Disclaimer: I do not own LOT or any of its characters.
Warning: Major angst alert.
Part I: My home was there and then, those meadows of heaven
Home.
It's been six years since she has been home, six long years since she has been Sara Lance, the pampered, stubborn, youngest daughter of her family. The world has moved on during that time, smiling and laughing and being happy, leaving her behind, like she's a ghost lingering in the background who doesn't matter. Starling City now seems like a foreign place out of books, somewhere she has never been to before but can vaguely recognize from the pictures and the maps she has seen. Her eyes meet new skyscrapers blocking the aerial view, new restaurants and bars in place of the ones where she spent some of the most carefree days of her life, new everything. Even the air smells different now, a little colder and less pure, the breeze never carrying a wave of nostalgia with it.
She doesn't have a home anymore, hasn't had one in six years.
But her parents are here, and that's a good enough reason for her to consider staying. She can see the tears they are trying to fight when they welcome her back with open arms, and she hates how even that doesn't move the monolith that's her now.
She hates what she has become, what she had to become to survive. How do you live with yourself when you have given up your name, your identity, your innocence, when you have traded your soul to the devil in exchange for a chance to live?
She spends her first night wide awake, wondering what to do with her life now and coming up with no answers, watching the fan blades move in a monotone clockwise motion like the thoughts swirling in her mind, her senses alert for intruders even in the safety of her home.
Or what used to be her home once upon a time.
Part II: Piano black
Laurel looks like an adult- that's the first thought that crosses her mind when she sees her sister, dressed in simple and professional clothes, her brown hair now dyed blonde, age giving her a look of maturity. She's a lawyer now, working with a non-profit organization, fighting to get justice for the wrongly convicted. Dinah Laurel Lance, her hero, always trying to save the world.
The world that she feels so detached from now, a world that can't save her. What she is, is irredeemable. She's the farthest from a hero- she's a monster.
But she can hide it behind a plastered smile and smother the blood-lust in her veins.
She steps into the role of younger sister and hugs Laurel tightly, and they go out for ice cream, and it almost makes her feel alive. Almost. Isn't that the saddest word in the world?
"So what case are you working on now?" Sara asks, wanting to catch up and not knowing where to start, not knowing if they should address the elephant in the room that's Oliver.
In a way, she deserves what happened to her, deserves it for how she hurt her sister by sleeping with her boyfriend.
And in a way, she's glad it was her on the boat that sunk, not Laurel, glad that Laurel never had to face what she did.
Laurel inhales sharply and her shoulders tense, like the weight of the world is resting squarely on them. "It's this guy. Leonard Snart. His sister came to me for help. He's on the death row. He doesn't have a lot of time left."
Sara nods, but at the same time, feels a little skeptical. Laurel is everything she is not, and people will try to take advantage of that light, that innocence. "What makes you so sure he's not guilty?" she asks.
"I've met the guy. He's a petty criminal, a thief. Not a serial killer," Laurel answers, her voice conveying her conviction, "He has alibis for three of the murders. But they are criminals with pending arrest warrants on them, so nobody is ready to come forward. It's frustrating."
Sara nods again. Alibis with zero credibility, that's never good. "I see. What about the evidence?"
Laurel sighs, infuriated at how tangled up this case is. "It was bad timing. He broke into the last crime scene to steal and ended up being busted by the cops. They could lift his finger prints off the place, as well as the origami canary."
Sara feels like she's drowning again, the air in her lungs being knocked out by that one last dreaded word. "Canary?"
"Yeah," Sara registers Laurel explaining in the background as the world around her warps into shadow monsters. "They call him the Black Canary. He leaves an origami of a canary made out of black paper at the scene of his murders. It's his signature. No murder weapon, no prints, no witnesses. This person is a pro. Unlike Snart, if you ask me. The cops just needed someone to pin the murders on, and he was the convenient suspect."
Part III: Through the trusting eyes of a mirror
She has been to precincts before to see her dad, has seen lock-ups from the outside. She's been a prisoner at a deserted island herself, living under brutal conditions. But she has never been inside a prison before, never had a reason to be.
Until now.
She sits in the visitor's room, watching the interactions carefully, watching the convicts spend time with their families. She sees in them what she can no longer find in herself- warmth, care, affection. She's a free woman, and she's so much worse than any of these criminals will ever be.
"Let me guess. Another young aspiring journalist?"
The voice breaks her out of her internal monologue, and she looks straight in front of her, into the tiny box with glasses and iron bars through which she is allowed to speak to Leonard Snart. He's older than she expected, well into his forties, hair cropped short but face obscured by a growing stubble, his brown jumpsuit looking out of place on him, his experience of being a regular at prisons evident by the way he is clearly comfortable in the handcuffs.
Sara takes in a deep breathe. "I'm Laurel's sister, Sara."
"Okay, Laurel's sister, Sara," he drawls, looking curious yet feigning boredom, "What do you want from me?"
What she wants is a reason to not feel like a piece of shit. She has come here to see who he is, to see if he deserves this, if he's a monster that the world will be better without.
If he's someone like her.
She doesn't answer him. Instead, she asks, "Did you ever kill anyone?"
"No," he answers sharply.
She can tell he's lying, and it almost makes her feel better. Almost being the keyword yet again. "Okay," she answers curtly, and leaves, her stomach lurching with the sickest feeling of guilt. If she had looked at him one moment longer, she might just have achieved the impossible- found a way to hate herself more than she already does.
Part IV: this dark page of history is colorfast
"I want to help," she tells Laurel after two days of contemplating running away, and realizing there is no escape from one's own self.
Laurel's eyes soften around the edges. "You just got back, Sara. You've been through a lot-"
"I want to help," she repeats, this time more firmly, cutting off Laurel's venture into her past. Laurel is the one who knows the most about it, but even Laurel doesn't know enough. Laurel only knows she was brainwashed by a dangerous cult to do unspeakable things. She doesn't know what those things are.
Or how she had started taking pleasure in them.
Sara pours over the files all evening, all night, and all through the afternoon. Leonard Snart has an incredibly complicated life and a ridiculously long rap sheet. His first offense was when he was just fourteen, mere two years after his mother's death. From there, it escalates to breaking and entering, heists, white-collar crimes, forgery, until his last spike in crime- the murder of his father that he was pardoned for, on the grounds that he had no other option but to shoot him to save his sister.
It's ironic how he got away with the only murder he did commit and got sentenced to death for the ones he didn't.
And it's ironic how he is almost like her- broken and damaged and jaded. Almost, her sworn mortal enemy.
Part V: a hollow opus, one, two, three
She goes back to see him the next day, and he seems a little less annoyed to see her. She realizes she's one of the few visitors he gets- his sister has been busy trying to find help and delay his execution- and it's one of the few times he gets to step out of his solitary confinement.
She was in a box once. A four by four feet box, with just a tiny crack in the middle to let in air, a tiny crack through which she had clung onto the fleeting rays of sunlight. It was all part of her training exercise, steps to strip away the last bit of humanity left in her.
It worked, clearly.
Not on Leonard, though. He looks weary, and he looks like a sinner, but he is so very human- flesh and blood and flaws in the peak of its beauty.
"I want to help," she tells him honestly.
"Why?" he asks curiously. "No offense, but you don't looks like a human rights activist. Or a nun."
She half smiles. She has a deep, dark reason for wanting to help, one that she can never tell anyone. "Looks can be deceiving."
He smirks, and gives her a typical male gaze, one she didn't expect from someone in his predicament. "I like playing cards," he tells her before he motions at the guards and walks back to his cell.
She brings a pack of cards next week, and they play blackjack, with her dealing the cards from the other side of the barricades separating them.
She owes him a hundred bucks now, among all the other things.
This becomes a routine soon. Leonard is a lot of things, but for her, he's an escape, a getaway. He's someone who doesn't know the distance between who she used to be and who she is, someone who doesn't judge her for the past or try to talk about it.
Someone who wouldn't be there in her broken world anymore in just two short months.
She tries to pry information out of him- dirt on his douchebag partners so she can blackmail them into stepping forward and saving him. But he's used to police interrogations, and he deflects her questions with shameless flirting.
She gets the feeling there's someone he's trying to shield, perhaps a partner who can prove his innocence, one who isn't ready to rat out, not even for his life.
He is nothing like her, after all.
"I could break you out," she offers.
He raises an eyebrow and looks at her admiringly. "Bonnie and Clyde. That's cute. But they'll probably go after Lisa, use her as bait. I can't risk my sister, Sara."
She is all too familiar with that sentiment. She can't see Laurel in pain either, can't stand to see her grow increasingly depressed as the days tick by and she comes up with no lead to stay the execution.
It's her fault. All of it.
Part VI: thoughts from a severed head
"Laurel told me you didn't want anyone at the-" she swallows around the bitter word "-execution."
He shrugs.
"That's lonely," she points out.
She has almost died a few times, has almost had the life drained out of her, breath by breath, one drop of blood at a time. She remembers the feeling too well. There was no fear, no panic, no regret even, just a sense of relief, a sense of freedom, a sense of redemption, and an all encompassing loneliness, knowing everyone and everything she loves were a million miles away.
"Life usually is," he says sadly. "Nothing like death to make you think of all the mistakes, all the wrong choices."
She attempts a smile. "Is this Leonard Snart coming to God in his final days?"
He grins. "Hardly. Being here in this place, with my expiry date coming up, started to think about what the future could have been. For me. And you. And me and you."
She feels her throat constrict around her tears, like the walls of a tiny room closing in on her. It's that feeling of drowning, that feeling of being locked in the tiny box- all the horrors hidden at the corners of her mind zeroing in on her.
And at the same time, it's the feeling of the walls she built around her crumbling to pieces, the feeling of stumbling across Atlantis in the depths of the ocean, the feeling of finally breaking out of that dreadful box.
Ra's al ghul once told her she is free of feelings, and she has believed him for years.
Until now. She's a bundle of scattered feelings now- regret, fear, anger, guilt, self-loathing, and above all, clarity. She has done a lot of things there are no forgiveness for. And she's not about to add another one to the list. There is one last selfless thing that she can do.
She's not a monster, after all. She's human, and she feels human for the first time, with the stream of hot tears running down her cheeks and the hiccups that follow each ragged breathe.
"Leonard, I need to tell you something," she chokes out between sobs. "I'm going to fix it. I know you didn't do it. I know because I'm-"
"-Sara Lance," he says, cutting her off. His eyes are pits of darkness, like the remains of dying star, a sharp contrast from the devil's eyes in which all she could ever see was fire and destruction. "Sara, Don't do it," he says softly.
She shakes her head. She has to do this. "You don't know what-"
"I know," he says, surprising her. "I've known it for a while now. I've seen the folds on your cards. It's extremely precise, almost technical. I've seen it before. Between that and your regular visits, I could join the dots."
"Why don't you hate me?" she wonders out loud.
He smiles softly. He doesn't have an answer to that, at least not one that can be put into words.
"I can't let you die for me," she whispers.
"There are a few people in this world that I would be happy to die for," he whispers in a voice that lacks his characteristic drawl. "I've done a lot of bad things in life, Sara. Consider this my redemption. And promise me something."
"No," she says stubbornly.
"When I'm gone," he begins, causing her to whimper, "Promise me you'll leave it all behind and start over. Promise me I'm not dying in vain. This is your second chance at getting it right. You're not a killer, Sara," he drops his voice down by an octave so nobody else can overhear, "not anymore."
He's right. She's no longer a killer, the Black Canary, Ta-er-al-safer, the woman who used to be the perfect assassin.
And that's exactly why she has to do this.
Part VII: try to save them all, bleed no more
She spends her next two days saying goodbye, in her own silent way. She still has her blade. She keeps it as a reminder that acting without planning has consequences, that her one rash decision to board the Queen's Gambit lead to all of this.
She has her black leather jacket too, and the mask she wore because she couldn't bring herself to let her victims look at her face, into her eyes, as she drained the life out of them.
The mask of the Black Canary that she had behind.
No more.
She will happily walk to the gallows and do the right thing. She does not deserve to live, and certainly not at the cost of Leonard's life.
Dying never scared her. She was at peace with dying, knowing her parents would remember her as the girl she used to be. Death still doesn't scare her. What scares her is revealing to them the monster that wears her skin, what scares her is the part where she has to walk up to her sister and tell her who she really is, watch the hope and love fade out of her eyes and be replaced with disgust. She takes in a deep breath and steps into Laurel's office, finding her busily scribbling on a notebook.
"I need to talk to you. It's about Leonard."
"Not now, Sara," Laurel answers without looking up, "I need to get the paper-work ready for his release."
For the first time in years, she feels the one emotion that had been snuffed out of her completely- hope. "Release?"
"You didn't know?" Laurel asks, surprised. "His partner, Mick, came forward. He has the diamond and the paintings they stole, putting Snart in entirely different cities during five of the murders. He has been cleared of all charges of murders."
Part VIII: the beginning
She has never believed in miracles, until this moment, this impossible moment when Leonard Snart steps outside the prison gates. She watches his sister run to him and lock him in a hug. He closes his eyes and hugs her back, and when he opens them again, he sees Sara, standing beside Laurel and Mick.
"You're a son of a bitch," Mick spats. "You thought I wouldn't step up for you after Alexa?"
"You said you would kill me if you saw me again," Leonard reminds him.
"I will," Mick counters. "As soon as I get out after serving my time."
Leonard acknowledges his gratitude with a nod. Sara gets the feeling they are best friends who had a bitter falling out, but Mick stepped up when Leonard needed him, just like true friends do.
"Thank you," she says to Mick herself.
Finally, Leonard looks at her, hope and uncertainty battling for dominance in his eyes. And she dives in for a kiss. The first time he touched her was with his words, his willingness to sacrifice himself for the girl he had unwittingly fallen in love with. The first time she touches him is with trembling lips that convey the depth of emotions she feels inside, and the promise to leave it all behind and start over.
But only if it's with him.
A/N: Hope you liked it :)