Series: Part 5 of Time Of Our Lives

All Of These Years When We Were Here
One-shot

"Snart. There's something wrong. He's-"

Mick had known, felt the knowledge deep down in his gut the second Ray and his panicked voice said his husband's name. Boots pounding against metal floors, he thought he could hear Amaya trying to grill Ray for details, but it was lost behind him cursing himself.

He'd stuck close, because he'd known this was coming. Len had been teetering on the edges of overloads since he'd woken up in med bay and slipped a handful of times while they were in Boston. They'd been minor, easy enough to pull him out, but he knew Snart's brain. He'd known this was coming.

Damn it.

Bloody walls. Bloody knuckles. Blank eyes. Normal as it was after thirty years, the sight still made his chest tight. "Damn it, Len," he sighed, head shaking, and gave Sara a short glance. "I got it."

Ray said something behind him—and Sara in response—but it was white noise as he honed in on Snart.

"Hey," he murmured, "I'm gonna grab your wrist, okay?" He didn't expect a response, but he still waited a second before took Snart's wrist in a gentle hold, stroking the pulse point. Sensations. Comfort. The fingers on his other hand itched to brush up against Len's cheek, but there were too many eyes and neither of them had ever been much for PDA. He tightened his hold on Snart's good wrist a fraction more instead and gave the hunched over figure a ghost of a smile. "You wanna come back, Lenny?"

A test, taken and answered when Len tipped forward and his forehead touched Mick's knee. No reaction came other than that, but it was what Mick needed. He sighed. "Okay. We can do it the long way," he said gently. He shifted so he could sit against the wall and pulled Snart against him, fingers running up and down his partner's spine. More sensations. More comfort. He wasn't even sure Len registered the touches, but it made him feel better to do it. He tried for a joking chuckle that might have fallen flat. "You couldn't have picked a more comfortable place to do this?"

The others pushed, concern melding with judgement, and he forced himself to not get defensive. It was Len's business, his own thing to handle, and Mick didn't like telling them details. Len couldn't tell them crap right then, though, and he knew the team well enough to know they wouldn't let it go until they had something. He kept it to the bare minimum, floating in a gray area of telling them what was going on and not. Len could tell them whatever the hell he wanted when he came to again, but he wasn't about to start spinning stories.

"If you can't talk him out of it, get me, and don't touch him. He lets me and Lisa, but he's not good with touch on a normal day," he told them and kicked himself a second later, because it felt like he'd said too much that time. Defensiveness prickled at him, though, and he forced himself to keep calm as he kneaded the muscles in Len's neck.

He ended up growling until they left, but he wasn't all that sorry about it. They had questions, but he had priorities. Team or not, his husband was going to come first every damn time.

Alone finally, he turned his head enough that his lips could brush his partner's head. "We gotta get you back on track," he murmured softly. Whatever had happened to him in the time stream—what bits of it Len could even remember—had been enough to throw him off kilter. He'd been struggling with his old coping mechanisms since he'd come back, muttering and grasping at straws.

"Might be time to go home for a bit," he mused at a whisper, if only to fill the silence. "Get you back in with Doc Kelly and work some shit out." Either getting him back into old habits or make new ones. "And you still gotta see Lisa. We wait too much longer to tell her and she's gonna turn us into a couple of statues."

Len never replied, too trapped inside his own head. One of two, Mick thought as he tried to get comfortable on the floor. Most days, he could talk Len out of it, coaxing him back so he could shake it off and get a handle on himself again. He'd gained a gut feeling for it over the years, able to guess with a simple look just how far gone his husband was. He'd been wrong before, a hand on a wrist being enough to shock him out of it, but the times he just tipped… Mick knew it was his body seeking the contact his brain couldn't make him ask for, but it still put his nerves on high. He couldn't do anything when Len tipped. He was too lost in his own head, stuck until he managed to dig his way back out. It made him feel useless.

He'd come back when he was ready, Mick reminded himself. Even at his worst he'd come back.

He tried not to think about that, about the time things had gotten so bad that Len's brain taken a vacation for nearly a month. Hospitals. Doctors. Breakdowns. They'd barely reached their twenties when it happened, still struggling to define what was happening between them and without a real word for what Len did when he checked out.

They'd called them blackouts and still did most days.

The doctors called it dissociation, leaning more towards catatonia on Len's worst days, but they'd said it with enough of a clinical tone that Lisa had still burst into tears. Too young to understand—hell, he'd barely understood—but old enough to understand that her brother saw the world differently than they did.

Blackouts felt less clinical. At the very least, it made Len a little less self-conscious about it.

So he waited. He sat with Len on a hard floor until his ass went numb and a chill started to set in. He kept talking, keeping his voice low as he rambled on about whatever came to mind. Thefts. Fire. Lisa. Anything, if only to fill the silence and calm his own nerves.

His shoulder had gone the same way as his ass—numb and tingling—when he felt movement. Slow and sluggish, but experience told him enough. The words kept coming, some meaningless musing about what the Rogues were up to, there to give Len something to respond to when he was ready.

He was halfway through questioning Hartley's taste in men—"Wells, Hart? Seriously?"—when Len gave a soft chuckle.

"At least him and Lisa aren't fighting over Cisco," Len mumbled before he pushed himself off Mick's shoulder. He reached up—Mick guessed to rub a hand over his face—but stopped when his husband caught his wrist. "What?"

Mick nodded at the blood crusted over busted knuckles and Len grimaced. "You were out for a few hours," he told him before the other man could ask.

"The others?"

"I scared them off." He tilted his head at him, one hand under Len's chin. "You sure you're with me, boss? You still look out of it."

Len nodded, but the lack of words—the lack of his stupid puns, really—was enough to say he wasn't totally there yet. The worst blackouts always left him sluggish and struggling to pull himself out of the fog. He'd shake it, same as always, but not before they had to show their faces to the others. He was surprised they'd stayed away as long as they had.

"You wanna explain the wall?" Mick asked instead, nodding towards bloody marks on metal. The lines didn't mean jack shit to him, but he'd never understood the way Len's brain worked on a normal day.

Len craned his back to get a good look at what he'd done, even though Mick was sure he remembered it line for line. "Timelines." He closed his eyes and swallowed. "I was trying to lay it out and I just…" Snapped. Broke. Overloaded.

"Maybe don't write it down next time," Mick suggested lightly. "Come on. We need to clean up your hand."

Len's brows furrowed. He knew what came after; facing the music and the team. Dealing with the questions. "I'd rather be catatonic."

"Not funny, Snart," Mick said, humor and lightness gone from his voice. That shit wasn't something they joked about. "You're forty-five. Suck it up."

"Do you age when you're stuck in the time stream?" He let Mick pull him to his feet, eyes glimmering just a little more like himself. "I mean, time just flies when you're out there."

Mick groaned. "Yeah. You're feeling better."

The cuts on his knuckles were too superficial for Gideon to heal, but Mick bandaged them with what Len wished wasn't practiced ease. Too many years of patching up injuries on themselves and each other, but he knew how Mick got when the marks were self-inflicted. He could feel the twitch in his husband's hands, wanting to turn into a full tremor, but resisting it anyway. He wouldn't. Len knew he wouldn't. He hadn't in years.

Part of him wanted to apologize, to talk about the timelines floating around in his head; aberrations and the way things should be and how they weren't. How to fix them, he thought as his brain started to drift back towards structure and order and-

"Len."

He pulled himself out of it with a shake of his head and grunted something that might have been an apology or simply an uncomfortable noise. One of the two, but he didn't try to figure out which. It didn't matter.

Mick sighed and stepped in closer, blunt nails scratching over Len's scalp before they just cupped the back of his head. "Sucks," he grumbled, "I can't even call you space cadet anymore."

He chuckled, tired, as hands—one braced and one bandaged—tugged Mick closer by the hips. "You'll do it anyway," he drawled in reply, head leaning back into the touch for a second before he tipped forward to press his forehead to Mick's shoulder. Mick hated when he did that and Len knew how it set his partner's nerves on edge, but he could feel his head aching with the beginning stages of a headache.

"Boss?"

He squeezed Mick's hip with his bandaged hand. Give me a minute. A minute to sort himself out. A minute to ground himself. He breathed through his nose, slow and controlled. Smoke and sandalwood and an underlying scent of kerosene the heat gun always left behind. It was as comforting as it always had been, giving him something to hold onto as he pieced himself back together. It was as healthy as it definitely wasn't, the way he used Mick to steady himself. His shrink would give him that look she always gave him when the topic came up, like she knew they were as codependent as they weren't, but like she also knew it wasn't going to change. Contradictions and complications, but he and Mick worked.

He lifted his head as something in him calmed. His mind kept moving the way it always did, nowhere near the manageable way it used to, but enough. Forehead to forehead, he sighed in tandem with Mick and hummed an affirmative before the man could ask if he was okay.

"We gotta get you back to Doc Kelly," Mick said as his thumb slipped under the hem of Len's shirt, rubbing slow circles into the skin.

"Not now," Len told him, because they couldn't leave yet. The others had ripped time to pieces in a way he'd felt when he was still bouncing around the time stream. Echos of pain and screams made him shudder and Mick held him a little tighter. They couldn't leave yet, not until time had been righted and the aberrations calmed enough that his body stopped picking up on the slightest hint of one.

They didn't talk about it, about what he'd gone through or the way some part of him had lingered with Mick. He remembered it in parts, like salvaging a handful of negatives from an old scroll of film, but there were bigger chunks he'd never remember. He didn't think he wanted to.

He drew back enough that he could pull Mick into a kiss. Normally, he wouldn't have done it unless they were in the privacy of their quarters, but he could feel the tension coming from Mick. His partner was worried, jarred by the blackout and the markings on the wall. It didn't matter that it had been years.

"Len," Mick sighed.

He shook his head. "I'm fine," he promised, almost sure he was being at least half-truthful. His head was aching and his body felt like a third of it was made of lead, but the fog was clearing enough that he could face the music with the team. He didn't want to—he'd rather they all stayed out of his business—but Mick enjoyed reminding him that he couldn't control everything. Wished he could, he thought and slid off the stool Mick had shoved him onto.

Mick pulled him in close when he was on his feet, fingers brushing against his cheek as he kissed him again.

Len smiled into it softly and pulled back. "You can play nurse when we're back in our room."

Mick barked out a laugh. "Still not wearing one of those dresses."

(He did and threatened to divorce Len if he ever told anybody.)

The End