The feedback on Exequies was overwhelming and so I decided to go along with this plot bunny and flesh it out. It takes place some time after Marooned and gets inside Leonard's mind.

Hopefully, you guys will enjoy it.

And I do not own Legends of Tomorrow.

He wonders what she sees in him.

He does not like the way she looks at him, he would almost say he hates it. He cannot quite put a finger on that look but it seems laden with expectations.

Hope.

Perhaps it is the slightest of glint in her eyes or the way her eyes never leave his, but something about that look makes him uncomfortable. It fills him up with this inexplicable urge to be better, to be something more, to be someone more, not to be just a crook.

And he does not like himself thinking like that, he does not like being filled with that kind of a need to be better because he has never considered being better. All his life, he has just been a crook, cutting corners, saving his back, looking after his sister and surviving.

It has always been about surviving.

But that look in her eyes, it somehow makes him want to do more than just survive, makes him want to live. He should not be feeling that way, he does not want to feel that way.

But he does. Every time she looks at him, it is the same feeling, the same noise in his head and all he is left to do is wonder.

And so he wonders: wonders what she sees in him, wonders what she sees in the maze of scars painted across his body, wonders what she sees in the cold eyes or the icy facade or the frigid words.

He stops wondering only when she is lying beside him, wordlessly silent, the sound of their beating hearts filling the void, her hands on his chest and her eyes fixed on him.

It feels so natural that he does not even bother questioning it. He just leaves his door unlocked for her and she always comes, always finds a way to him.

He does not remember how this had turned into a practice. All he remembers is waking up from his own nightmare to find her swallowed in her ones. They had got talking, the usual banter between them replacing the ghosts that were haunting them. Somewhere in between the subtle insults and the constant mockery, she had confessed that she was scared to sleep at night.

It had surprised him, he had always seen her as an undaunted intrepid assassin.

"I hate sleeping alone too," he remembers his soft admission. "I hate fighting on my own."

And just like that, they had ended up in his bed, holding on to each other in the darkness and waiting for the light to come.

He does not understand it but she likes tracing her fingers across his scars. Her touch is featherlight yet reassuring, bringing out feelings in him he had long ago buried underneath, feelings he had chosen to forget.

He is so used to feeling empty inside that it scares him to know that she had somehow broken down all his walls and had managed to make him feel.

Her hands linger in some places, calloused fingers hesitating where the cuts are too deep, the scars too grave. She never says anything though, it is only her fingers that ask silent questions.

So he decides to tell her, answer all her silent questions.

They are nothing but stories now, stories that he once belonged to but managed to escape from.

There are seven worth telling, the rest have faded and disappeared in the folds of time.

His voice quivers as he begins, somehow the stories turning too real. Her hands find his, bringing them to rest against his chest. She holds his gaze for a while before leaning in to kiss him.

There is a small voice of reason that screams at him to pull back, not let anything more develop between them but he is too weak now, too needy and he leans into her, allowing himself to get lost in her.

He begins with the one just a little above his stomach and just a little below his heart.

It is long and crooked, just one line on his skin yet so much more. It is an ugly scar, uneven stitch marks spread across it.

"I don't remember what he had used to hit me with," he says, voice low and pained, making her heart wrench in agony.

She does not have to ask who the he is, his voice reveals it.

"But I lost a lot of blood. I remember waking up in a pool of my own blood," he continues.

She does not say anything at first but examines the scar, her fingers trailing over it.

"Why the stitch marks?" she asks softly.

He laughs at that, bitterness bubbling in the sound.

"He never took us to hospitals," he replies, a caustic tone overtaking him. "He would have to answer a lot of questions there. He had a friend who could stitch up wounds and prevent them from getting infected. So that is where we went after my father's benevolent beatings and his friend did not really have a skilled hand."

She takes some time to digest that information, a clear picture of the childhood that he had survived floating in front of her. She cannot even begin to imagine what he must have felt like, being treated like that by his own father.

"That's one of the better ones," he cuts through her thoughts. "There are ones which are way worse."

"And this?" she asks as her hands go up to his arm.

"This was a glass splinter," he says. "That was an accident. Had it not happened, I could have ended up with a bullet in my heart."

She wonders how he keeps his voice so emotionless and detached as he recounts these memories.

She does not have to ask any more as he continues. "It was a robbery gone wrong. I had a strained muscle and had insisted that I not go along with him but my father was a stubborn man and he forced me to go with him. We had to leave behind a few bags of cash because I could not run and he had to carry me."

"I am surprised he did not leave you behind," she says before she can stop herself.

She covers her mouth with a hand when she realizes what she had said.

"I didn't mean to-" she begins, remorse lacing her words.

"It's okay," he laughs it off, much to her surprise. "He would have left me if he had an option but leaving me would mean the police finding me and finally finding him."

She stares at him, bewildered at his acceptance of everything.

"But that night, he took me to the shed and started hitting me. He had a gun with him. I figured that was the end but he flung me and I fell on a table with a glass top. The glass pierced me, the arm was the worst."

"It saved you," she whispers.

"Strangely, yes."

"How old were you?" she questions softly.

"I don't know," he sighs. "Eight, maybe nine. I did not really have the opportunity to celebrate my birthdays."

She gulps, fighting hard to keep the tears at bay, tears for the childhood he had never had, the childhood that had been snatched away from him.

The next one is on his thigh, which she finds only after he guides her hand there.

She lets her fingers dance upon his skin for some time, trying to figure out the story behind it.

"That was a clean painful stabbing," he finally says. "Cold metal blade went right through me."

"Why?"

"He was going to hit my sister and I stepped in between," he states, voice neutral.

She presses a hand on his cheek, rubbing her thumb gently against it.

"I am so sorry."

He smiles wryly, remorse sketching itself on his face. "You don't have to be."

There are three more on his back, crisscrossing each other, cutting each other's paths.

"Good old whipping," he drawls.

She nods, pressing her lips on them, feeling the roughness of the skin.

They look like swords engaged in a fight on a battlefield to her but then again, she quickly realizes, that is all his body is: a battlefield of scars and cicatrices.

She waits for the seventh one, knowing the last to come is always the worst.

He sits up and stretches his legs in front of her and brings her hand to a stop on his calf muscle.

It is a bullet wound, she does not need an explanation for it.

"It was another robbery gone wrong," he says, a tinge of disgust in his voice. "He really was poor at his job."

"He shot you?"

"No," he replies, shaking his head. "We were cornered and the police had opened fire. There was no way that we could escape but the police did not know how many of us were there. And so my asshole father came up with his master plan, he graciously pushed me out of hiding, giving me up and saving his sorry ass. Bit cold, I would say."

A smirk stretches itself across his lips at that and she wonders how he can joke about things like these.

"A policeman shot me," he finishes. "But my father pulled the trigger, I believe."

She figures it is her turn to tell.

"I don't know why the Lazarus Pit could not fix these," she starts as she lifts her top to expose her stomach.

He sees the three scars, left behind by the arrows that had killed her.

It is his turn and he trails his fingers across her scars, holding her gaze as he does so, feeling her skin thrumming to the beat of his fingers.

They are clustered at the same place, circular holes punctured into her skin.

"Your ones are better than mine," he says as he climbs on top of her, kissing her till she sees nothing but him and feels nothing but him.

"Why?" she manages to ask between his assault on her body.

"Well, they killed you, didn't they?" he smirks.

"That's cold," she says, before breaking into an effervescent laugh that claims him too.

They revel in their scars, in the masterpieces painted on them, in the stories scribbled on them, in the memories imprinted on them, in the history inscribed on them, in the marks left on them and in the future engraved on them.

He will never be unblemished, his skin will remain etched with these marks but he is beginning to realize that it is not about recovering but about healing and turning the scars into naevuses, turning destruction into creation.