In which the Legends discover that the League's "prisoner" is anything but, and Sara is more confused than ever.

All characters seen or mentioned copyright DC, CW, et al.

"Snart!" Kendra shrieked.

Sara whipped her head around in time to see Leonard lose his balance and fall backwards off the cliff. Kendra flew after him, but in the time it took her to reach the spot where the thief had disappeared, the League's prisoner had broken free of his chains, torn off the hood, and pushed past the demigoddess to launch himself over the edge.

The hell?

"Ray!" Sara called up.

The man in the flying armor paused between shots and flew low.

Sara pointed to the edge where Leonard had fallen. "Help them!"

Kendra shook off her stupor and leaped over the edge, and Ray darted down behind her.

Leonard... Sara forced herself to concentrate on the fight. There was nothing she could do to help the thief now, and allowing herself to dwell on even so important of a distraction would only get the rest of the team killed.

"Oh, my god," Ray muttered before he fell silent.

Sara and Mick exchanged a glance before they returned their attention to the fight.

The seconds dragged on. The team found themselves pushed together against a sheer rock wall. Firestorm joined them on the ground and continued flinging fireballs where there was less risk of catching his friends in the attack.

And finally, finally, Kendra flew back over the cliff to join the team, and Ray flew up to watch the battle from above...

Without either Leonard or the League's prisoner.

"Ray!" Sara screamed into her comm. "Where is he?"

"Ow," Ray complained. "A little quieter next time, please?"

Kendra shook her head. "We didn't need to do anything. Snart—"

"The fuck do you mean you didn't need to?" Mick growled. "Len—"

"ENOUGH!" a voice roared from above and echoed through the mountains.

"—is safe," Kendra finished. But her eyes were wide and the color had drained from her face.

A man, winged as Kendra was, hovered over the battle. "Lower your weapons!" he growled in English. "All of you!"

The dialect was odd, older by far than even the era the team had arrived in, but the command was unmistakable.

Rip let his laser pistol fall to the ground and he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Uh, what are you doing?" Ray asked. "Pretty sure he's not talking to us."

"Oh, I'm fairly confident that he is," Rip muttered back.

The League backed away from the team, providing the winged man a clear space to land. He drifted to the top of the rock wall, crouched, and turned to address someone behind him in Arabic.

"It is all right, my friend," Sara heard Carter's voice over the comms, speaking a dialect common to the team's era. "You are safe now. We are back on solid ground."

"What the... Gideon?" she asked.

"I can translate as long as you are close enough to pick them up on the comms," the AI replied. "This method is unfortunately limited; given enough time I could process any language you require, but in real time I am only able to translate into a variant of the language being spoken."

"Well, that answered one of my questions," Sara muttered.

"Meaning only Sara and Rip will understand them?" Kendra asked. "Even with you translating for us."

"As long as they're speaking Arabic, yes," Gideon said.

Sara twisted around to see what little was visible from her vantage point. She watched Leonard slide from the demigod's back and huddle, shaking, on the ground before Carter draped a single wing around him and concealed him from view.

"Thank god," she breathed.

Carter's expression was hard as his gaze traveled from one member of their team to the next, his eyes lingering on Sara and longer on Kendra, and then finally to the League.

"Ra's!" he called out.

The man who had led him in chains stepped forward. "Yes, my lord?" he replied in Arabic.

Sara gave a start. My lord? No, of course she had translated it wrong. Or Gideon had. Ra's al Ghul was the ruler of the League, Carter should've been calling him "my lord."

"Must we continue this charade every time?" Carter asked.

"Apologies, my lord," Ra's said, "but it is written in the scrolls—it was your orders that we should test your claim to guard against imposters!"

"To test the claimants, yes," Carter agreed. He waved one hand at Sara's team. "But not bystanders who don't know I'm being tested!"

"Be that as it may," Ra's said, "they have intruded upon us. Upon the day of your ascension. Perhaps you would care to offer a recommendation as to their fate?"

"I'm taking this one to my chambers," Carter replied. He shrugged the wing he'd wrapped around the shaken thief.

Ra's lifted one eyebrow. "Shall I have him bathed for you?" he asked in a mild tone.

Sara glowered at the man. Small miracle that Leonard didn't understand Arabic; with his childhood traumas and all that the suggestion implied...

"To recover," Carter growled. "You're not as funny as you think you are. Send up two vials of my elixir and a healer to tend to him."

Ra's nodded. "And these others...?"

"Intruders they may be, and ignorant of our customs, but they appear to have fought in my defense," Carter admitted. "I would learn why. Give them another thirty seconds to decide whether to lower their arms. Spare both women, and any of the men who surrender; I'll speak to them after I've settled him. As for the rest..." His gaze traveled up to where Ray continued to fly overhead. "Use them as target practice." He pulled Leonard to his feet and walked away, leaving Sara's team to face the League.

Sara gulped. "Ray, get down here now. Get your armor off as quick as you can. The rest of you, drop your weapons."

"Why?" Firestorm asked. "Carter's got them scared. Too bad he couldn't reincarnate in time to help us in 1960, kinda looks like they're doing whatever he tells them."

"Yeah, well, 'Carter' just told the League to use us as target practice if we don't surrender!"

Silence met her statement.

"Drop. The weapons. Now," she repeated. "That means you, Mick!" She gently laid down her knives and staff, and hardly dared to breathe until she heard the team following her lead.

"I have an idea," Ray said. "Firestorm, don't separate yet."

"Whatever you're planning," Firestorm muttered, "do it fast."

Ray flew down to land next to the metahuman. "Ready when you are."

At the very instant Firestorm separated into Martin and Jefferson, Ray used the ATOM suit's controls to shrink. As a result, the League wouldn't notice that a member of their team had gone missing... or so Sara assumed was Ray's plan.

"I think I know my way to the dungeon by now," Ray said on the comms. "I'm going to see where he's taking Snart."

Ra's and ten of his followers approached the team. He looked back and forth between Martin and Jefferson. "What has happened to the armor?" he asked the professor.

"It, uh... it only appears if I am ready to join battle," Martin replied.

"Okay, yeah," Ray muttered over the comms. "That'll work."

Ra's frowned and drew his sword.

"Wait!" Sara said. "He told you to spare us if we surrender," she said in Arabic.

Ra's nodded. "That he did," he replied in English. "And I believe I see why. Your dialect is unfamiliar, but you fight like one of ours." He turned his gaze on Kendra. "And you fly as al Eanqa' does, with wings like his own; he'd said there was another like himself but I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to meet you. Whatever he expects to learn from your men, I look forward to seeing him interrogate the pair of you." He turned his head to address his followers. "Take them all to the dungeon," he told them in Arabic. "Take them, but gently. They are to be treated well, and are not to be harmed before al Eanqa' has dealt with them."

Sara shivered. Jefferson was right; for whatever reason the League was following Carter's orders. But he wasn't Carter as the team once knew him. This incarnation might have sensed who Kendra was—which was probably the only reason they hadn't been killed on the spot—but he viewed the rest of them as strangers, and rightly so.

Leonard's eventual fate remained a mystery, but they wouldn't be able to save him until they'd saved themselves.

And Carter planned to interrogate them. Whatever he might have done to them in another incarnation, a League interrogation never ended well.

Couldn't decide whether to include "Carter"'s shout in, well, shouty capitals or emphasized italics, but since I've been using italics on complete sentences to indicate "off screen" dialogue (such as dialogue spoken over the comms) or translated dialogue (as opposed to italicizing one or two words in a longer sentence where the italics exist solely for emphasis), I thought capitalizing that one-word sentence would be clearer than italics.

Linked fics:
The ficlet Necropolis alludes to the events of this exact chapter during a scene told from Carter's perspective.
The "shall I have him bathed for you" comment alludes to the "bathe her and bring her to my chambers" trope (god, I had a hard time figuring out how to indicate he was being sarcastic without just saying it ); Sara's reaction to the implication is due to what she found out about Len during the mature-rated Confessions arc... mature rated precisely because of how that implication related to his childhood.