That Don't Sound Like You

One-Shot

"It's not him," Mick breathed suddenly and the room went quiet. Eyes turned to him, but he paid them no mind as he pushed out of his chair and went for Nate's computer. "It's not him."

"What are you talking about?" Sara asked, voice tight. "Mick-"

"He said they grabbed him in 2011. March." Mick shook his head, muttering curses under his breath as he waited for a shitty internet connection to load the Google search.

"So?"

"He said they grabbed him in Central." He smacked the side of the computer and ignored Nate's indignant squawk. "He wasn't in Central." The page finally loaded and he skimmed over the first few results before he clicked on the third article down. The whole thing was written in French, but he understood enough. He glanced at the date again and nodded to himself. "We were in Paris."

"What? Did you try and steal the Mona Lisa?" Ray asked. His tone tried for joking, but it fell flat.

"Snart got bored," Mick said simply, because it was the same kind of weird shit Len always used to pull when he'd get antsy.

"It's still there, you know."

Mick cast a smug glance towards Nate. "You sure about that?" Because it wasn't. He'd always been better at forgeries than he probably had any right to be. A scan with a black light and they'd figure it out, but he and Len had made it in and out of that stupid museum without a problem. His copy—painted while he was halfway to drunk and listening to Len try to teach himself French—had been hanging in the Louvre for years while the real painting was hanging in a little apartment they kept for themselves in Paris. You could see the Louvre from the window, like they were permanently mocking the fact that they'd gotten away with it.

Nate sputtered, eyes wide and speechless, but Sara shook her head. "We don't have time for this," she said.

"Make time," Mick snapped. "Week after we stole the painting, Snart wanted to slip into a jewelry store to get something for Lisa." That theft had caught attention. The necklace had been damn near fifteen carats. "Look."

They crowded around the laptop screen when he turned it around, brows furrowed and frowning.

"It's in French," Jax said. "Do you speak French now too?"

"The swears," he replied and didn't tell them that he could make his way through a basic conversation. He was better at it than Len, at least, but Snart had always seemed to do better in languages that didn't use English letters. And prison sign language, he remembered with a fond twitch of a smile. The both of them were pretty damn fluent in that. "That's the place we robbed, though. Snart thought their security system looked fun."

"Mick, get to the point," Sara said, fists clenched and still angry, as if all of them weren't. Amaya was dead. The timeline was fucked. The spear was gone.

"Snart wasn't in Central in March," he told them again. "We stayed in Paris until June and met up with Lisa in Italy."

"You're sure?"

Mick nodded, but didn't elaborate and tell them how he'd spent months paying chefs to teach him things in broken English. "They couldn't have picked him up then. He didn't even have the cold gun in 2011." He shook his head, fingers tapping anxiously against the table. "I knew something was weird. Shit wasn't adding up and he..."

Jax looked at him closely. "What?"

"He's a petty bastard, but he's never killed someone just because he was jealous." He'd never called Mick a dog before either, not even in their worst fights. "Even at his worst, he wouldn't do that."

"You're sure?"

"I married a klepto that's probably OCD and a little autistic," he said flatly, "not a sociopath."

"Married?" they all echoed. Mick didn't see where the shock was coming from. He figured it was obvious when he started wearing that stupid ring on a chain. They'd practically called each other partners every other sentence.

"It's not him," he stressed.

Sara frowned and looked back at the computer screen. "That doesn't explain who killed Amaya, then."

"You're going to rip the world apart," a voice over Mick's shoulder said. They all froze, grabbing at weapons as they faced Snart.

Nate let out a noise that almost sounded like a growl and stepped forward, but Ray held him back.

Snart watched them, familiar and...not. His eyes glowed too blue, the same color flickering over his cheeks and hands in thin crackles of light. He tilted his head too far to the side and shook it like he was disappointed in them. "Heroes don't destroy the world."

"How the hell did you get in?" Sara snapped.

"I'm everywhere," Snart told them with an airy sigh before he straightened back up, looking somber. "Getting torn into pieces isn't fun. Trust me." His eyes turned sad and a little haunted. "You won't be able to put the pieces back together."

"Snart-"

His gaze fell on Mick. "It would have been me," he said as his voice grew a little softer. "Without you. Without Lisa." He looked around the room like he was searching and his shoulders sagged. "She isn't in this world."

Mick froze. He'd thought... Len hadn't mentioned her once. A new reality, finding her should have been his first priority and they never... "Where is she?"

"We don't exist in every world," Snart said, as if that were an answer at all. Maybe it was, Mick thought as his stomach churned. Lisa had been the first person Leonard ever let himself love. He'd had a soft spot for her a mile wide when they met, but it had taken him years to let Mick in properly rather than follow him around like a lost puppy, used to being hit by its owner. If he'd never had her…

"She's not here."

Snart shook his head, sad, before he looked distracted and started staring at a blank spot on the wall. "They couldn't erase me."

"Because you're working with them." Jax's fingers curled into fists and he stepped around Sara. "You-"

"-died," Snart finished as too-blue eyes met brown. Light crackled over his cheek and he looked down at the way his fingers sparked blue just before they turned into a full flame.

"The Oculus," Ray breathed, horrified. "You... That's what you meant by pieces. You blew yourself up."

Snart—God, it was Len, Mick thought as his heart seized up in his chest—hummed and let the flames die. "You won't save her if you tear the world apart. You won't save any of them."

"We have to do something," Sara argued.

"You can't travel to a reality that doesn't exist anymore," Len said as his focus slid again, "but the spear exists."

"Thawne destroyed it."

Len chuckled, amused and a little mocking. "Bad time travelers," he scolded.

"It existed before," Mick muttered. "This reality-"

"Ding, ding, ding." Another smile as more blue crackled over pale skin. "Everything exists at some point."

"What happens to you when we do?" Nate asked, cautious.

"I'm everywhere," Len just said again.

"What does that mean?"

"You bonded with the Oculus," Ray said, brows furrowed as he thought. "Can you control the timeline?"

"One."

"Your own?" he guessed and looked pleased with himself when Len nodded. "So the you that's with the Legion…"

"A piece," Len said, eyes down as he stared at his own outstretched fingers like he didn't recognize them. "Shattered little pieces blown apart. Realities and maybes and never-could-bes." He looked up, a hint of a smile on his lips, but bright blue eyes looked sad. "I can see everything."

"You're insane," Mick murmured as a lead weight settled in his gut. There were glimpses of the Len he knew—the one he'd loved since they were kids—but the breathiness and the distractions… He was unhinged, drifting out somewhere they couldn't reach.

Len knew it. Mick could see it on his face as his husband dropped his hands and stood too still for someone that hadn't been able to stop fidgeting since the day he was born. "We're all insane, Mickey."

Mick closed his eyes tight, chest aching. "Don't call me that," he croaked, begging. The nickname—as much as he'd always hated it—had good memories attached to it. He didn't want them to be tarnished with memories of a Len he couldn't save.

Jax's hand gripped his shoulder, half support and half apology, and focused on Len. "So what? We find the spear in this reality?"

Len nodded, gaze roaming around the room without actually seeing anything. "This world's not right. The versions of everything's…wrong." He shuddered, arms wrapped tight over his chest. "Rewrite it. You can save her."

"Can we save you?" Sara asked quietly as the anger bled out of her.

"I'm everywhere."

"That's not an answer."

He tilted his head at her. "Isn't it?"

The blue crackling along his skin flared and he disappeared.

They found Rip first, miniature and frazzled. The search came second, spurred on by loss and anger and a clear mission. They couldn't rip the world apart, no matter how desperate they were to get their world back. Len was right, they realized as they sat around the table, nursing glasses of scotch. The old timeline didn't exist anymore, erased by the destruction of the spear and the setting of the new reality.

Jax rubbed at his chest like a piece of him was missing and apologized to Mick properly in the privacy of the cargo bay.

Ray voiced a question at a whisper, asking just who they could save and if they were playing God. He wanted to save Anna. Sara wanted to save Laurel. Rip wanted to save his family.

"How do we decide who we can save and who we can't?" he asked, eyes desperate as he searched for an answer.

No one had one.

Six months later, they tracked the spear to a tiny village in Jerusalem and faced the old dilemma.

"We won't interfere with the birth," Rip said firmly, both hands planted on the console as he leaned forward and stared each of them down. "We rewrite reality and get the blood from somewhere else."

"The timeline for that might play out the same," Nate considered. "Thawne probably didn't think about changing it if he had another way to destroy the spear. If we go back a decade earlier…"

Mick narrowly avoided being immortalized in another historical event and Nate did get named a prophet after he named Jesus early by mistake, but they got the spear and made their escape without the timeline falling to pieces.

Getting the blood was almost too easy. They spent hours looking over their shoulders, sure that something was going to jump out at them, but nothing did, and they set themselves adrift in the time stream.

"Amaya was supposed to do this," Nate argued when Sara pressed the spear into his hand.

"She's not here," Sara told him, "and the rest of us have too many temptations with it. You're a historian, Nate. You know how things should be."

"There's stuff I'd change too," he reminded her, even as he curled his fingers around the staff. "You all trust me with this?"

They did.

The world spun.

Reality shifted.

Stein stepped into place beside Jax like he'd been there the whole time. Jax grasped his wrist in a shaky hold and gave him an almost watery smile when his partner asked if he was okay. "All good, Gray," he told him, but he didn't loosen his grip. "We're all good."

Amaya came onto the bridge, talking about something no one paid attention to, and Nate dropped the spear so he could rush at her. A hug. A kiss. The relationship was as doomed as anything, but they still watched the reunion, smiling, and pulled Amaya over so she could be the one to destroy the spear.

"The Legion…"

"They're back where they're supposed to be," Nate told her and determinedly did not look at Mick, but Amaya did.

"What about Snart?" she asked, concerned when he wouldn't meet her gaze.

"It was an alternate version of him that got created when the Oculus blew," Ray explained. "Like a what-if."

"There were probably a few of them scattered around. We got rid of them in the rewrite," Nate told her, voice soft, but Mick still heard.

Amaya stepped towards Mick, sympathetic, but he stepped away before she could get too close. "Destroy it," he told her gruffly as he gripped a beer bottle too tight. "I want to go home."

"Home? Mick-"

He looked at her, serious and feeling like he'd broken all over again. "We all need to go home sometime."

There was no celebration when the spear was destroyed.

The trip back to Central was quiet. They parked in the spot their journey had begun, knowing it should feel like they'd come full-circle, but they just felt tired.

"I think we all need a break," Sara admitted as she leaned against the doorway of Mick's room. The others hovered around her, muttering agreements.

Mick packed a bag quietly, ignoring the items he'd stolen during their travels, and only grabbing clothes and a little lockbox of mementos he couldn't bear to lose.

Ray set a repaired cold gun next to the duffle and gave Mick a weak smile. "Thanks for letting me use it," he said before his face shifted to something more guilty. "I'm sorry I broke it." Broke the gun. Broke the beginnings of a partnership that was probably doomed from the start. Ray wasn't Len. He never could be and they both knew it, same as they had before.

Mick nodded, stiff, and curled his fingers around the muzzle. The metal felt cold under his hands, same as it always used to.

"Where will you go?" Jax questioned.

"Back to the Rogues," he said and reached for Axel before the rat could scurry off the edge of the bed. "Lisa's back there." Len would have wanted him back with their little band of meta misfits, he thought. Dysfunctional as they were, they made a good crew when they wanted to. It was where he belonged.

"Back to being a thief?" Sara asked, but there was a ghost of a teasing smile instead of the tone he'd gotten used to hearing from them.

"You don't quit what you're good at."

"You're a hero too."

"I play both sides."

Lisa hugged him when he walked into the old warehouse, arms wrapped tight around him and lips pressed to his cheek. "Welcome home," she whispered in his ear. "Come on. Shawna's cooking."

"She hasn't burned it yet?"

"I heard that!"

Laughter echoed, but his ears picked up on the amused chuckle that made his heart stop. His eyes shot towards the corner they'd shoved mismatched couches into, breath trapped in his throat as he spotted Len sitting next to Hartley. The duffle bag hit the floor with Axel's cage following a little more gently, and he stepped forward on shaking legs.

"Leonard…"

Blue eyes were still too blue and the crackling of light shined a little brighter as it flashed over his cheek, but there was a smile he recognized.

"He's like a nightlight now," Mark said somewhere off to the left. "Drives us crazy."

"Pieces," Len said before Mick could ask. He stood to meet him, enduring as Mick laid a hand on his cheek. The light drifted over Mick's hand and faded to nothing. "Some got put back together."

Mick's eyes widened. "The spear?"

Len hummed, but his eyes still glazed over a bit. Not perfect, Mick realized as he pulled in a breath. Still unhinged. Still different. Maybe a little more stable, he considered as Len seemed to focus in on him again, but not what he was. He probably never would be.

"You're not going to vanish again?"

Axel—maybe it wasn't a good idea to name his rat after one of these assholes—snorted. "He's been here for weeks. I want my couch back."

"There are three others."

"I like the plaid one."

"He's a little…" Hartley glanced at Len and discreetly signed crazy behind his back, but Len chuckled like he'd seen him do it.

"We all are," Mick mumbled as his hand fell from Len's cheek and took his hand instead. He'd kiss him later, he told himself. Once they were somewhere private, he'd kiss Len until they couldn't breathe and put that damn ring back on his finger. Lay him out and see how much skin was covered by those cracks of light.

Different, he thought when Len leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together like he never used to do in public. He could deal with different if it meant Len was alive.

He could definitely deal.

The End