This is for my secret Santa, the lovely locitarose! I hope you have a wonderful holiday and that the new year brings many good things!
Inspired by the song Find My Way Back by Eric Arjes
When Sara Lance was younger — around nine or ten, when she'd just started reading superhero comic books, she'd thought the whole "tragic backstory" thing was a cliché. Now, after everything she's been through and everything she's seen, she realized it's a cliché for a reason.
Sara could see now that there was something to why people who live normal lives don't end up in this business.
The whole team of time travelers Rip Hunter had recruited had seen their fair share of hardship, both before the mission and after. They all had their own ways of dealing with that sort of pain.
Jax and Stein could literally feel each other's emotions, and in that way had their own personal therapist in their head.
Ray was an open book. Everybody knew about his problems, whether they wanted to or not and he was lucky that there were a few people on board who could help him if he needed it.
Mick fell on the other end of the spectrum, usually dealing with problems by drinking until he couldn't remember what had made him feel actual feelings, even momentarily.
They all had their own ways of getting through tough times, because they all knew that whatever they were going through couldn't impact the mission. Their first job was the people they were protecting.
Sara often took that sentiment to an extreme. She was in this mission to help people, and for her, that meant putting herself last, even if she didn't realize it.
Then, she met Leonard.
Leonard arrived to the Waverider the polar opposite of Sara. He put only himself first; Mick was often with him, but sometimes he wasn't. Captain Cold didn't really care as long as he himself was alive.
As polar ends of a magnet attract, Sara felt strongly drawn to Leonard. Rip warned her that she wasn't going to get him to change, but she didn't want to change him. She wanted to know him, know his story. She wanted to find out why they were so vastly different and yet still ended up here together.
As it turns out, Leonard wanted the same thing, and over time, that turned into something more.
Sara and Leonard found a surprising sort of salvation in each other.
It started when Leonard convinced Sara to not kill Stein in the Russian gulag. She repaid the favor by getting him through his conflict with Mick.
They didn't ask to help they other, but they also didn't ask for thanks either. It worked, maybe not for everyone, but for them.
That's how it went. She helped him, he helped her, but like all good things, it came to an end, and this time, it went out with a bang. Literally.
It started with a game of cards. Sara was sitting on her bed, Leonard was leaning against it (he didn't want to face the intimacy that was sitting directly on the bed with her). He heard something, something that was different than the noises the team made as they lived out their lives on the Waverider. He wasn't sure of the source of the noise, but the only thing on his mind was making sure that whatever it was didn't get Sara.
Maybe that's why he reacted the way he did on the bridge. Maybe that's why he pulled a gun on her. He hadn't meant to do that, but he had a plan and she wasn't following it and he reacted like he always did. That, of course, didn't justify threatening to shoot her with his cold gun.
Sara hadn't expected it either. She usually never displayed the way she felt, but as she looked into Leonard's cold gun she felt pinprick tears in her eyes before she could stop them. She'd gotten so used to letting her walls come down while she was with him that she'd caught herself off guard.
There was something else that she'd felt, not as obvious as the tears and a thousand times worse, something that made her wish Leonard would just pull the trigger already.
Love.
It was just that he'd never done anything like that before. He'd always been respectful of what she wanted, even when they disagreed. He'd always been looking out for her, always keeping her in mind, like in St. Roch, Russia, when they were locked in the cargo bay together, the list went on and on. He was always by her side; clichéd as it was, it was true.
This, this gun pointing at her was so different from how he'd treated her in every other instance and there was something about looking at the weapon, feeling small waves of cold brushing past her that had unlocked this feeling and now, as she looked unblinkingly into his eyes, she wanted desperately to lock it away again.
But she couldn't. Much like a dam, it needed to lose one piece, and then it was completely destroyed. There's nothing you can do but try to build it up again with the feeling that this will never be the same.
Then, the Oculus. Sara thought that maybe it had been his plan the whole time. Maybe that's why he'd been talking about "futures" and "me and you". Maybe he knew what he was going to do later and wanted to take his last chance to say what he needed to say, like a final confession before the end.
Sara wished she hadn't shot him down. She wished she had that extra time with him. Even if it was only fifty minutes, she wanted those fifty minutes. If the end was coming, she wanted every moment before it.
Forty nine minutes later, they were standing at the Oculus Wellspring, her arm on his and his lips pressed to hers. She tried to leave, even took a step backwards, but found that she couldn't leave, because she still had thirty seconds, and if she had thrown away nearly a whole hour, she would relish in these thirty seconds. She had thirty seconds to memorize every inch of his face, every curve and line and bump and scare. As his blue eyes met hers, she made a promise to herself that she would look into them again, no matter what it took.
But their thirty seconds was up now. She had to leave, and the combined weight of Mick, the heat gun and the cold gun still wasn't as heavy as the guilt she felt leaving Leonard behind.
Back on the Waverider, the team stood at the narrow windows and watched the Vanishing Point explode, feeling both pride at defeating the Time Masters, but mourning the loss of a teammate.
Sara sat with her back to them, trying to wipe the tears from her eyes before they had time to fall.
From then on, her one mission was to get Leonard back. She could feel it deep down in her bones that he wasn't dead. It didn't matter where or when he was, she was going to find him. There was nothing she wouldn't do to find her way back to him.
Sara heard every theory Stein had, persuaded every tiny detail about the Time Masters out of Rip, even discussed theoretical physics with Jax, but it took a casual conversation with Mick for Sara to hear anything that felt right.
According to Mick, there was a sort of space between the spaces in a deep corner of the time stream where lost Time Masters sometimes turned up, stuck in some kind of limbo state of simultaneous nothingness and everything-ness until someone showed up to pull them out of it.
Sara immediately knew this was it, and she knew what she had to do.
She had to save Leonard.
It took months of careful planning and deliberation, but finally, after following Sara's step-by-step, minute-by-minute plan, the team got him back.
Leonard and Sara could be together, were together. He was hers and she was his and to them, that's all that mattered.
They would always find each other. It didn't matter if it was a Russian gulag, or Nanda Parbat, or a place where time didn't exist at all. They would always find their way back to each other.
Happy Holidays locitarose!