"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible."

-T.E. Lawrence

At first, she assumes it's a dream.

The arms around her are warm and solid, but it has to be a dream. Right? Sara Lance moves her head just a little, cheek rubbing against the upper arm that's tucked underneath her, and comes to the muzzy conclusion that her dream lover…sleeping companion…whatever…is a man, based on the roughness of the hairs there.

Of course, why would she be able to feel that so clearly, in a dream? The thought actually elicits a sleepy smile, even as her head continues to whirl. She's felt other things, far more strongly, in dreams, but why this would rank among them…

Her head is spinning so badly she can't focus. She takes another deep breath, feels the man whose arms are around her sigh against her hair, senses…

No. This is definitely a dream. Definitely. Because she knows that elusive scent of pine and peppermint, knows it even though she can only smell it in memory, memory and dream, now, as it's long since faded from the parka that she wouldn't even admit to stealing from storage…

His arms tighten around her, and this doesn't feel like a dream. It doesn't feel like a dream at all.

She freezes despite herself, sucks in a breath, screws her eyes shut, wills herself to wake up.

Instead, she just hears a lazy voice next to her ear say, "Sara? Is something wrong?"

No. Yes.

No.

She's flung herself out of the bed before she can even articulate the thought, landing on a plush blue-gray carpet and rolling, barely registering her current lack of nightclothes even as she lifts the hand with the knife she'd known, known, was tucked into a corner of the headboard….

…and throws.

She never misses, but she does this time, and for a long moment, both she and the man in the bed just stare at the razor-sharp blade that's thunked into the headboard, so close, so very close, to the hand he's stretched out toward her.

"Sara," Leonard Snart repeats carefully, "what the fuck?"

Everything around her is not what it should be, from the room that's very definitely not her cabin on the Waverider to her current state of undress. But he's the thing she can't take her eyes off, not for a variety of reasons, from the fact that he's the second most deadly thing in the room to the fact that he's shirtless, at least shirtless, though she can't see past the sheet tucked around his hips, and...

She scuttles backward, still not taking her eyes off him, grabbing a blanket off a chair and wrapping it around herself in a move that perhaps has no true defensive value, but makes her feel a bit less... exposed. He watches her, tracking her movements but not so much as twitching, and it's the sheer lack of self-consciousness in him that convinces her that this is no Leonard Snart she'd ever known in life, not the teammate and friend and almost and not the rat bastard...

"When am I?" she lashes out verbally. "Is this the Dominators again? Because it's not going to work, I'll..."

At that, he does sit up, holding up both hands to show her he's unarmed. She can't help staring, even in her current state of semi-panic, at the lean muscle on arms and chest and the scattering of scars she'd always suspected were there.

"Sara," he says yet again, tone even. "I think you're dreaming. The Dominators are gone. We kicked their asses about four months ago." A pause. "It's April 2017. Same as it was yesterday."

Yesterday.

I think we broke time.

"I went to sleep on the Waverider yesterday," she tells him numbly, despite herself. "Passed out, really. We'd crashed... we'd damaged something... the timeline..."

"No." He moves, freezes as she drops into an attack stance. "The Waverider's fine, Sara. Mick had to take it to the Vanishing Point; he dropped us off yester..."

"No, he dropped you off, not even yesterday." The words bubble up, full of all the emotion she didn't let herself show while it was all going on. "In 2014, where and when they got you. I didn't even... " Why is she bothering to do this? She takes another step backward, then grabs for the shirt and pants she'd glimpsed there during her earlier motion.

"Sara." The feeling in his voice sends a chill through her even as she tries to harden herself to it, because this isn't real, it can't be. "I'm sorry; I don't know what the hell is going on, OK? We'll contact Mick, get the Waverider back here, ask Gideon..."

She's tugging on undergarments and pants under the blanket, trying to feel like she's not wearing another woman's clothing, trying not to listen and fall into another woman's life, to fall for this... "Where am I?" she interrupts him, glancing his way, but avoiding the expression in those blue eyes. "This isn't the ship."

"We're in Central City." A pause, one so tense that she nearly makes the mistake of meeting his eyes. "I can't... we... needed a home base and you said it made sense..." His voice trails off as she takes a step backward, pulling the shirt on also under the blanket, shaking her head in denial of his words.

"Look," she tells him, thus armored and letting the blanket fall to the floor. "I don't know what's going on here, but I didn't say that. I wasn't here. And I don't know what happened to time, or... or who you really are, but I'm not going to play pretend. I'm going to find out, and I'm going to fix this."

And, with a deep sigh, she finally lets herself look right at him again.

So she can see it then, the very instant he starts to fold back in on himself.

Over the course of their first handful of months on the Waverider, she'd watched his body language more than she cares to admit, noticed how guarded he tended to be around nearly everyone. She'd noticed when that careful posture started to relax around her, and she'd matched it with her own relaxation, always wondering, even as he'd said the words himself, what the future might hold...

Then he'd died.

Then he'd come back, in a way, and broken her heart in a way she'd admitted to absolutely no one.

Watching now, she sees this Leonard Snart, a man who'd seemed relaxed and almost... happy... revert to the closed-in, secretive body language of the crook who'd first walked onto the Waverider-and the arrogant asshole who'd stunned them all when he'd showed up with the Legion.

She's caused that. Here. Now. No matter what's going on, how fake a world this is, she's caused that pain, that retreat.

And despite everything... the realization hurts.

But she doesn't say anything, doesn't let it show.

This isn't real. None of it is real...

"Right," he says then, and his voice is every bit as cold as she's ever heard it. "If you'll... step out for a moment, then, I'll be with you in a minute.

"And we can start getting to the bottom of this."