but intriguing. He prefers the Sailor Moon manga Sara doesn’t know he knows she has hidden under her bed, but he’s already gotten through all of them twice. “Only if you pay me.”
“I’ll buy you coffee.”
“I steal my coffee.”
“Of course you do.”
She slumps into the chair next to his and he spares her a glance, just to appreciate the wry curl of her funny little mouth. She’s cute in a guileless, sardonic way that Leonard can’t help but be pleased by, though he’s sure she wouldn’t appreciate him saying it.
They sit in the silence for a long time – Sara lays her cheek on her forearms, folded over the table, closes her eyes, and Leonard reads. Only the faint hum of the neon lights overhead and the distant rumble of the waverider’s engines keeps them company. Leonard appreciates this about Sara: her silences. Unlike any of the others – aside from Mick – she doesn’t expect polite, pointless conversation from him, (she never asks him how he is, she doesn’t even tell him good morning – it’s delightful). And unlike Mick, she doesn’t constantly generate her own noise.
Sara has a small person’s ability to cause a racket when needs be, but it hasn’t escaped Leonard’s notice that she treads so lightly around the Waverider that she can navigate the entire ship without making a sound. That she can appear as if from nowhere (and has been using this ability to scare the shit out of Jax for a few days now – also delightful), and slip out of rooms completely unnoticed. She, like him, can lapse into protracted periods of mute withdrawal from reality. She seems to seek stillness in the mornings and after battles like the lost seek maps and the drowning seek land.
People don’t know how noisy trauma can be. Leonard has a long, grinding acquaintance with the idea that, when you grow up listening to the pounding voices of raging adults, decades later the most benign of raised voices can, when unexpected, prick the hairs on the back of your neck, send your lizard brain scuttling for signs of danger. So Leonard appreciates quiet places, quiet people, long stretches of disengagement from the clumsy, uncontrollable forces that are other human beings.
And Sara, with her brain so full of blood and war, death and destruction – Sara likes silence, too.
They sit in silence together often. They don’t talk about it. That would defy the point.
+++
Mick may genuinely have a sinus problem. Leonard sleeps at the foot of Sara’s bed several nights in a row, to the point where she actually clears a six foot area of weaponry and dirty laundry and plates so he has a spot now. Considerate.
“You want a pillow?” She murmurs, from the bed, when he comes in at three AM – the room is dark, Kendra is soundly asleep, Sara is reading Card Captor Sakura by cell phone light. He has yet to come in late enough to find her unconscious. He’s not actually sure when she sleeps. Maybe during their long, shared silences during the days.
Leonard shakes his head – but she drops one of hers on his face when he lays down anyway, and he’s not about to protest the extra comfort. Tonight Kendra’s half of the room smells like honeysuckle. He wonders where she’s getting the damn incense from.
+++
“How come he gets to sleep with the girls?” Jax demands, over breakfast.
“He sleeps on the floor,” Kendra replies, flatly. “And he pays me in eyeliner application.”
“What’s he paying you?” Jax jabs a finger at Sara, who only grins.
“We snuggle.”
Leonard levels a long look at her, then Jax. “I’m the small spoon.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Jax rolls his eyes as Sara throws her head back and laughs properly for the first time in days.
+++
Lisa is even smaller as a baby than Leonard remembers her being. Tiny. Flailing and soft and full of need. He lifts her from her cot with practiced care and yes – she smells the same, baby formula and talc and something he swears she still smells like in 2016.
“She was crying,” he tells Sara, to her questioning look when he arrives in the den, Lisa tucked snugly against his chest along the length of his forearm. “You don’t leave babies crying. What am I, a monster?”
Sara smiles, dryly. “She’s cute.”
She’s fussy and scrawny and squashed looking, but she’s still his sister and Leonard feels the same desperate protective lurch he did the first time she arrived home from the hospital and he saw her fragile little form in his father’s arms, knew he was going to be the only thing between that weird tiny human and his worthless crapbag of a dad for the rest of his life.
Leonard tugs off one of his gloves with his teeth, pockets it and slips his little finger into Lisa’s mouth to quieten her. “Let’s just find the damn key and get out of here.”
“You’re seriously telling me that your parents aren’t home right now?” Sara glances around, “they just left a baby here?”
“Not all us were raised by nice, decent human beings, Sara,” he intones, flatly. “Daddy didn’t care, mommy dearest just needed one more drink, most nights. The only other person here is probably…”
“Hey!” He’s standing in the doorway with a shotgun, exactly as weird and awkward as Leonard remembers feeling at the age, and a good deal more scared looking. “You put her down!”
Sara’s eyebrows all but disappear into her hairline as she takes in thirteen year old Leonard Snart, barefoot and in need of a haircut, dressed in too-small spaceship pyjamas and wearing a thick-rimmed pair of milk bottle glasses, daddy’s shotgun cocked in his skinny hands.
“Hello, Leo,” Leonard eyes the boy for a moment. “We’ve met. Remember?”
A little cloud crosses his younger self’s face, and then he nods, slowly, lowering the gun. “Daddy said you weren’t his friend.”
“Well we both know that Daddy’s a moron,” Leonard points out, evenly, “so I wouldn’t take his judgement as your own. But we’re looking for something, and the sooner we find it, the sooner we can get out of your hair. A key. The one with the skull on the handle. You remember where it is? Because my memory is a little fuzzy.”
Leo considers them a moment longer. “Who’s she?”
“Sara,” Leonard jerks his head at her. “We like her.”
“Who’s we?” Leo frowns but is already padding past them, toward a high shelf and a stack of empty biscuit tins and – yes, of course – Leonard remembers now, abruptly.
“You and me, kid,” Leonard tells him, and Leo grabs a chair to climb on so he can pull down one of the tins. He won’t hit his first growth spurt for another couple of years and will remain every miserable, underfed inch of 5 foot 1 for most of that time.
“You gotta put it back when you’re done,” Leo shoves the tin at Sara, “dad’ll know if it’s gone.”
“You leave daddy to me,” Leonard says, jogging Lisa when she starts to squirm again.
Sara is watching this exchange with something unreadable in her expression, leaning on the kitchen table. “You hungry, Leo?”
He was always hungry at that age. Leo’s gaze comes up, hard-lined and protective. “No.”
“Oh, that’s a shame,” Sara glances away, “cause we were thinking of going to Big Belly Burger. Weren’t we Leonard? I hear they have great milkshakes.”
Rip will lose his fucking mind. Which of course means Leonard loves this idea.
“Let’s go,” he ushers his younger self upstairs, “put on some socks, we’ll meet you out front.”
Which is how Leonard has burgers and milkshakes with his younger self and his baby sister and an undead assassin in the middle of the night in 1984.
Leonard buckles Lisa into a highchair and Sara spoons strawberry milkshake into Lisa’s gaping baby bird mouth, whilst Leo consumes three burgers and two large helpings of fries. Leonard picks at his fries and remembers how the smell of fast food on the way home from school in the afternoons used to make his stomach snarl during the days when mom had forgotten to shop so he’d had no breakfast or lunch.
Leo’s gaze keeps darting to Sara’s face, his eyes huge and magnified behind his glasses, brow furrowed. Leonard has vague memories of a passing fascination with blond hair at this age – very pale skin and blond hair – didn’t matter who on, boys, girls, whatever. He liked the coldness of the look, and the hardness of it – a weird kind of clean, steely beauty that had caught his imagination, so different from the grotty shadows of his own existence.
When they get back to his old house, his thirteen year old self takes Lisa back from Leonard and, whilst she squawks angrily at the transference, scuttles back into the house without a word.
Sara glances at Leonard. “You were kinda cute.”
“I looked like an underfed scarecrow and you know it.”
“Poor baby scarecrow.”
She’s teasing him, but there’s something gentle in her gaze when she says it – Leonard doesn’t like the feeling that gives him in the pit of his stomach.
He’s glad she doesn’t try to talk about the whole encounter once they’re back on the Waverider, though he tells himself that that’s probably more about not letting Rip know what they did than it is her sensitivity to his feelings about his shitty childhood.
+++
Conversely, without Mick in it, his room is too quiet.
Kendra’s also not in Sara’s room when Leonard arrives.
“She’s with Ray,” Sara’s sharpening knives again, “I didn’t ask.”
Leonard nods.
“You can probably take her bed, I don’t think she’ll be back for a few hours.”
Leonard glances at it – neatly made, and Kendra has somehow acquired a powder pink bedding set. Leonard has given up wondering where she’s getting her creature comforts; Kendra’s simply one of those people to whom pleasant things seem to naturally gravitate. Which he supposes might be the universe making up for the immortal despot trying to murder her, although the universe has never once attempted to compensate Leonard for the injustices levelled against him during his own youth.
“I don’t think she’d appreciate it,” he tells Sara, though he takes the romance novel off Kendra’s bed for good measure and peels it open.
Sara laughs, softly, as he deposits himself in his spot at the foot of her bed to read.
But the main light has been broken by what Leonard has to suspect, from the gaping hole in the fitting, is an accident involving one of Sara’s throwing knives. Now there’s just a little lamp in the wall by Sara’s head. It’s not really strong enough for him to read by, not from down here.
“Hey Leonard,” Sara puts her knives down on her bedside table and pats the space next to her. “You wanna share?”
Leonard glances up at her.
It’s not as if they haven’t had to get used to touching each other today: they both almost froze to death in the engine room, needs must. And yes the idea of the strange, broken edges of her is still titillating but – but.
It has been a long, trying day. He doesn’t want to think about Mick. He doesn’t want to think about anything.
He wants stillness and quiet.
He shakes his head again, silently. And if she’s hurt she doesn’t show it – only shrugs and curls up by herself.
+++
Inevitably, there are drinking games.
“Never have I ever…” Ray begins, leisurely, “um – had sex in a public place.”
Leonard, Stein, Sara and Kendra all drink.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Leonard asks, as he swigs.
“It seems a little unfair,” Stein adds, “I came of age in the 70s. For a time during that decade, if you didn’t have intercourse outdoors it barely counted as such.”
“Dude, don’t put those images in my head,” Jax shakes his head, grimacing. He glances at Kendra, “for real?”
“What?” Kendra shrugs, just a little self-consciously, “it’s not that unusual. We were seventeen. And dumb. And worried about our parents catching us at home. So we did some – dumb stuff in a library bathroom.”
“What’s your excuse?” Leonard inclines his head at Sara.
Sara’s funny little mouth quirks, her gaze starry from the Barvarian beer he stole for her in 1968. “Paris. At midnight. On our first anniversary.”
“Paris? Ah, well, there’s an excuse,” Stein agrees, leisurely. “A romantic, was he?”
“She,” Sara murmurs, “and she was when it came to me.”
“Well, that’s what matters,” Stein pats her arm, comfortingly, because there’s something heavy in Sara’s distant expression – another loss, Leonard thinks.
Whilst the others attempt to play poker, badly, Sara slumps down conspiratorially next to Leonard, a little ways removed from the action – they’ve all ended up in Rip’s study, and whilst the others huddle around the table Leonard has removed himself to the sofa against the back wall. It’s soft and warm and matches the pleasant haze of the alcohol. He hasn’t been drunk in a very long time. He wants to savour the quiet.
“Why aren’t you playing?” Sara asks.
He snorts. “Same reason you wouldn’t take on a 3rd grader hand to hand combat combat.”
“You don’t want to kill any children?”
Daddy knew every way there was to lose money, including cards, especially poker – Leonard learned how to cheat probably before he could tie his own shoe laces. Beating any of these drunk idiots would be so easy it would likely also be intensely boring, and there’s nothing in the pot he wants (nothing he couldn’t just take later, anyway).
“What was her name?” He asks, idly, as Sara sinks low on the sofa with a sleepy hum.
“Mm?”
“Paris. Midnight.” Leonard finds himself watching carefully controlled emotion flicker in the corners of her mouth. “Who was she?”
For a moment, he thinks she won’t answer. Then – “Nyssa.” Her gaze is distant.
“Did she die?”
“No.” Sara smiles, small and grim. “I did.”
“Is she not aware of your miraculous resurrection?”
Sara chuckles. “It’s complicated.”
“Such a tragic word,” Leonard intones, “covers a multitude of sins.”
Sara shrugs, her head lolling back, her eyes drifting closed. Leonard’s not sure why he’s asking, what he’s digging for. If he were a wiser man – or perhaps simply sober – he’d stop.
“What was she like?”
Sara inhales, slow and deep. “She was like… drowning.”
“Well that’s an interesting thing for a person to be like.”
“Mmhm.”
Leonard’s gaze drifts to Sara’s throat, exposed, the way she’s let her head fall back – the long, elegant curve of her neck, the pulse point vulnerable, the flesh soft and smooth in the dim light of Rip’s study. Her eyelashes are casting shadows down her cheek bones, her mouth still curled upwards. He imagines this woman who was like drowning, consuming Sara sip by sip.
“Is that your type?” Leonard asks, low and thoughtful – teasing, maybe – is he trying to be teasing? He’s not even sure anymore. “People who drown you?”
“Mmm. Maybe.” Sara opens one eye to peer at him, sleepy, curious. “Maybe not.”
Leonard yawns widely, and points at Kendra. “What about her?”
Sara shrugs. “She’s pretty.”
“….but?”
“Straight. I don’t do straight.”
Oh well I’m in luck, Leonard almost says, and traps the words in his throat before they can escape. He shouldn’t drink around her. “What about him?”
He’s pointing at Ray, which makes Sara laugh, properly. “The ken doll? Please, I’d snap him in half.”
Leonard points again – mostly at random – comes up with Rip: “too sad,” and then Jax: “too young.” And Stein, “married. And not in an interesting poly way.” Sara giggles, dozily, and tips her head so that it’s almost, not quite, but almost resting on Leonard’s arm.
So he points at himself, and raises his eyebrows, expectantly, suggestively – and Sara only laughs again, and shrugs, her expression teasing, her eyes starry and warm. Leonard wants to stroke her neck, just to see if she’ll let him, but he thinks that if he does, he’ll probably want to do other stuff and – he shouldn’t be drinking around her.
+++
He doesn’t even see who shot her, the guy’s iced before Sara hits the floor, the white of her Canary uniform already blooming horrible scarlet – shot in the chest, shaking, coughing.
When she was four, Lisa had been belted so hard across the face by their father that she’d fallen off her chair and landed on the kitchen floor on her head. It’d made a horrible cracking sound. Leonard remembers distinctly the split second of silence as he’d spotted what had happened from across the room – the blood on his sister’s startled face – before she’d started screaming, and screaming, and screaming as loud as her lungs could go.
And the noise, for the first time in his life, had been a relief, because if she could scream she was probably alright, and Leonard had had time to get his baseball bat and chase their dad out of the house promising that if he ever came back Leonard would break his fucking legs.
Lisa screamed all the way to the ER, smeared blood all over his T-shirt, screeched at any idiot doctor dumb enough to try to peel her off her brother, wailed and kicked when she saw the needles and finally only shut up when Leonard promised her ice cream for dinner and a new My Little Pony. But he’d known the whole time that she’d be fine. She was exactly herself, loud and fearsome and outraged at the world for daring to hurt her.
“Lenny, I hate Daddy,” she’d told him, firmly, on the way home, her little eyes big and fierce. “I hate him, I want him to die.”
“Me too,” he replied, adjusting her on his hip, “one day, I’m going to kill him. But he won’t ever hurt you while I’m here, okay?”
She’d nodded, solemnly. She’d been okay.
Here, now, in this time, with this new silence, Leonard found himself hoping desperately for a scream, for anything – anything – but Sara’s only wheezing, a wet rattle in her chest.
He pulls her into his lap, rips off his coat and crushes it to her wound with both hands, feels hot blood swelling through the fabric immediately.
“Help!” Leonard’s voice shatters the horrible stillness, “help us! Someone get over here!”
“Mm, here we go again,” Sara mumbles, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“You’re not going to die,” Leonard gives her a little shake as if to prove his point, “stay awake!”
Sara’s wet rattle breath shakes as she laughs, deathly and cold – she doesn’t speak again, and Leonard hates it – hates it –
At last the sound of Ray’s suit humming catches his ear and Leonard has never been so grateful to see an idiot in a hydraulic outfit in his life. He takes Sara away from Leonard, snatches her up and shoots off back to the ship, leaving Leonard to trail after, still smelling Sara’s blood on his clothes.
+++
“I asked for chicken and noodle,” Sara complains, when Leonard brings her soup. She’s being deliberately crotchety because that’s easier than silently contemplating a second brush with non-existence, of course, but Leonard’s still irritated.
“Matzo ball is better.”
“But I wanted chicken and noodle,” Sara actually pouts, like a five year old. “My sister always makes me chicken and noodle.”
“Well, I’m not your sister.”
“But – ”
“Shut up and eat your damn soup,” he puts it in front of her, “before I take it away.”
Sara huffs, pulling the bedcovers up to her chin. Gideon has released her from the medbay but she has to stay in bed for a day or two whilst her insides finish healing. Gideon can only speed the natural process, not complete it.
Unsurprisingly, Sara is unimpressed by her confinement. Leonard has already caught her attempting to leave her room for the kitchen, hungry and bored whilst the others are out on a mission.
“What the hell are you still doing here?” She had demanded, whilst he shepherded her back to bed.
“Someone had to make sure you’d stay lying down. Drew the short straw,” he had replied. (He volunteered. But he’s not going to say that).
She eats the soup, though she frowns the whole time, like it’s somehow personally offensive to her that he happens to know a superior recipe to the one she would have selected herself.
“Do you have to stare at me?” She pokes him with her foot. “At least sit down.”
He sits on the end of her bed and reads. When she’s finished her soup, Sara tries to read but he can tell she’s in more pain than she’s letting on by the way she shifts and frowns and struggles to keep her gaze focused on the page. It’s one of Kendra’s romances. She must have run out of manga again.
“You want me to read that to you?” He offers, into the silence.
Sara considers him and for a moment he thinks she’s going to refuse – but then she only offers him the book, and Leonard is forced to climb up the bed to take it, and in the end it turns out to be easiest simply to lie down next to her, propping the book on his chest.
Sara promptly huddles closer to lay her temple on his shoulder, the crown of her head brushing up under his chin. Leonard tries not to tense, inhales deeply, wills himself to relax.
Sara’s watching him – of course she is. He feels her eyelashes, the way she must have angled her head to peer up into his face. “You okay?”
“Fine,” he replies, too briefly. He can practically hear her rolling her eyes. “I don’t climb into bed with others very often. It… disquiets me.”
Sara shifts a little, lifting her head. “You’re not big on being touched, huh, Frosty?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You want me to stop? Touching?”
“No,” Leonard glances sideways at her, “I can tolerate it.”
That makes her laugh, small and grim. “I don’t want you to tolerate it.”
She tries to sit up, wincing, and it’s Leonard’s turn to roll his eyes – he grabs her wrist and tugs her back again. “Don’t tear out your stitches. I’ll have to clean up the mess.”
The face she makes is decidedly unimpressed.
“Lie down,” he adds, just a little gentler. And just to make the point, he puts his arm around her.
It’s not as alarming as it should be, being this close to someone so dangerous. She’s a muscular little thing – sturdy, stronger and shorter than his sister, who’s all lythe length, tall and skinny like him. Sara’s hands are small but powerful where they come to rest on his chest. She smells like Kendra’s shampoo. The sensation of it all is a little overwhelming – but it’s not unpleasant.
They acclimatise to each other for a moment, and Leonard makes himself exhale, and relax.
“What’s your deal, Leonard, seriously?” Sara taps at him with one of her sturdy little fingers, “I can’t figure you out.”
“Yeah, that’s sort of the point,” he replies, firmly, and she laughs properly this time.
“Well, you gotta let someone figure you out at some point,” she insists, “my dad used to say no man is an island.”
“That’s John Donne,” Leonard tells her.
“Mm?”
“No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;” Leonard intones, stroking, absently, at where a fall of her hair is lying over her shoulder. “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
“Wow, Leonard.”
“Juvie will give you time to think,” he tells her, “and read the only poetry book in the library a few hundred times in a row.”
“So you agree you’re not an island?”
“No, Sara, I’m a thief.”
He can feel her smiling, though. And just a little to his disgruntlement, she plants a kiss on his jaw. It feels like she’s teasing him. He’s not sure how to feel about that. (He settles on distantly smug).
“You gonna read me this book or recite more poetry?”
Sara has fallen asleep before he’s finished the second chapter. And, well. It’d be just rude to move now, wouldn’t it? What if he wakes her up?
So Leonard Snart stays in Sara Lance’s bed and holds her whilst she sleeps.
+++
“So what’s your type?”
Sara nudges him with a foot. Another mission, another afternoon on the bench while Rip takes the others out – Rip insists they aren’t needed but they all know he just doesn’t want Sara back out in the field until she’s totally healed. It’s been a week, she’s fine, but it was a little close for comfort.
Leonard was expecting Sara to protest being sidelined but she only eyed Leonard up then shrugged and agreed to stay because it was better company.
They’ve been playing cards. She’s not as good as him but she’s been improving (and she’s better by far than anyone else on board). This might almost get challenging.
“Mm?”
“Your type.” She raises her eyebrows, “I told you mine.”
“Not really.”
“I told you more than you’ve told me.”
That’s true. Leonard narrows his eyes at her – she’s smiling, slow and impish, dimples crinkling her cheeks. It’s a real little sister of a smile. Leonard has never asked which of the canaries is the elder, he hasn’t had to. Sara’s such a brat.
He rubs the place on his jaw where she kissed him. That particular spot hasn’t felt right since.
“I’m… not fussy,” he tells her, which makes her smile all curly and soft at the edges.
“Yeah?”
He shrugs, and she pats him on the knee.
“Welcome to the club, buddy.”
“There’s a club now?”
“We throw parades and everything.”
Leonard snorts.
Silence again for a while. Leonard watches her fingers, how small and delicate they are under thin white scars and heavy callouses. “I don’t like sex. Very often.”
He’s not sure what reaction he’s expecting. Sara doesn’t give him much of one. “Okay.” She quirks her head at him, like one of those cute pugs in the youtube clips Lisa is always sending him. “What do you like?”
Leonard shrugs, trying not to hunch forward defensively. Defensive hunching is for insecure losers. “You.”
That can’t be a revelation to her at this juncture. She did the kissing thing, after all.
He chances a glance at her face over his cards – she looks less tweety pie and more puddy cat. Puddy cat with recently ingested tweety pie.
“What, you waiting for me to ask you to prom?” He grimaces, and she laughs.
“I thought you didn’t like dancing.”
“I prefer to watch.”
“Yeah, well, don’t worry, I’m not expecting an invitation.” She wafts her cards. “You can watch any time you like though. For the record.”
He has a strong suspicion it’s not just the dancing she’s offering him a front row seat to. And now – well – that’s an interesting suggestion. “Duly noted.”
Her mouth quirks. Just for a moment she’s looking into his eyes, and her gaze promises all sorts of fun things – and he’s tempted to lean over and touch her or – maybe get another kiss out of her – but –
Then the others are coming back, bringing all their clatter and noise with them, and the moment dissolves like frozen breath on the winter air.