It feels remarkably like having his strings cut.
Some support structure he had never realized he existed within being torn away from around him. Falling, and floating, and drowning all at once.
A swirl of electric blue and greens.
The flash of moments all around him. A different event in every space, and his mind struggling to interpret the vast new dimension of information scraping against his senses.
Two blurry figures against the chaos.
Len focuses, blocking out the too quick visions – Canary crying on the Waverider; Kendra captive on a jump ship; Lisa sitting on an old couch with Shawna, eating ice-cream and watching horror movies; Rip in the cargo bay, curled in on himself, the last grasps of denial torn from him – to see what it is that lays beyond them.
Standing without standing amid the rush of time he sees them.
"Mick!" He shouts. "Raymond!" His voice is raw in his throat, but muffled in the air around him. Neither seems to hear him.
He has to get to Raymond. He has to get to Mick.
His heart clenches. They aren't supposed to be here.
He takes a brief distracted moment to be thankful he still has a body and a beating heart to bother him, and the memory of the explosion plays out around him followed by a million different ways it could have gone.
It overwhelms, blocking out everything else. He can see an endless cycle closing in on him. His thoughts calling up visions of the explosion, feeding his thoughts, feeding the visions.
He breathes. Clears his mind the way does during the lulls of a heist. His awareness passive, counting down the moments in which he exists.
The explosions fall back into the blue green flow around them.
As he counts down the seconds time fluxes around him, like the ripples from a thrown stone. He pushes into the flux, a slow path forming in the solid, intangible dimension in front of him. Every second that counts away in his head an ounce of mobility. Raymond stands, silent and still. He moves in the wake like it is molasses. His hands in front of him like he is holding some imaginary ball, a furrow of concentration on his brow.
Mick's eyes are on Raymond, seemingly unaware of Len's presence. There are fires burning in the streams around him. The echoes of flames throughout time licking its way across the distance between the two.
Mick takes large, jerky steps forward into the fires, chasing his own sirens call in a path towards Raymond.
They reach Raymond almost at the same time. Mick's stop and start method, and Len's slow but steady pace bringing them oddly in step with each other.
Len stops short for a moment when he sees what Raymond holds in his hands.
In the air in front of them is one event in time. One that Len would be tempted to tear out of the time stream so that it never existed.
Mick, strapped into a chair in the Time Master's control as they try to warp him into Kronos.
Here, trapped in a nexus of time, Len can see what the machine does, stripping Mick of his history without stripping history of Mick. Pulling moments out of Mick's head like they're plucking flowers.
And as quick as the Time Master's take them out Raymond is putting them back.
He finishes moments before Mick and Len reach him, sagging in relief. Raymond's thoughts, always curious and quick to latch onto a subject, spiral around him visibly. The invention of the machine Mick was strapped to, the discovery of some equation that was necessary in its construction, and on, and on, and on, and on.
Around Raymond the timeline flourished with discovery, and perished under the hubris of its own invention.
Len and Mick reached out, and each grabbed one of Raymond's shoulders, Mick's eyes meeting Len's in surprise as he sees him.
The moments slow to a drip around Raymond at the touch, but his eyes are still distant and distracted as he looks at them. Confused by their presence.
"Mick? Leonard? What…how?"
"Doesn't really matter, Prettyboy," huffs Mick. "You aren't sticking around long."
An image crystalizes behind Raymond, the moment where Mick had intervened hanging in balance with a world where he didn't. Working in tandem, so familiar and so achingly foreign in the recent past, Mick and Len pick Raymond up underneath his armpit, and shove him into the world where Mick punches him and takes his place. Raymond falls into himself at the moment of unconsciousness, and the future where Raymond destroys the Oculous dissipates into a shower of blue light.
"What the fuck, Snart?"
Len shakes his head. "I wasn't leaving you behind again."
"Well you didn't exactly come with me, did you?"
A world flashes in between them, both their hands, intertwined together, holding down the mechanism at the moment of destruction. At the last moment Mick grabs the back of Len's head, and drags him in for a final kiss.
"No," says Len, and the possible world fades away.
"I can toss you out, same as we did Raymond. Make things go my way."
Another possibility. Recognition hits Mick a second sooner, and he ducks out of the way of Len's hit. He pulls his hand out just long enough to swing at Len, knocking him onto the ground. When Sara makes her way up a moment later he yells at her to take Len back to the ship.
She argues – they're there to save him, not give their last goodbyes – but she gives in after a moment. Stretching up on tip toes she gives Mick a desperate kiss before she leaves.
"Maybe." Len looks around Mick, sees the flames shimmering around him, ready to burst into existence and consume Mick's attention. "But how long do you think you can ignore those flames, Mick?"
Mick shakes his head. Raises his hand in a half aborted gesture to wipe it all away. "It doesn't fucking matter!"
Len grabs onto Mick's arm, and looks him dead in the eye. "If you stay here Mick, the way this place is, the world burns. Just like you wanted."
There's a beat of silence, the flames surging around them in innumerable times and places.
Mick's eyes are wide, trapped somewhere between panic and devotion.
"The world will end in fire. And so will I. And so will Sara. And Lisa. Raymond. Anyone else that think about. We'll all burn."
Mick breaks eye contact, and the images flicker in front of him.
Len in the middle of a fight, the Cold gun running out of charge, reaches for his left thigh where a second hostler holds Mick's heat gun. The vicious look in Len's eyes as he draws his enemies close enough, and pulls a section off once it gains a charge, unleashing a huge, beautiful explosion. The last of Savages followers defeated.
Sara, rushing into a burning fire to save a child no more than five years old. Her hips crushed under a falling beam. The child caught under her, crying in fear and pain. The dead look in her eye as the flames move closer, the smoke not thick enough to kill them where they lay on the ground. The snap of the child's neck. The bones and ashes all that's left by the time the fire's out.
A car crash involving a big rig carrying fuel. The explosion hits Lisa on her bike, even though she's in front of the crash. She's taken to a hospital with severe burns, where she lives for several days in intensive care. She's under an alias, whatever she happened to have in her wallet, and with Mick and Len gone no one finds out what happened to her until after she passes away.
A fire in one of Raymond's labs. The atom suit left somewhere else. The noxious fumes from burning chemicals takes him down before the fire department arrives.
"I can hold it back now," says Mick. The closest that he'll come to admitting that he cares about them in this moment. "I won't let that happen." He keeps his gaze down, away from the penetrating stare of Len's eyes.
"Mick. Look at me." Len pulls off his right glove, lets it drift in the time stream and come out wherever the hell it wants. He brings his hand up to Mick's face, and guides his chin up so that they are looking each other in the eyes once again. "I am not leaving you behind again. I am always going to come back for you."
Len swallows. He closes his eyes and lets his forehead rest against Mick's. Shared history - in 2024 and Chicago, with Kronos and Alexa, of thirty years of partnership - flashing around them.
"I can't come reach you if you're here. I won't know how to get back to you."
Mick takes in a shaky breath, and reaches up to squeeze the back of Len's neck. "Don't leave me waiting again this time. If I have to track you down again I'll make the ass kicking I gave you last time look like a playground tussle."
Len huffs out what could almost be called a laugh. "Understood."
The fires dim around them, and flicker away. Len takes a half step back as the moments before the Oculous exploded once again appear before them. He takes off his pinky ring and slips it into Mick's front pocket. "See if you can remember this."
"I will." Len smiles, sad and self-deprecating. "You're pretty fucking hard to forget, Lenny."
A thin voice drifts from the moment hovering on possibilities. "Old friend, please forgive me."
Mick frowns. "Did you seriously just pull some Star Trek shit on me?"
Len smirks, and pushes Mick back into the event, where he merges with himself just in time to take yet another bow to the head.
On the Waverider, Mick jerks awake. "Son of a bitch."
"Mick?"
Sara blinks up at him where she's nestled against his chest, and he runs a soothing hand over up and down her back. "Just a dream." Mick shakes his head. Just a fucking dream.
Sara yawns, the bags under her eyes heavy and dark. Between losing Len and the bloodlust that came on her during the battle with Savage Sara had worn herself out pretty good. Not that Mick had been much better. Len and Kendra were the only two that had much experience talking Sara down from her bloodlust, and Kendra had been busy with lover boy, whoever that was this time, so Mick had done the best to redirect Sara's energies elsewhere.
It was probably the saddest fuck that Mick's ever had. The both of them obviously thinking more about Len than of each other. Sara gripping the hand where Mick was wearing that stupid pinky ring like a life line the whole time.
He drops a kiss on the top of her head, but rolls her off and under him. "Go back to sleep. I'm just gonna take a piss. Get something to drink."
Sara hums, and gives him a quick kiss on the lips before he gets up and starts rummaging around on the floor for clothes. He ends up having to turn on the lights, and he pulls on the first pair of pants he sees, and fucks the rest of it. He'll be back in bed soon enough, he just needs to walk off that fucking dream.
Besides. They're back in 2016 now. Mick isn't sure who crashed on the ship, and who decided to head home.
"Leave the lights on?" asks Sara.
He grunts in assent, and lowers the lights to about half strength on his way out. Wanders to the kitchen after he takes a piss.
Ray is there, staring at one of the cupcakes that's left like it holds all the answers in the universe. Somehow Mick isn't surprised that Ray hasn't left the ship yet either.
Mick reaches into the back of one of the cabinets and pulls out what's left of a bottle of whiskey Len swiped on their cowboy trip. Takes down two glasses after a moment of debate, and plunks one in front of Raymond, who jumps in his seat, apparently just now noticing Mick.
"Oh," says Ray. "Hey, Mick." There's something funny about his voice.
'What's got your panties in a twist," asks Mick. He pours out a fingers worth of booze in both their cups and takes a seat. Ray offers Mick another cupcake, which he takes with a nod of thanks. "Nightmare?"
Ray shrugs, his face wrinkling up. "Not really? It was…"
He trails off, and they both take a few sips of their drinks.
But, being ray, it's not long until he speaks up again.
The man doesn't do silence with any sort of grace.
"I dreamed that it was me. In the explosion. Except I didn't die." Ray shakes his head. "Or at least I don't think I did? There was all these lights, and images, and then you and Leonard were there."
Mick can feel his shoulders tense unwilling to let the idea fully form in his head just yet.
"And then we tossed you back into a world where I knocked you out."
"I…Yeah. Yeah, how did you know?"
"Gideon, you still being a peeping tom and watching our dreams?"
"I continue to monitor the dreams of this crew, Mister Rory, yes."
"Anything off during the last sleep cycle for me and Haircut here
"Affirmative. There are signs both you and Mr. Palmer were processing a time anomaly during your last sleep cycle."
"What does that mean?" asks Ray.
Mick downs his drink. He doesn't smile, doesn't celebrate, even though a part of wants to. Things aren't fixed yet, just looking a lot more fixable. He sets his glass down with a clink.
He locks eyes with Ray. "It means that we weren't dreaming. We were remembering events that happened outside the timeline."
"Then Leonard?"
Mick shrugs. "Not sure if he's alive, but he sure as hell doesn't seem to be dead yet."