I was researching something for work and came across the fact that" "kruos," in ancient Greek, means "icy cold."
"Huh," said the part of my brain that is always thinking about writing fanfic, "reminds me of Chronos. What if..."
This is done and will be posted in five chapters; right now I'm planning Mondays and Thursdays. Many thanks to LarielRomeniel for the beta. I promise I'll get back to my other WIPs now that this is no longer dominating my brain. :)
"Wake."
The tall man jerks awake, a gasp rattling in his lungs, straining immediately against the restraints holding him to the bed. He stops nearly immediately as their strength becomes apparent, and injuring himself helps no one-but inside, his brain is working furiously.
The clearing. Mick. And then the Time Master strolling out of the woods, bounty hunters by his side, pointing their guns first at Mick...and then at him.
No. We'll take this one."
The...issue...with his partner forgotten for the moment, Leonard had steadied his hand on the cold gun, glancing down at Mick to see if they were on the same page with this, at least. He saw understanding in Mick's eyes...and then nothing, the world vanishing in a flash of light as one of the bounty hunters hit him with some sort of weapon.
And now, that same Time Bastard stands there, smiling down at him.
"Hello, Mr. Snart," he says smoothly. "I understand we have quite a bit of work to do. Unless you're interested in... a partnership of sorts? You seem to have a rather...pragmatic...background."
Work. He can figure out what that means, based on the restraints and the man's earlier words. They want to use him as a weapon, one to take out the team, all those silly heroes for whom he's shown such scorn.
The ones on whose behalf he'd turned against his oldest friend.
He inhales, watching the Time Bastard from underneath lowered lids, wondering if he could play along for a while, learn a bit more, perhaps steal some sort of interesting time technology. But there's a dangerous quality to the man's watchfulness, and he thinks about what Hunter has said about the Time Council, their refusal to save his family, to deal with this asshole named Vandal Savage, to save the world.
Some things are too cold even for him.
Well, at any rate, he'll be damned if he'll be their lapdog without a fight. He stares at the other man, mask fixed in place as firmly as it's ever been, knowing that to show weakness here will mean doom.
Then he smiles. It's a very cold smile.
"Fuck," he says distinctly, "off."
The Waverider is there, waiting. Staring at it, knowing full well he has no choice, Mick Rory prepares himself for one of the hardest things he's ever had to do.
The Time Master had known it, too.
"Well, well," he'd said, staring at the tableau before him, at Len holding his cold gun on Mick, at Mick sprawled on the ground, both of them staring at the unexpected newcomer. "It would seem we're somewhat earlier than planned."
He'd looked at the armored figures flanking him, both of whom were ignoring Snart—the one who was actually armed—and shook his head. "No. We'll take this one," he'd told the others, pointing at Leonard, staring at Mick with distaste. "He's by far the smarter of the two. I want cleverness. This time."
While he'd been talking, though, Leonard had glanced down at Mick, and the bigger man had seen the expression on his face—the "hell with whatever our beef was, there's a common threat now" look. Mick had been about to nod, just a tiny bit, enough to show that he agreed—but there was a flash of light, and Len had fallen, in the utterly limp fashion of the unconscious or the dead.
Mick had tried to surge back to his feet, only to halt as both the figures pointed their weapons at him, in a way that suggested that this time, their shot would be deadly. One of them looked toward the Time Master…who'd shaken his head.
"He's not our problem," the man said. "Not now." He motioned toward Leonard, and one of the armored men moved to hoist the unconscious crook to his shoulders, also snatching up the cold gun as his cohort kept a gun on Mick. "He's a dead man, anyway. There's nothing out here, and he'll never go back to the ship, not after what he did."
With those words, he turned his back on Mick, as if he were nothing, and the bounty hunter carrying Snart fell in just behind him. The other one kept his weapon trained on Mick until they'd vanished, then shook his head, raised his weapon, and tapped a handheld control, winking out even as Mick had lunged for him.
Only one thing to do. Not only did he not want to starve out here—or face the team when they came looking for Snart—but he'd be damned if he let those Time Bastards do…whatever they'd do…to Snart. The only one who got to hurt that smug jerk, he thought grumpily as he started trudging back to the Waverider, was him.
Standing here now, looking at the ship, though, he wonders if he'd made the right decision. No matter how pissed he'd been at Hunter's words, at Snart's betrayal in Star City, bringing the pirates to the ship had been a stupid-as-fuck idea. Sure, he'd figured that Snart would back him up, but…
Mick shakes his head again, then raises his hands in the air to show his lack of weapons and slowly approaches the Waverider. When he's close enough, he figures, he raises his voice too.
"Hey," he bellows, in the direction of the ship, "um, anyone there?" Stupid, Mick, of course they are. "There's sort of a problem. Open up!"
He's right. Someone's here; someone's been watching for Snart. The hatch begins to open after only a minute or so go by, and it's somehow no surprise at all that it's Sara who starts to stalk down toward him. The captain, hovering a step or two behind her, tries to catch her shoulder, but Sara gives him a withering glance as she slips away and takes a few more steps toward Mick. Behind them, he can see the others approaching, Haircut and the professor and the kid and Kendra, but his eyes remain on Sara.
"Where the hell is he?" she hisses, and she can see the flash of a knife in her hand. "Ray, go find…"
But Mick interrupts her, shaking his head, and raising his hands just a little higher. "The Time Masters," he tells her numbly, ignoring Hunter's gasp of surprise, the muttering from the rest of the team. "They were here. They took Snart."
Sara's eyes widen, then narrow. He can tell, though, that she believes him, that she's even now plotting how to get his partner back. Her eyes are just as cold as Snart's could get, sometimes, when someone had threatened to hurt someone he...cared...about.
Somewhere in the back of his head, a few pieces click together, and a couple of things suddenly make sense. Huh. Well, how 'bout that? he thinks to himself, remembering the look on Snart's face earlier when he'd threatened Sara. 'Splains a lot...
But there are bigger fish to burn, right now.
"The rest of it, it don't matter," he tells them, hands held out before him, trying to emphasize his lack of weapons. "I can promise or whatever you want, or you can keep me in the brig. I may not get why Snart wanted to stick with you lunatics..." He tries very hard not to look at Sara. "…but those Time Bastards don't get to mess with my partner."
"Even though you threatened to kill him yourself?" Kendra's voice is cold. The bird woman stands with her arms crossed, regarding him. Mick is impressed.
"Ain't ever had a brother, have you?" he asks before he realizes what he's about to say. "Wouldn't have done it. Just...getting a few things straight."
"Was Leonard right, though?" Sara's voice is very, very cold, and while she'd been staring over his shoulder into the woods with worry in her eyes a moment ago, she's completely focused on him now. "Would you have killed his sister? My sister?"
"My wife?" Stein says softly in the background. Mick doesn't have the heart to look at him, though, staring at Sara instead.
Fact is, he's not sure what he would have done in the heat of the moment. He's always…done things he regretted, in situations like that. Leonard knew that. He'd always tried to protect Mick from doing the shit he'd regret later, just like Mick had protect him, way back when, in juvie.
But all the rage that'd filled him when he'd heard Rip's words earlier, when he'd watched Snart pick this team over him…it's drained away, now. And what's left? It's 110 percent directed at the Time Bastards.
"I burn hot," he told her shortly. "Always have." He saw recognition in her eyes and nodded, guessing that Snart'd been talking. "Can I tell you what I mighta done in that...in that...then? Nope. He mighta even been right. But now's not then. And now I'm far more pissed at those Time Bastards."
She doesn't look happy. Well, he can't blame her; he'd burned her pretty good not that long ago, before Snart had tagged him with the cold gun. (Why hadn't he guessed? Snart's not one to go running to just anyone's rescue. But he'd done it in 1975, and in 2046...)
It all seems so stupid now. Time pirates? Seriously? He keeps his hands held out, eyes on her, ignoring the noises the so-called captain is making.
Finally, Sara glances behind her at the team. Whatever she sees, she nods, and turns back to him.
"OK by me," she says. "No heat gun, though. And you stay in the brig until we get some things figured out."
Rip has had enough, now. "Isn't my opinion of any bearing on this question?" he asks, sarcasm worthy of Snart thick in his voice. "This is, after all, my ship."
"I know," Sara tells him. "I just don't care."
Mick can't help it. He laughs.
No wonder Snart likes her.
The Time Masters had been right about one thing. Leonard Snart is smarter than Mick Rory. Not that Mick is stupid, not at all like he sometimes pretends to be, but Leonard has the sort of brains that could have, in another place and time, made him a prodigy. (In something other than safecracking.) It is, in truth, the sort of thing the Time Masters respect, far more than they respect brute strength, in anyone other than their bounty hunters.
But what they hadn't taken into account is that Leonard has his own sort of strength, not just the physical sort built painstakingly by a wiry, underfed kid determined to be strong, but a mental toughness also built up over the years, a sort of emotional scar tissue layered over his inner core. He has far more of a sense of self-worth than Mick's ever had, though no action of his father's.
Don't ever let anyone hurt you.
He never fully managed it, though. There aren't many who could, no, not at all, but oh, those rare few can hurt him horribly.
Mick can do it with rare skill. Lisa could destroy him if she wanted to.
Barry, against Leonard's own will, had gotten under his skin with his words of heroes and a better future. And lately, oh, lately, he's let someone else in. (He clings to the memory of a compact form huddled in his jacket, curled into his side in the cold, getting past his defenses, getting under his skin.)
What's it like, dying?
There, in the Vanishing Point, he finds out. The Time Masters hurt him. They hurt him in ways Lewis Snart, with all his flair for causing pain both mental and physical, never dreamed of. They break him down to his component parts (in some ways literally) and remake him; they drown him in his own blood or burn him to a cinder, and then bring him back, gasping and weak. He fights, not only or even mostly for the team, but because he is Leonard goddamn Snart, and he's no one's servant, no one's victim, and no one's puppet.
Never again.
It's been minutes, it's been forever, when his tormentor, the only one he ever really sees, looks away and frowns, stepping to the side and out of his very limited field of view. But Leonard can hear, and he closes his aching eyes to concentrate as the voices rise.
"…a mistake, Declan," he hears, as the newcomer speaks urgently to his main captor. "…should have stayed with the plan…"
"This one was the better choice." Declan...oh, the demon has a name...sounds annoyed, but also a bit defensive. "You'd have me take that...thug? This one is highly intelligent; it makes the task more difficult, but..."
"This one has less reason to betray that ridiculous team Hunter put together. And ties to it that complicate matters." The voices lower to murmurs again, then rise. "If you can't break through soon, the Council has decreed that you must drop him back there and take the other instead."
"Surely, he's dead..." Declan sounds disbelieving.
"Not so. And if he knows to blame this one for his dilemma, we may be able to salvage the original plan."
Mick. They're going to take Mick if he doesn't break.
Mick, with all his rage and hate. Mick, who'd burned Sara, who'd made him choose.
Mick, whose sense of worth has always been shaky, who's far less likely to manage to retain that inner core of self, to battle back even if these Time Bastards take him. Who's already tried to kill the team once, and who, underestimated, could tear through them like a forest fire, burned corpses in his wake. Who will all too likely blame Leonard, and pursue his revenge...
Leonard makes his decision. He fights a little longer, for appearance's sake...and then he lets go, lets himself drown, swamped immediately by a sea of whispers telling him that he's a bounty hunter, that he's always been a bounty hunter, that the Time Masters know best, that they're working to save the world, that Rip Hunter's team has betrayed him, that they need to be ended.
But deep inside, he has that spar to cling to, that hidden corner to hide, propped up by sheer will and four pillars, four people, four sets of memories. Lisa. Mick. Barry. ... Sara.
He starts giving them the answers they want. It's easy, far too easy, and the hidden core of Leonard cringes at it, wraps itself a little more firmly in its tiny corner, buries itself just a little better.
With each day, with each answer, with every twinge of betrayal, that core's a little more hidden. Eventually, they let him out for training sessions; he learns to pilot a time ship, to read the timeline, to operate the weapons and equipment they offer him. Declan, a proud smile on his face, takes credit for how fast he soaks everything up, the best "recruit" in millennia, and accepts the apologies of those who doubted him with a gracious nod.
And when they're satisfied that he's ready, that Leonard is gone, they give him his new name-"Kruos," icy cold—and his cold gun, newly revamped and powered up. He loses track of how many missions they send him on over the next—2? 20? 200?-years, but he excels at all of them, always bringing his target back, whether it's dead or alive. His name becomes a byword for trouble over all the timescape, a source of fear and panic.
And then they send him to kill the team.
They make Mick repeat what the Time Bastard said, again and again, and if he hadn't realized that the dismissal (again) hurt then, well, he realizes it now. Sara picks up on this eventually, and the kid, of all people, and they shut the questioning down. Eventually, they're all just standing there, starting at each other, and Hunter sighs, running a hand down his face before closing his eyes.
"So, they meant to take Mr. Rory, but got there 'early,' " he says, eyes still closed. "At a guess, I'd say Mr. Snart wasn't planning to...do what we'd feared, after all. And they would have picked Mr. Rory up after he'd been marooned."
Hearing those words, something loosens in Mick's chest, something he hadn't even realized had been tight. Snart wouldn't have killed him. Even after...he glances at Sara, an unfamiliar feeling of guilt rising. Sara glances back at him, eyes softening just a little, then looks at Hunter, expression hardening again.
"What you'd feared?" she says tersely. "Everyone on this ship was all too willing to let him do it. Myself included. Even though I knew what it'd do to him."
"Ms. Lance..."
But Sara waves away Hunter's protests, as well as the murmurs of the rest of the team. "It's besides the point now," she says, gaze sharpening. "After everything he's done for this team, we are not leaving him to... whatever those bastards will do. We are not."
"Sara...Sara, it's already too late." Hunter lifts his hands in a placating manner. "It was too late when they took him. The Vanishing Point, it exists in all times, and none. As far as he's concerned, they've had him for centuries by now. More." He sighs. "At a guess, they took him to become a bounty hunter. They're masters at...at brainwashing. And they have reasons to want someone who knows this team."
It takes them all a moment to digest that. From Sara's intake of breath, she makes the connection first, but Mick's right behind her.
"You mean, he mighta been that armored asshole I flattened with the car?" he asked in horror. "Oh, fuck. I'm gonna pay for that."
"He tried to kill us," Ray says numbly. "He really did. That can't be Snart."
"He didn't try. Not really."
They all turn to look at Jax, who stares back. "You all'd left me in the ship, remember?" he points out. "And yeah, he took some potshots at it, and you guys when you got back, but he didn't hit anyone. And he could have. I remember watching, thought he'd gone to Stormtrooper weapons school or something, but this makes more sense. No way someone as highly trained as you say would miss at that range."
"He could have shot Aldus," Kendra murmurs, remembering her son, now safely tucked away in a location of Hunter's choosing. "He didn't."
"You're all acting as if there's something left there." Rip's voice is layered with sorrow that sounds like it's real, and that's the only reason Mick doesn't flatten him for those words. "There isn't. I...it's not pretty, what they do, the induction process. Most people don't survive. I'd always been taught that it was OK, that they only took people who had no other option, but...I think we've established the Time Masters aren't what I always thought they were."
He shakes his head. "If we go to the Vanishing Point looking for him, we. Will. Die." The Brit's voice is flat. "If we carry on...well. He'll show up. I can guarantee it. They took Mr. Snart for a reason, to hurt this team and to have someone who knows best how to get to us. I just pray that you'll all be able to do what's necessary when the time comes."
Sara frowns at those words, and glances at the professor, for some reason. Mick just shakes his head.
"Snart's tougher than that," he says. "If Jax is right..."
"We shall see, Mr. Rory. We shall see."
Hunter insists they carry on to the 1950s, where he's pinpointed some odd occurrences—OK, murders-that may lead to Savage. Mick, at whom Rip is still looking sideways, gets to cool his heels back in the brig, but Ray and Kendra get to play house, while Rip and Jax take on other roles and Stein and Sara go undercover in a local hospital.
There's a particularly cute nurse there, and that, on top of other feelings stirred up recently, have Sara unsettled, ill at ease. She winds up kissing the woman—Lindsey—but backing away, even more unsettled by emotions she hasn't dealt with since she'd died.
"That's the thing that sucks about feelings," she tells Stein, "you realize how much you can hurt someone...or get hurt."
It's not just Lindsey, if she's being honest with herself, something she tends to avoid where stuff like this is concerned. It's the memory of a black leather jacket draped around her shoulders, booze and card games and "that's not you anymore." The tendrils of an attraction that was taken away before it'd even coalesced into a possibility.
If things had continued as they were, she might have just shrugged it off, continued to flirt, to banter, to tease, treating the whole thing like a game while shying from anything more. But now, she just can't help wondering...
Nothing, of course, goes quite as planned; Ray and Kendra barely escape Savage, while Jax gets turned into a bat...thing...and is only just barely saved by Mick, who's finally been allowed out of the brig. His actions go a long way toward getting the others to trust him again, and that makes Sara smile, but it's still a profoundly disturbed and uneasy assassin who prepares to leave the '50s with her teammates—and good riddance to the whole decade, she thinks.
She's approaching the Waverider with Ray and Kendra and saying as much when a ruckus up ahead makes them all start. Sara sees the other ship first, sees it fire on the Waverider before coming around to land in the field, and it almost feels like her heart skips a beat in her chest.
"It's him," she whispers, breaking into a run. "Ray, Kendra, it's the bounty hunter. It's..."
She can't say it.
She's not precisely dressed for fighting, but she has weapons on her, of course. She sheds the coat before she even reaches the scene, collapsed bo extended and ready, and watches as Firestorm soars out of the Waverider's hatch, sending a warning blast toward the tall figure advancing on the ship, a figure that raises a gun and send a blue-white blast toward the enemy.
The blast hits a medium-sized maple tree instead, and the whole thing immediately goes white, then shatters.
Ice.
Rip and Mick have taken cover behind the lowered hatch, and Sara joins them breathlessly. She looks at Rip, who shakes his head, staring at the melting remnants of the tree.
"They must know we've figured it out now," he says. "They've given him his own weapon back, for just a little more of that intimidation factor." He takes a deep breath. "I knew there was a bounty hunter who had an ice weapon, but I never dreamed..."
"Snart's gun never could do that before," Mick breathes, watching another tree shatter and fall. "I wonder what they could do to mine..."
"Mr. Rory!"
"Just kidding."
Kendra's hawked out now, and she and Firestorm are harrying the bounty hunter. Rip starts explaining how they should all just leave now, and Mick is arguing with him, but Sara's thinking about how... Leonard, she's still going to hope it's Leonard... could have just stayed in his ship and shot the Waverider where it's resting, or easily tagged Jax and Stein just a moment ago.
And then she makes a break for it, ignoring Rip's loud "Sara!" from behind her.
The bounty hunter sees her coming and aims a blast at her while she's still some distance away. It's easy to elude, however, and she actually uses the icy patch of ground to turn her dash into a slide, wondering if she can get close enough to land a blow that incapacitates without causing lasting damage.
No such luck. As she hit the rough ground at the end of the patch, a tree root causes her to lose her footing for just a heartbeat, a real distracted amateur's move, she thinks with annoyance. While she keeps her feet, by the time she's back in stance and ready to attack, he's pointing the gun straight at her, face still hidden by the mask, silent and obdurate.
She uses the only weapon with a chance of working.
"Leonard," she tells him, "fight it."
A long moment passes, and she'd swear the figure almost cocks its head in a very Snart-like gesture. But then he speaks.
"My name," the metallic voice informs her, "is Kruos."