Happy birthday to Pir8grl! And many thanks to LarielRomeniel for the beta. :) (And the title, sort of.)

Inspired by a recent trip to a Renaissance festival. A sequel of sorts to "Carry Me Home," set in an alternate Legends season 3.

"Now, remember. This anachronism could be as small as a piece of jewelry or as large as … well, as a human being." Sara's lips twitch briefly as Leonard, walking besides her, snorts. "Or bigger, I suppose."

Nate swallows, stopping in his tracks to regard their current destination. "But…Sara?"

"What?"

"How will we know?"

Sara sighs and stops to look at the sign on the gate the six Legends are approaching.

"Renaissance Festival," it reads, ornate words beneath a fanciful coat of arms. Other guests are trickling in through a gate beneath it, and there's faint music in the air, audible even at a distance. The site covers 35 acres, according to their records, and somewhere on those acres is the item—or creature, or person—they've come to find.

"Well," she says finally, "Ray has the temporal energy detector. And Gideon has…all the talents that allow her to make these calls. The rest of us will just have to keep our eyes open."

"That's … not a great plan," Nate tells her.

"You have a better one?"

"…no."

"Well, then." Sara slaps him on the back, smiling. "Let's go."

Behind her, Gideon frowns. "Why do humans do things like this?"

The Waverider's AI had made the surprise decision, only a week or so ago, to fashion herself a human body using the ship's regeneration tech and upload herself into it. Jax had been the only one she'd confided in before the actual process. While Sara hadn't heard her say out loud that it'd been because of the possibility of the Time Bureau reclaiming the ship, everyone had guessed that was indeed the case.

Jax, walking next to her, shakes his head, grinning. "It's fun, G," he tells her blithely. "You know, fun? People like to play make believe." He slows, studying the walls running around the grounds as they approach the front gate. "I mean, I don't really get this, but it isn't really that different from, oh, cosplay or something."

The dark-haired woman shakes her head in a mix of confusion and disapproval. "The Renaissance was not like this," she says, a note of bafflement in her voice. "If this is their way of achieving time travel without a time ship…"

"No, it's not about reality…"

Sara, listening in, chuckles as Jax gamely tries to explain-again. She glances at Leonard, only to see him watching her with that small, secretive smile, the one she's been seeing much more lately, ever since they'd decided to try this…well, she guesses it's a relationship. Not that they've had the time to do much more than steal a few kisses and a few moments here and there.

And not that those moments hadn't been rather enjoyable.

"They're doing it again," Nate says in a loud stage whisper to Ray, and Sara realizes she's been smiling back at Len. And since she'd been thinking about those stolen few moments the night before, it probably hadn't been an innocent-looking smile.

"Do they really think we don't know?" Ray stage-whispers back, as Mick bellows with laughter in the background and Amaya tries to hide a smile. "I mean, it's sort of obvious. And do they really think we can't, you know, be mature about this? After all, we're grownups."

"Obviously," Sara tells him drily as they show their tickets to the employees at the gate. "So mature."

"I'm mature!" Ray objects. Then he bounces on his toes to better see ahead. "Ooh, look! Puppets! Sara…"

"You all have an amount of the money of the time," Gideon reminds them primly as she pauses to take in the scene. "Any more would draw too much notice. It should prove adequate if you are not profligate."

"It's 2000; it's not that much out of our own time…"

"Which still does not mean you should use 2016 bills."

"All right, enough, people." Sara sighed. "All right. Nate, Ray, take the southwest area. Mick, Amaya, the southeast. Gideon and Jax, the northeast. We'll take the rest. Meet back in the..." She consults the map in her hand. "...in front of the main stage."

"Sweet! Sara, do you know…"

"Focus, Ray!"

"Focusing…"

Sara watches as the other members of her team head off through the sun-dappled grounds of the festival, then turns to Leonard. Who's watching her with that smile again.

"Stop that," she tells him.

"Stop what?" The Snart drawl is out in full force as the smile/smirk grows. He leans against a tree, eyeing her, looking extremely distracting in the short-sleeved gray shirt she'd finally convinced him to wear, lest he court heat exhaustion. (Gideon had helped him conceal the thick, twisted scar on his left forearm; Sara's not sure how.) He sees her looking and raises his eyebrows, smirking, folding his arms; she can see the muscles play in his arms and shoulders for once.

Oh, but two can play this game.

Sara sidles closer, clearing her throat. "Well," she tells him, "if you don't, I might very well drag you back to the ship and take advantage of the others being here. And that probably wouldn't work out well."

The words...and the low tone of her voice...have him licking his lips and looking a bit less composed. "Silvertop and the new girl are still there," he points out, his own voice rough, as she leans in.

"Zari, Len. Her name is Zari. And they don't need to know we're there."

He's about to say something-or kiss her, she's not sure which-when she suddenly takes a step back and grins at him.

"But..." She points out. "...we do have a job to do. And there's no telling what sort of trouble the others could get into. So, let's try to enjoy it while we're here."

Leonard rolls his eyes and sighs, straightening from his lean. "True enough," he allows. "Carry on, Captain."

It's a lovely summer day, and the festival is more interesting than she'd thought it would be—and Leonard actually twines his fingers with hers, commenting that a couple out in public at such a thing draws less attention that two random people alone. Sara's not entirely convinced of this, but given that it's a spontaneous, public physical gesture from a man who admits he's not good at those, she doesn't protest. She just takes a deep breath, resolves to leave some of her worries behind her this day, and maybe even enjoy it.

After a moment or two, though, she glances at him. "Attention, hmm?"

She gets merely a raised eyebrow in return.

"Len, I don't care how historically accurate it might be. No picking pockets."

That gets a noise that might be annoyance, might be amusement. Probably both. He waves his free hand at the scene around them. "I haven't lowered myself to target this sort of crowd in years," he tells her loftily. "These are just ordinary people trying to escape the real world for a bit. I have standards."

"Mmhmm. And they probably don't enough cash to be worth your while."

"That too."

For all their banter, she's been keeping an eye and an ear out for any unusual activity, and raised voices in a nearby shop catch her attention as they pass. She feels Leonard tense, but the tone doesn't seem to be the sort that means real trouble and...ooooh, handmade bows!

"I've got this," she informs him, squeezing his fingers before dropping his hand and heading toward the shop, hearing a quiet laugh as she goes.

The voice was no more than a tipsy patron wanting to try out the merchandise, but Sara winds up inspecting things anyway—for the sake of thoroughness, she tells herself. She gets into an involved discussion with the proprietor, who's thrilled to be talking to another skilled archer, tries a few things out, and thinks about commissioning a new longbow for herself (and buying a child's miniature bow as well, because one of these days Oliver and Felicity are going to get their heads out of their respective asses and give her an honorary niece or nephew).

When she emerges, she casts about for a moment before seeing Leonard inspecting another stand, from which she gets an impression of color and movement in the wind. Curious, she approaches, watching him glance over his shoulder before he turns and quickly sets something on her hair.

She catches a quick glance in a nearby mirror as she puts a hand to it. A flower crown: Sunflowers, with yellow ribbons.

It's pretty and impractical and frivolous, and it actually startles a laugh out of her. She sees Leonard smile as she does.

"It suits you," he drawls, lips twitching. "Couldn't resist."

"Oh?" She straightens it, smiling, tying the ribbons as she peeks in the mirror again. "Then why don't you have one?"

"I don't think that's really my style..."

But even as he speaks, she's scanning the row of crowns and selecting one with deep blue flowers, then going up on her toes and depositing it on his head. It slips to the side, lending him a fairly rakish air. A rakish, unexpectedly appealing air. Sara bites her lip, studying him as he rolls his eyes.

"I think that's really pretty hot," she whispers to him, leaning close and smirking.

"Oh, yeah?" He moves closer, too, leaning down until their noses bump, and she goes up on her toes just enough to kiss him, a kiss that heats up quickly and draws wolf whistles from a few onlookers (as well as a few slightly off-color comments). After a minute, though, Sara breaks the kiss off with a sigh.

"We can't keep getting distracted like this," she murmurs against his lips. "We need to hunt for an anachronism."

"Damnit."

"But first, you're buying that crown."

They keep looking, but while it's easy to find an anachronism like, say, a dinosaur in the middle of Los Angeles (or a long-lost crook in the middle of said dinosaurs), it's not so easy to find an unidentified object out of time at a Renaissance festival.

Leonard points out that it doesn't have to be something from that era—there's nothing saying it couldn't be something from the future, like the actual lightsaber they'd had to remove from 1977 (resulting in a very disappointed 10-year-old boy and a team of Legends squabbling over who got to play with it) or something from any other historical period, like the real, live dodo they'd had to corral at the Bronx Zoo in 2020.

But Sara's pretty convinced, at this point, that the universe has a warped sense of humor.

They keep looking.

Of course, "looking" means walking past all those intriguing artisans...and food that didn't come from a replicator. And, as noted, it's a lovely day, and she's with Len, and no one's asking her, at the moment, to be the captain and make tough decisions. She's given the team plenty of time with which to do its job.

It is, Sara decides, OK to enjoy herself.

After a just slightly embarrassing misstep involving a guest's costume that seemed a little too authentic, they decide to take a break and get a cup of mead each, listening to a set by the group of Celtic musicians playing nearby. Sara tells Leonard about Guinevere, which makes him smirk, and he tells her a story about taking a very young Lisa to a tiny Ren fest event in Central City, which makes her laugh.

They're the first ones back to the rendezvous point, but not by much. It's only a few minutes before Mick and Amaya come wandering down one of the paths—not hand in hand, but so close they might as well be.

(Leonard nudges Sara; he'd called his friend's growing feelings for the other woman nearly since the first day he'd been back. Sara, at this point, agrees.)

Amaya is carrying a new wooden practice sword...and wearing a crown of bright tiger lilies on her dark hair. She laughs when she sees Sara and Leonard, putting a hand to her hair, and turns to smile at Mick.

Mick has a pewter beer mug in one hand and a turkey leg in the other...and a crown of fiery red flowers. He takes one look at Len and bellows in laughter, raising his mug in a toast.

"There's a glass-blower," he informs his friend, as Sara borrows Amaya's sword and makes a few experimental passes in the background. "I want to learn how to do that."

"I don't think that would work well on the ship," Leonard tells him in a long-suffering tone. "Gideon would probably have issues with it."

"What sort of issues will I, allegedly, have?"

Gideon, it seems, has thoroughly enjoyed this excursion in human guise after all. She's carrying a bundle of fresh lavender as she and Jax join them, and keeps lifting the bundle to her nose and smiling.

"I never realized that scent is a very underestimated human sense," she says happily. "I also purchased some soap. I never realized how very...utilitarian...the sort we keep on the ship is. This is so much nicer." She smiles at them. "And I really liked the shows here, although I did not understand all the jokes, and Mr. Jackson would not explain them all."

Jax groans, shaking his head. "And that's not going to change, G. Consult the databanks when we get back. Not going there."

"You didn't see anything either, then?" Sara asks Gideon, who shakes her head. "Damn. I wonder..."

With excellent timing, for the first time that day, her comm crackles to life

"Sara?" Ray's voice is a bit anxious on the other end. "We've found our anachronism."

The captain takes a step back, putting a hand to her ear. "Can you isolate it? Or just take it back to the ship?"

"Well. No. Sara, you need to come down to the jousting field."

"Apparently, they were expecting a sub for someone who's sick. This guy was in the field when they got here this morning and they figured he was the sub. We got our first clue when we heard them talking about how he wouldn't break character at all and how he kept ranting about 'witchcraft.' So I checked." Ray holds up the temporal energy detector. "It's him. And the horse."

Sara puts her hands on her hips and sighs, staring at the armored figure that's pacing back and forth at the far end of the field set up for jousting events on the grounds. Even from here, the man looks profoundly uneasy, glancing back and forth over his shoulders, and it's probably only the utter strangeness of this age in which he finds himself that's kept him in the scant familiarity of the field with its standards and viewing area.

"When's the next joust?" she asks. "We need to get him out of here before that, or someone's going to get hurt."

"About an hour," Nate tells her. "We, ah, already took the liberty of getting the three performers out of there." He shrugs. "Had to use the tranquilizers on them, but they're OK. We left them in one of the horse trailers, out of sight, since the horses are already out here."

The two Percherons and two Clydesdales are all gathered at the other far end of the field, and Sara wonders if it's her imagination that they keep looking over their own shoulders at their out-of-time counterpart. The other horse is several hands bigger and looks just as uneasy as its rider.

"I can talk to the horse," Amaya offers. "Animals often have more sense than people. If I can convince it that following us to the ship will lead to it getting home, it will go."

"Then we just have to convince Mr. Tall, Shiny, and Anachronistic over there to go for it, too." Leonard sighs. "Trank him too?"

"Yeah, but we have to get in a clear shot." Sara smiles. "Well, I've fought people in armor before. Jax, Gideon," she turns to the other two, who are conducting a low-voiced conversation, "please go back to the Waverider and get a space ready for our guest. Guests. Gideon, if you could work on pinpointing exactly where and when they come from, please?"

Jax looks relieved; Gideon, disappointed. But they both head for the exit and the Waverider, which is parked in a fallow field not too far away.

"Amaya, with me. Let's go get our guests moving." At the other woman's nod, she turns to Leonard, handing him the bag with the small bow in it, which he accepts without comment. "See if you guys can figure out a way to keep the absence of a joust from causing too many problems. And try to keep them out of trouble," she says in a low tone, motioning to Mick, who is leaning against a tree drinking his beer, flower crown askew, and Ray and Nate, who are squabbling about the authenticity of the joust and just who might be remembered more fondly in Camelot.

"Must I?" But for all the put-upon drawl, he nods, eyes serious. "Good luck."

It's easier than Sara had expected, to be honest, to lure their anachronism on the hoof out of the joust area and into an area out of sight behind the fair buildings. Amaya, invoking her amulet, quickly convinces the big horse to go where she tells him, and the knight, cursing—at least she's pretty sure it's cursing, it sure as hell sounds like it—follows.

When he sees his steed approaching two women in trousers—with flowers in their hair, no less—he stops dead in his tracks and shouts another epithet. It doesn't take a background in earlier forms of English to recognize this one.

Oh, well. It's not the first time she's been taken for a witch.

He's big, but he's not used to finesse. Sara ducks under his upraised arm and, with her bo, deals him a blow to his helmeted head just so, sending the helmet flying. Then she plunges the trank into his exposed neck…and dances out of the way as many pounds of knight and armor hit the ground hard at her feet.

Amaya, grinning, applauds. The horse snorts. Sara sketches a bow—she supposes it should probably be a curtsy—and shakes her head.

"So, will your friend there help us get him back to the ship?" she asks.

The horse is more than willing, when Amaya asks. He even obligingly lies down so Amaya and Sara can drape his unconscious master over his back, then plods carefully back to the ship with them. Sara's pretty sure the only reason he doesn't balk at going on board is Amaya's presence, but they leave him munching feed in an improvised stall in a cargo bay, the knight still out cold in the brig.

Then they go back to retrieve the boys.

Sara, frowning, taps her comm as they enter the gates, but there's no response, not even from Len. She glances at Amaya, who tries her own with the same lack of response.

"What do you think?" the other woman asks her with some amusement. "The tavern?"

Sara nibbles her bottom lip for a moment, then shrugs. "Worth a try," she says. "And if they're not there, we can get a drink."

They start in that general direction, although Sara turns as she walks to admire the low-cut dress, with tightly fit bodice, worn by a flower-seller who passes them with a saucy wink. (And the flower-seller too, to be honest; she's in a relationship, not dead.)

"I wonder," she muses, "how much those bodices cost."

Amaya chuckles. "Leonard would probably like that," she notes slyly, grinning at her friend.

"Yeah, well, so would Mick." Sara smirks as a faint hint of color rises in the other woman's cheeks. "What? You thought we wouldn't notice? Since when has that been a thing?"

Amaya's quiet a moment, and Sara lets her have her thoughts. Finally, she sighs.

"It's not, not really," she says. "But…it could be. If we let it." She gives Sara a helpless look. "It seems a bit…impolite, with Nate on the ship and all, but…"

"Nate's a grown-ass man," Sara tells her firmly. "And you pretty much broke it off mutually. He'll live." She stops in her tracks, turning to put her hands on Amaya's shoulders. "Take it from me. If you want him, don't wait. Do something about it. You never know what might happen if you don't." She laughs a little as she turns to walk again. "Although, sacrificing yourself to restore free will, getting blasted through time and space, and landing in a midst of a warped alternate Los Angeles with dinosaurs isn't likely to happen again. Leonard just had to be original." A faint cheer rises not too far in the distance, and she stops again, frowning.

"Do you hear that?"

"I do. But…" The two women look at each other suddenly as another cheer—and gale of laughter—rises. Putting pieces together, Sara suddenly curses, breaking into a run, and Amaya follows her.

They make their way to the jousting field, slipping through the crowd with many a "pardon me" and "excuse me" (at least on Amaya's part), coming to a halt near the fence just as one of the four armored knights on the field tackles another, sending a spray of mud in all directions.

Sara studies the scene with disbelief, noting the array of broken lances propped up near the fence and the whispering going on amongst the queen and court in their viewing stand. No one seems to want to confront the out-of-character knights, though, and the crowd is eating it up.

"How the hell did they manage this without killing themselves?" Amaya wonders aloud, staring at the lances and then back at the field. One "knight," the biggest, waves cheerfully to her before one of the ones on the ground in the melee grabs his foot and yanks it out from under him. Another, the cleanest one of the lot, steps back fastidiously and lifts his head to regard the women.

After a moment, he heads toward the fence.

Amaya giggles as Sara shakes her head and moves toward him as well. She can't help being amused as he actually goes to one knee, reaching through the fence to take her hand (which she allows, after a moment's consideration) and raise it to his lips.

She sees a sparkle of blue eyes though the visor just as he glances up at her and the crowd goes "Awwww!"

"You idiot!" she hisses, trying to keep a straight face. "What the hell do you four think you're doing!?"

"You said to keep an eye on them." A tilt of the head. "And Raymond insisted that we had to do something, that people came here to see a joust, and Nate and even Mick were all in. I figured it was better to stick with them."

"And you saw an opportunity to knock Ray off a horse into the mud."

"And that," he allows. "Fringe benefit."

While he's been distracted, though, the other have struggled to their feet, and Len's only warning is when Sara suddenly retrieves her hand and takes a hasty step back. His eyes widen in betrayal right as Mick reaches him, throwing an arm around his waist and slinging him to the ground before slipping and landing next to him with a splash. Nate and Ray, running up, promptly dogpile on, and Sara gives in, laughing so hard she cries as Amaya joins her and the crowd roars behind them.

Under the cover of the eager crowd, the six manage to slip out of the joust area and rush for a break in the fence that Amaya had found earlier, heading back to the Waverider. Gideon, still possessive of her "metal body," scolds them soundly for tracking mud in to the ship and sends them right to the showers.

Once the four wayward "knights" have cleaned and repaired their armor to better than its original state (which some help from the fabrication room), they return it to the festival grounds under cover of darkness, leaving it piled carefully in the viewing stand with a cheerful thank-you note written by Ray. Then the ship departs for the temporal zone, heading for 1585 to take their temporary guests home.

"Ow. Ow, ow, ow!" Nate winces as he applies disinfectant to a gash over his left eyebrow. He glowers at Ray, who's bandaging a right wrist strained when he'd yanked Mick into the mud. "You need to learn how to aim!"

"You need to learn how to duck!" the other man says indignantly. "I've done this before…"

Mick laughs at them as they continue to squabble. "You both," he informs them, "are getting better at fighting dirty. But not quite good enough." Winking at Len and Sara, he departs the medbay, whistling to himself, as Sara shakes her head.

Gideon, still snippy at the mud and being forced to leave the festival earlier than she would have liked, has refused to enable the medbay to treat injuries that are an annoyance at best. Miraculously, Ray's strained wrist had been the worst of the lot, although all will be moving a bit gingerly for a while.

Leaving Ray and Nate behind to argue about who'd "won" their little free-for-all, Sara grabs Len's hand and tugs him gently out of the room, leading him down the hall to her room. He goes willingly enough, wincing just a little as bruised ribs shift against their wrapping.

Once there, Sara takes a seat on her bed, smiling briefly at the two flower crowns now sitting on the desk.

"I still haven't forgiven you for failing to be the voice of reason," she tells him, trying to keep the amusement out of her voice as he leans against the bed next to her.

"Well," Leonard drawls, meeting her eyes with that look of his, "if it makes you feel better, I'm still paying for it."

"Hmm." She leans closer herself, smiles at the flicker in his expression. "How so?"

"Still getting mud out of places mud has absolutely no right to be." An expression of distaste crosses his face momentarily before he smirks at her again. "I think I need to shower for a month."

"Want some company?" Amaya may never take her advice, but Sara figures it's high time she follows through with it herself. She smiles again as Leonard lifts both eyebrows, looking briefly surprised before she moves just a bit closer and kisses him, correcting the awkward angle as she slides down from her perch and moves into his arms.

After a long, heated moment, Len breaks it off and looks down at her, eyes dark and expression hungry…and just a little hesitant.

"Do you," he asks carefully, "have time?"

There's really only one good answer to that. Sara gives it, winding both hands in the collar of his shirt and pulling him closer, kissing him again and harder, their bodies pressing against each other in a way that makes her response perfectly clear without any words at all.

When she finally pulls away, she doesn't go far, just far enough to look in his eyes and whisper.

"We can," she tells him quietly, "make time."

And so they do.