AN: As usual, I own nothing. This is what came from me dreaming up ways to fix things.

XXXXXX

If it's any consolation, I can always bring you back to this particular time and place.

Rip Hunter only made the offer once, yet Mick Rory has replayed the words dozens – hundreds – of times since.

He'd initially rejected the idea as far too painful.

I'm fine. Just let it be.

He'd barely gotten through his first trip to see Len in 2013. As time inevitably passes, though, he begins to seriously consider the offer. Life without his old partner is much harder than he'd anticipated. Everyone keeps saying things will get better, so why does it seem like they're only getting worse?

Eventually, he decides there's nothing wrong with another visit or two; it will be good for him to see his partner again. He needs that tangible, real-life interaction with Leonard to remind him why he's doing this. Because the truth is, far too often, he thinks about walking away. He has the others, sure, and sometimes they're…tolerable. But none of them are Leonard Snart.

The only reason he's stuck around this long is that he feels compelled to make sure none of these idiots get themselves killed while catapulting through time and space without much heed for the consequences. (And maybe it's ironic that his answer to his own problem involves yet more time travel, but he glosses right over that contradiction.)

It annoys him when he thinks about how his friendship with Leonard changed him. He would have been content following the same path for the rest of his life, stealing and burning his way to the grave, but Len had to ruin it for him, didn't he? The bastard had gone and made him care. It's practically unforgivable and he wants to tell him that, somehow. Even if he can't use those exact words.

So he ends up visiting 2013 for a second time. A month after that, there's a third trip. He only goes when there are things weighing on him, things he wants to tell his old friend (that he can't). He consoles himself with the second-best option – vague conversations with Len that are generally similar to his first visit. He sticks around for longer than a minute now, though, trying to stretch out their interactions as reasonably as he can.

"Does it help?" Sara asks from behind him, right as Mick is about to board the jump ship for his fourth visit to 2013. The way he almost skips a step is the only indication that she's surprised him. That's a rare thing, and it's lucky that she's the one who did it, since he won't hit her in retaliation. Or burn her to a crisp.

Mick faces her, considering the question. He wants to answer quickly, thoughtlessly, but he doesn't. Sara deserves more than that, because out of all of them, she's the only one who can even begin to fathom his loss (and maybe by now he should admit that it's their loss).

"I don't know," he says, finally.

"Then why bother going?"

"It's better than nothing."

"What a ringing endorsement," she says, unimpressed.

"I didn't ask your opinion, did I?" He's obviously looking for a fight.

She won't give it to him. "I just…I'd imagine that it'd make things more difficult. To see him and be reminded…" that we lost him? That we can never have him back?

His irritation disappears when he sees her struggle to comprehend the choices he's making. "He's there. We can talk, even if we don't say much. Even if he'll never really understand why I wanted to see him that night."

She doesn't tell Mick that she thinks he's taking the easy way out. If he doesn't have to stop seeing Leonard, he won't have to deal with the loss. Not really. It sparks such an insane jealousy in her that she's afraid to admit it out loud for fear of what she might say. Or do.

She's already had this argument with Rip a dozen times – if Mick can repeatedly visit Leonard on the same day and time, how come she can't visit Laurel? Why can't she pick a meeting with Len on a day when he knows her? Rip's answer is always the same: after the destruction of the Oculus, this spot is the only one that Gideon can (almost) certainly say won't catastrophically change anything. In other words, the AI is relatively sure there's no way their visits to that time in 2013 will cause them to significantly alter the current timeline. They don't have to worry that the wrong word or action will end with them inadvertently erasing themselves from existence.

Frustratingly enough, Rip doesn't know why any of that is the case, nor can Gideon adequately explain it, though she likes to go into speeches about infinite timelines and causal loops that Sara can't follow too closely. She doesn't completely buy it, either, because if there's one exception, there are bound to be others, right? Gideon concedes that there are probably other spots that are equally 'safe' so to speak, but the AI hasn't found any – at least, not yet (and Sara's begged her to keep looking).

Mick must see the warring emotions on Sara's face. "It's not what you're thinking. Trust me. He's never who you want him to be." He sighs heavily, as if maybe these visits aren't accomplishing what he'd hoped they would. "I don't know how to say goodbye to him. He's my only friend."

"No, he's not," she snaps, punching Mick on the shoulder, ignoring the way he scowls at her. "Not anymore."

XXXXXX

After losing Leonard and learning about Laurel's death within the same twenty-four hours (thank you, universe), Sara had found a comfortable place of numbness. Not letting herself feel had seemed like the obvious solution. It was easy to throw herself into missions, rescue those who needed it, and take down the people who seemed to exist just to cause pain – and her denial worked fantastically. For a while.

Then the feeling starts slipping back into her life, no matter how much she tries to keep it out. She'll catch a glimpse of a face in a crowd that reminds her of Laurel and she won't be able to breathe from the pain of it. Or she'll feel a sudden icy wind that brings with it a sensation of aching loss. Most of her happiest memories don't help because they're filled with her sister. The very place she lives doesn't help because she sees the ghost of Leonard in every room.

That leads to her sitting cross-legged in the hallway, waiting for Mick outside his room; she knows he's going to take a fifth trip soon. The others never join him, not after that first visit (and technically no one else is supposed to go to 2013, either – at least that was the ground rule Rip had devised to try and 'limit impact on the timeline despite what Gideon claims is an acceptable amount of interference').

Not that Sara's ever been good at listening to him.

She jumps to her feet when she sees Mick coming. "I've been thinking about what you said, that it helps to see him even if he's not the Leonard we lost."

He can tell where this is going and tries to shut her down instantly. "Not a good idea, Blondie."

"Why not?" When he moves to step around her, she blocks his path, crossing her arms and letting him know the conversation will be over when she says it's over.

"He doesn't know you."

"He doesn't know you either," she points out, and they both know she's not talking about 'Mick Rory' in general, but rather the person he's become these past few months with her and the team and Leonard – a different Leonard who they'll never see again.

"We know each other fine," he argues, not believing the words even as he says them.

"You're as much a stranger to the past version of him as I am, yet you don't have a problem with it."

"Maybe I have a lot of problems with it," he growls. His subsequent look indicates he's not going to talk about those problems with her, either.

She's taken aback, but forges on, because she can't let him talk her out of this. Not when she's been struggling and this has been the one beacon she's held onto for the past week. "One time," she says, hopefully. "I don't need to talk to him. Seeing him would be enough." Would it, though? Forget lying to Mick to get him to agree to take her along without a fight – if she's already lying to herself then this plan is probably doomed before it even begins.

"Us showing up together would go over real well," Mick says sarcastically, in a way that painfully reminds her of Len. "He definitely won't want to know who you are or why we're there together. Leonard Snart never questions anything."

"You're being purposefully difficult. Obviously we'd go in separately. I'd hang out in a quiet corner for a few minutes and then leave. That's all I want."

He already knows he's not going to be able to talk her out of it. Some foolish part of him still hopes, though. Because what he's been doing…it's not good.

"Take the next week or so to think about it. Really think about it. If this is some passing thought then you need to forget it. Once you start, it feels like it's impossible to stop."

"What, like some kind of time traveling addiction?"

"I don't know what it is, but it's not what you're expecting, trust me."

"I've already thought about it. I'm not going to change my mind."

He considers her for a moment. "Before…everything happened," (and she feels her heart break at how he can't actually speak about Leonard's death out loud in specific terms), "he told me your decisions were usually pretty questionable."

They'd talked about her? She wonders what else those conversations had consisted of… "Looking at my past, no one can argue that."

"He thought you two were a good match that way, because most of his life decisions weren't much better. Until this team came along." He hesitates, wondering if it counts as betraying a secret if the one who told it to you was gone. Well, he'd never had much in the way of morals before now, anyways. "He thought that he was one of the worst decisions you'd ever made. And that you were one of his best."

She feels stuck. In place. In time. Her breathing isn't as even as it should be. "But we hadn't…I mean we weren't…"

Mick's silent for a long moment. "Yeah. You were."

She turns away from him, rubbing her shoe along the grating on the floor. It surprises her how much it hurts to hear someone acknowledge a truth that she'd barely been able to admit to herself. As if Mick's awareness of her and Leonard's connection made it more real and reminded her of what she'd never have. It had slipped away from her, time running through her hands like sand. The harder she held on, the more of it she lost.

He takes pity on her and keeps talking when it's clear she can't. "For what it's worth, I told him he was wrong. As usual. Leonard Snart might have been a lot of things, but he was never anyone's worst decision."

"No he wasn't," she agrees. He would have been the opposite. If they'd had more time.

"Please reconsider going to see him," Mick urges her again, as he moves past her to enter his room. "This is a road that you don't want to go down."

She nods, because it seems better than a spoken lie, and one thought keeps running through her mind.

I don't know where else to go.

XXXXXX

Numbness doesn't work anymore, no matter how hard she tries to pull it around herself like a protective shield.

Grief wields the same unrelenting force as the ocean, wave after wave crashing, any one of them threatening to drown her. She fights through them one at a time, but when they hit unexpectedly (or too fast) they threaten to pull her under. And this time she isn't prepared.

Things have been particularly difficult – another mission with people they can't save, and the pain of that on top of what she's already going through…the waves are too much this time, too high, and she can't fight through them on her own.

She doesn't want to drown out here alone.

When Mick boards the jump ship to make his fifth visit to 2013, Sara's already inside, strapped into one of the chairs with a mutinous look on her face that challenges him to try and throw her out.

He takes a seat and orders Gideon to leave without so much as acknowledging Sara's presence.

They land in 2013 and she swears to Mick that she doesn't want to talk to Leonard or interfere in any way. She instinctively knows that seeing him in person, seeing that he's 'alive' in some sense (even if it's in the past) will help her – only a little, maybe, but a little is all she needs to get through this particular storm.

After her earnest speech, Mick nods slightly, and she figures that's as much approval as she's ever going to get from him.

He tells her their destination is a ten minute walk away, and when she hears it's a strip club, she sends him an exasperated look. Mick mumbles something about not wanting to raise suspicions so he'd picked one of their 'regular' hang-outs.

She's eager to get there, her pace repeatedly overtaking his. She keeps hanging back to wait for him to catch up.

"We're supposed to be late," he reminds her, for the third time, when she pointedly checks her watch that Gideon has synchronized for the time and date in 2013. Since Mick's initial message had been for Leonard to meet him at 8, he repeats that request every time. They should be late, Mick explains, because he'd been late the first time, nerves unexpectedly getting the best of him. It makes him feel better to try and keep the minor details of his visits as similar as possible, like maybe he's messing with the universe less if there aren't a dozen different versions of this same meeting in existence somewhere out there.

Gideon hasn't given him much guidance about these trips aside from the basic gist of: Don't say or do anything that might tip Leonard off about the future.

Sara doesn't see why it matters if they try to keep things the same, especially because Gideon has confirmed that the 2013 visit 'rewrites' itself each time. Mick always jumps to the exact same moment, so in theory, any serious mistake could be fixed by immediately returning and rewriting the meeting (yet again).

Thanks to Mick's maddeningly slow pace on their walk, Sara has an irrational fear that Len will have given up and left by the time they get there. Mick repeatedly insists that Len will stay until at least twenty past 8 (and she wonders how he knows that…had he tested it one of these times?).

She enters the club first and her eyes have to acclimate to the dim lighting. Right as she's calculating her odds of getting a contact high from the place, she catches sight of Leonard alone at one of the tables near the bar.

She stops so abruptly that she nearly trips over her own feet.

It's inconceivable. It's insane. It's…time travel. She shouldn't feel this surprised. She knew he'd be here, but it's still mind-bending to try and reconcile how he can be both dead and alive at the same time.

This Leonard will meet the exact same fate as hers. In three years.

She feels an overwhelming surge of protectiveness, actually takes a step in his direction – to what? Warn him? The thought is patently absurd. What could she say that he'd find remotely plausible? Hey, in three years we have to blow up the time stream and you decide to sacrifice yourself to do it, so maybe try to come up with an alternative solution before then. And also, I didn't realize I could have loved you until it was too late, so let's start things sooner next time. She can already picture him signaling for the bouncers to drag her out.

She abruptly changes course, taking a sharp turn toward the far end of the bar. She orders a drink and wonders if Mick was right. If she shouldn't have come here.

Mick walks in a minute after her and orders his own drink before joining Leonard. She's situated so that she can see Leonard's face while Mick's back is to her. Even from a distance, she can tell how awkward the interaction is and she feels terrible for Mick. Talking to this version of Leonard must be so disorienting, like he's there but also not, and she can't imagine it.

Despite her earlier resolve that she can't warn Leonard about the future, there's a growing desire in her, whispering that she should join them. She wouldn't have to mention anything to Len about the future, about who they will become in the world (or to each other).

Twenty paces, stop at their table, flirt a little. Introduce herself as an old friend of Mick's or maybe skip that altogether and just ask Leonard if he wants to buy her a drink. He probably would – she remembers their first interactions, the spark of attraction they'd shared. She'd intrigued him once without even trying. She could certainly do it again with little effort.

Sharing one small, innocuous moment in a bar in 2013 wouldn't be enough to affect the timeline, right? Certainly not when he doesn't know who she is and will forget the encounter by the next day. The risk wouldn't be that great, either, not when she knows they could easily rewrite this evening if anything went wrong with the timeline…

It'd be so easy to go over and see him. At this exact moment in her life, she'd be hard-pressed to say she's ever wanted anything more.

But she won't do it, because this Leonard isn't her Leonard (not yet) and it wouldn't be fair to him to do that.

She's fine watching from afar. This is all she'd needed. Just a few minutes of watching him.

This is enough.

She orders another drink, tells the bartender to make it stronger this time.

There's growing suspicion on Leonard's face the longer Mick keeps talking. Never easily played for a fool, Len had noticed something was wrong the moment he'd seen his partner arrive. Sara wonders if Mick realizes just how wary Leonard is, or if he's too wrapped up in his own grief and unhappiness to give it much thought.

A few minutes pass and it appears their conversation is ending. When Mick gets up to leave, she catches a glimpse of his face and sees the faintest hint of despair. She wants to kick him. Hard. Because this is not making things better.

It's making them worse.

Sara decides to talk to him about it later. She's not exactly the poster child for making the best choices, but maybe she can give him a fresh perspective, convince him this is hurting him more than it's helping.

She waits for Mick to exit the club first, not wanting to give any hint or clue that they know each other, not when Leonard is over there brooding about his friend and already suspicious enough to pick up on anything that might be out of place – even a mistake as small as a shared, commiserating glance between friends who've suffered the same unimaginable loss.

She finishes her drink and counts out some money for the bartender before heading to the door.

A shiver runs up her spine and nerves tingle at the back of her neck as if she's being watched.

She casts one last casual glance at Leonard before leaving, but he's looking at his drink and not at her.

XXXXXX

When Sara returns home, it's excruciating, and she wonders if Mick had felt the same way after his first visit to 2013. It's crushing to go from a time where she could literally reach out and touch Leonard to one where he doesn't exist. It takes her several days to recover (and it's in those moments, when she's crying in her room, that she understands the look she'd seen on Mick in the club).

One thought helps her come out of it – she can always see Leonard again.

She keeps reminding herself of that fact and quickly rebounds. It feels like the waves of grief are coming further apart; she can easily breathe again. She's more cheerful, upbeat, and hopeful than she's been in months. Months.

If something as simple as seeing Leonard from across a room gives her more hope than anything else, who is she to deny herself that simple comfort? Who is anyone?

She tries to talk to Mick about what she'd seen on his face in the club, that moment of anguish, but he brushes her off. He tells her that he always gets melancholy when he leaves, and she believes him because she'd felt the same and she'd gotten over it. Besides, who is she to tell anyone else how they should deal with their pain?

She joins Mick for visit six because it had only taken one trip for her to realize she can't stay away.

On their walk to the club, Mick lingers further behind than he did last time. At first, she waits for him to catch up, then she abandons her efforts and walks the rest of the way by herself. She beats him there by a good five minutes and it gives her the opportunity to watch Leonard while he's alone.

It's eerie to see him repeat the same small actions and gestures that he did last time – but obviously he would, since it's the same night all over again. He sips his drink, checks the time, and mostly broods (presumably about life in general, though who knows with him).

To be honest, the fact that he does anything at all is enough to take her breath away. She knew he was alive here, and gone in her time, but to see him a mere thirty feet away, living and breathing and drinking and being alive…it threatens to break something in her. She thinks that the only reason it doesn't is due to her sheer force of will – I can always come back, she whispers to herself, over and over and over again.

Mick eventually arrives, ordering his drink and going over to his partner. His footsteps seem slower tonight, like maybe he can't do this too many more times.

She watches the same events occur between them: the awkward interaction, Leonard's confusion and suspicion, Mick's abject unhappiness…she gets this surreal feeling like she's watching a twisted stage play, except this isn't a play, it's real life. Both she and Mick are acutely aware that the Leonard they eventually team up with in 2016 will have these memories for the rest of his life – or at least, the memories from their most recent 2013 trip.

They have to tread lightly.

They have to be careful.

It startles Sara – the sudden need she has to walk across the room and squeeze Mick's shoulder in an attempt to ease his pain. Or to joke and flirt with Leonard and then kiss the suspicion right off his face.

She orders a double shot to try and force those thoughts out of her head.

The vantage point she's chosen means that she can only see Leonard's face and not Mick's, the same as last time. She sips her drink and Mick glances back at her, then quickly away. Almost like he doesn't want Leonard to notice she's there (not that he'd know who she was – this Leonard Snart does not know Sara Lance in any time period).

They finish talking and Mick leaves. Sara knows that's her cue. She finishes her drink quickly, pulls out some half-folded bills (she's going to go broke if she keeps spending this much money in 2013 – and it makes her wonder, if she keeps visiting the same time and spending this much, where does all that money eventually go? Lost in the time stream? Who the hell knows?).

She stands up, stretches, and feels a familiar sensation of being watched, just like their last visit. She looks over, not expecting anything different (time repeats itself, right?).

Except Len's not staring morosely into his glass as if contemplating the meaning of life; this time he's looking at her. Right at her. And their eyes meet with a jolt of electric shock.

Leonard! her mind screams at her. That's Leonard, go over there, talk to him, explain to him…

The rational part of her takes over before it's too late and warns her that she can't go over to him. This might be Leonard, but not the one she knows. It's the past version of him and she can't take the risk of ruining all their lives on a fleeting whim.

She does the only thing she can – she turns and leaves.

XXXXXX