Written for FreyReh's Legends Halloween challenge.
(Author's note: Set in a AU where "Destiny" didn't happen ... or did, up to a point. Early but established CaptainCanary relationship. Consider it a follow-up to "Out of the Rain," if you'd like!)
...
The captain is pacing again.
All the assorted miscreants seated before him have seen it before. There's a pattern to it...step, step, step, step, turn. Drink. Step, step, step, step, turn. Drink. Sigh.
Sometimes there are more drinks. And more sighs.
This is one of those times.
Finally, Rip Hunter comes to a stop before them. Drinks again. Sighs again. And turns to survey the majority of his crew.
"Explain."
Silence.
Finally, Jax sighs and shakes his head, glancing over his shoulder at his cohorts, some of whom are far more repentant than others.
"I'm sorry. It was my fault," he says. "I wanted to go. I talked them into it." He holds up a hand as Rip starts to speak again. "I know! It was a bad idea. Bad. Idea. Capital 'B.' Capital 'I.' All right. I get it."
Ray chimes in before the captain can say another word. "I wanted to go, too. So don't just blame him." He gives his other teammates a look that is, for Ray Palmer, withering, but adds, "And it isn't all their fault. They say the actors at these things don't touch you, but they grabbed both Sara and Kendra and, well, that's when things really started going downhill..."
The next interruption comes in the form of Leonard Snart, who's slouching in his jump chair with a foot braced against the side of the next one...in which Sara Lance is slouching herself.
"It wasn't a big deal, captain," he drawls, making the word sound like an insult...as usual. "No blood, no foul. And we're outta Dodge; it's done with."
"Not a big deal?" Rip stares at him a long moment, just a touch wild-eyed. "Ms. Lance was nearly arrested for assault and indecent exposure..."
"That was Snart's fault."
"Was not."
"...Mr. Rory burned down several structures..."
"We already sent them cash, anonymously," Ray explains earnestly. "A lot more than they'd need to replace that old barn thing. And the clown just got singed, really."
"...while, fortunately, thanks to the time of year, Ms. Saunders'...transformation...was chalked up to a truly epic costume, and not the presence of an Egyptian hawk goddess among them..."
A laugh from Mick. "That was awesome..."
"...and Dr. Palmer and Mr. Jackson were nearly charged because the rest of you cut and ran instead of staying behind to clear up your mess!"
"We broke them out," Sara points out. "And it's not likely we'll be back in 2012 Nickel City anytime soon, anyway."
The noise that emits from their captain, then, is a cross between a growl, a sigh and a whimper. He picks up his glass, shakes his head, sets the glass back down, picks up the bottle, and stalks off the bridge without another word.
Jax tilts his head to watch him go.
"So, you think we're off the hook?" he asks Ray.
About 24 hours earlier
"This is supposed to be one of the best haunted hayrides in the country," Jax enthuses to the group of people who are trailing along with him with attitudes ranging from bright interest to studied boredom. "Good actors, good effects...well, they'd probably be better in 2016, but it's still way beyond the one they have in Central. A bunch of the guys from the team came here when they visited Nickel City University last year, talked about it for weeks."
Ray grins at him as he walks along next to a tolerant Kendra. "I've never been to one of these before. It sounds like fun!" He slows his steps just a little, though, as he glances over his shoulder. "Uh. Do you think it was really a good idea to bring..."
"I can hear you, Haircut." Mick steps up between them, leveling an amused glance at his teammates. "Don't worry. I'll behave. And the lovebirds back there are paying more attention to each other than anything else."
That gets a chuckle from Kendra. "It'll be fine, Jax," she assures him. "But why did you want all of us to come?"
"Well, with six people, we got a group rate, and we get to stay together as a group on one of the wagons. I thought that might be a good idea."
Mick huffs out a laugh. "Or a bad one..."
Walking behind them by a few feet, Leonard and Sara watch their teammates bicker back and forth. Sara shakes her head and glances up at her lover
"You're a good sport," she says in a low voice, lacing her fingers with his, something he's only just started to accept in public. "But I don't think you really want to be here, do you?"
The tall man beside her shrugs, letting just a touch of unease show as he squeezes her hand.
"I'll be fine. But I don't really like Halloween," he mutters, avoiding her eyes as he scans the lit-up entry area with its food tents, giggly teenagers and roaming actors. "Never really did it as a kid. And 'haunted' shit like this just seems sort of...pointless."
There are words behind the words, though, words like "dad" and "trust" and "sister" and "punishment," reasons for his dislike of being startled and his dislike of gratuitous violence. And she knows him well enough at this time to hear them even if he doesn't say them.
She doesn't need to tell him that, though. "It's OK. I'll keep you distracted."
Now he'll meet her eyes, with the edge of a smile that tells her he's completely aware of what she's doing. "Promise?"
"Mmmm, yes." Her attention is caught by movement ahead of them. "Wait...does Mick have a flask?"
"Yep."
"That's probably not allowed."
"Nope."
Jax checks them in at the ticket booth, and then all six of them amble through the site, which also contains a maze and a more traditional haunted house, before making their way to the line for the haunted hayrides.
It's not too long, really, before the tractor-pulled conveyance pulls up before them, and the Legends dutifully pile onto it, joining a number of perfectly innocent civilians in their pursuit of pre-Halloween thrills and chills.
Studying the scene, for just a moment, Jax thinks that, just maybe, this may have not been his greatest idea.
Nah. They'll behave...right? Mostly, anyway.
Sara grabs Leonard by the hand and drags him to the back of the wagon, where the particular structure of the hay bales makes for a secluded little corner. Jax watches them sink to the floor, into the shadows with a low murmur of voices, and hastily averts his eyes...just in time to see a group of four girls approximately his own age climbing onto the wagon.
The one in front—tall, hazel eyes, curly dark hair-stops to grin at him as her friends, grumbling good-naturedly, push past her. "Hey."
"Hey." He grins back, forgetting for a moment crazy teammates and time travel and everything else life has served up the past couple years. "There's room over here. If you want."
"Thanks." She drops down next to him, gesturing to her friends as they move back to her, giggling just a little. "I'm Cori."
"Jax." He nods to them, shifting a little to make room. "'I'm...ah...from out of town. Visiting...the college..." We were retrieving an out-of-time artifact from a professor there, but you don't need to know that...right?
"Did you come with friends?" Cori asks, to a renewed gale of giggling from her friends.
Well... He's trying to think of a way to temporize when one of those friends promptly leans over from his other side and beams at them.
"Hi!" he says happily. "I'm Ray."
Jax sighs.
The pre-ride area is lit well enough. The woods they now head into are not. "OOooooOOhhh!" the girls chorus as it grows dark.
The wagon slowly creeps through the trees, occasionally slowing or stopping for scenes just barely illuminated by creepy effects, with spooky music playing in the background and actors occasionally coming just close enough to draw screams and laughter.
They pass a laboratory set featuring beaten, bloody people strung up by their hands, struggling while electricity crackles and evil scientists prance around, cackling madly...
"We've done that, haven't we, Haircut?"
...an apparent black magic ritual with dark-robed figures holding bloody knives...
"We've seen that, too."
"Shh...!"
...a demonic circus...
"Haven't seen that. Yet."
"Mick..."
And that's when it all goes to hell.
Maybe it's because a number of the people on this particular wagon aren't giving them the reaction they want. Maybe it's just that this particular actor gets a view of certain activities going on in one corner and wants to stir the pot a little.
But grabbing a rather...distracted...highly trained assassin with highly trained assassin's reflexes is never, ever a good idea.
The actor, dressed as a particularly disturbing clown, snatches his hand back with a yelp as a blonde blur vaults over the back of the wagon, ready to fight and looking around for a reason to do so. Jax groans.
Mick stands up. "Hey...why isn't Blondie wearing a shirt?" He peers into the darkness. "Damn. Or anything else up top. Snart, man..."
At that point, their team crook launches himself out of the darkness after Sara, landing neatly and tripping an actor who'd been rushing up to help his coworker. On the wagon, Kendra stands up, too, actually stepping on top of one of the hay bales to catch a glimpse of her friend.
"Do you need..."
And then one of the actors grabs her ankle.
He grabbed a perfectly ordinary-looking, if attractive, woman...but it's a startled, vengeful centuries-old hawk goddess who rounds on him, snarling and mantling her wings.
A heartbeat. Then the girls next to Jax shriek. The actor shrieks. The driver, stopping the tractor, half-turns in his seat...and shrieks.
"Oh." Ray's voice drops into the chaos. "Oh. Shit."
Kendra launches herself off the wagon at the man, who turns and runs, saved only because Ray gets a hand hooked in Kendra's jacket...only managing to delay her a little as she promptly shrugs out of it and takes off.
"I think we need a distraction!" he yells to Jax,
"I can do distraction!" Out of the corner of his eye, Jax sees Mick climb down from the wagon, thinks about it for half a second and then yells, "Nooo!"
Whumfph...
And that's when the barn ahead of them goes up in flames.
At this point, the driver bails, jumping down from the tractor and yelling to those on the wagon to follow him as he runs for cover. Jax regretfully watches Cori and her friends dart after the driver without a backward glance, then runs over to the barn. Fortunately, the rickety structure does seem to be mostly a transition between scenes-not the sort of thing actual people would be in.
"Mick, what the hell?"
"I did check, kid." The bigger man turns to looks for his partner in crime. "Where's Snart? And Blondie?"
"I don't know!" he yells over the crackle of flames. "Ray?"
"I think they went after Kendra. After Sara put the fear of...well, herself...into that guy, anyway." The other man looks with alarm at the barn. "Tell me there was no one in there."
"There was no one in there. Well. There was one clown lurking near the door. He's OK. Ran off whimpering." Mick shakes his head. "I hate clowns."
"At this point, Mick, I think clowns hate us." Jax sighs again, wondering when he became the grown-up. "Go see if they need help? And we'll try to keep this from getting worse?"
"Sure, kid."
Of course, five minutes later is when the police show up.
"I can't believe you just let us sit there for two hours!"
"They weren't going to actually charge you without more than they had at the moment," Mick points out as the group makes its way through back streets toward the jump ship. "Trust us. We know these things."
"Until they got the security footage and reviewed it, they had no real way of even telling you'd been with us," Leonard drawls from where he's sauntering along, arm in arm with Sara, who's now fully clothed again. "Maybe Kendra, but let's be honest. They're going to chalk her up to a really, really good Halloween costume. Who'd believe anything else?"
The former barista looks a trifle embarrassed. "I didn't actually do anything to him. Just scared him a little..."
"He deserved it," Sara tells her friend, staunchly. "So did the one I, well, jabbed. But I didn't do any permanent damage."
"Yeah, and thanks to you, no one else was even looking at the rest of us!" Mick tells her, then grunts as she whacks him with a fist. "Hey!"
"And we got you out before they could review the footage. It's not like they're going to put out a massive APB for something like this," Snart remarks. "Day I can't break into a suburban lockup like that is the day I retire."
"The captain doesn't need to know about this...right?" Jax asks woefully as they start to enter the small ship. "I mean...no harm done, right? Ray already sent the hayride company some cash. And we didn't really damage anything valuable."
"Kid...Rip'll know," Mick tells him seriously. "Rip always knows. Now, he can't do a goddamned thing about it...but he knows."
Sara lingers just a bit as they file aboard, though, turning to Leonard as she holds out her hand and lifts an eyebrow. Smirking, he pulls a bit of lacy dark material out of his pocket and hands it back to her. Rather than don the undergarment right then, though, she just tucks it away and grins at him.
"You have to admit," she tells him, "that was a rather entertaining taste of Halloween."
Leonard picks a piece of straw out of her hair, holds it up and lifts an eyebrow in return.
"Well," he says, "maybe you're right. This spooky stuff isn't so bad, after all."