When Sara opened her eyes, still muddled from blood loss, Stein reached up with the back of his hand to touch her cheek. Her smiled at her, and she smiled back. The feeling lingered after he was knocked unconscious and Rip's hand closed around Sara's throat.
It was a parental gesture. That's what she thought as she strained for breath, already aware that she was too weak to fight Rip off.
When Sara was young, her family lived in an apartment. Her mother was in graduate school. Her father worked as a line order cook by day and took criminal justice classes at night. She and Laurel shared a room, trundle beds side by side. At bed time, their mother sat between them and read from the Little Golden books that lined the floor of their closet.
After extra stories and glasses of water had been requested, she always took Sara's face between her hands and kissed her on the forehead. Laurel considered herself too old for such a tender gesture. She was in the middle of a silly stage, and preferred for their mother to tickle her and dodge away, laughing.
They fell asleep to the dance of the aquarium night light on the ceiling, and the sound turning pages and a scratching pencil from the kitchen, where their mother studied.
The year Sara started first grade, they moved into a house in the suburbs, where she and Laurel got their own rooms. Years and years after her mother stopped tucking them in every night, around the time Sara hit her wild teenage years, Laurel revived the gesture. Every time she lectured Sara, she began by placing her hands on Sara's cheeks. Sara read it is as condescending, which was likely how it was intended. At that age, Laurel acted like she was decades older than Sara, instead of two years and a few months.
Still, Sara never shoved Laurel's hands aside. It stirred something within her, and the gesture worked its way into her physical vocabulary. She did it with Oliver, she did it with Nyssa, and they both learned to reciprocate. When she was finally reunited with Laurel, Sara's hands were well-practiced.
It wasn't a habit Sara brought on board the Waverider. It was too intimate for those she already lived in such close quarters with. Rip took her face in his hands once, right after Laurel died, which Sara tried not to think about. It was too close to an omen.
In the present, Rip's grip tightened. She heard he and Jax speaking, but not Stein.
She could swear, in the haze, that her cheek was on fire where he had touched her. It was something. Maybe her mother reaching out through the hands of another parent. Maybe Laurel, welcoming her back as Rip snapped her neck.
As a rule, Sara does not talk about death. She talks about dying, sometimes. Never death.
But then, air.
She took a moment to collect herself before she opened her eyes and was captain again.
Stein was there, and she did not look at his hands. "Where's Jax?" she asked.
"Your neck was broken," Stein said. "I still don't know about the structural integrity of your spinal cord."
She sat up and wiggled her fingers, then her toes. They tingled a bit, like they had fallen asleep, but moved fine. She kicked her left leg out, testing it, then reached down to examine the significant bloodstains on her torso. "I'm fine. Just sore. What happened to Rip?"
"Mr. Jackson followed Captain Hunter off of the ship," Gideon chimed in. "He took a gun with him. Dr. Palmer is hanging from the reset switch and could use some assistance, and the others have yet to return."
Sara cursed. "Thank you, Gideon."
"I believe that Mr. Jackson intends to kill Captain Hunter," Martin added. "Gideon, is Ms. Lance able to move?"
"Her bullet wound has yet to fully heal, but she won't do any further damage by walking."
"I've got Jax," Sara told Martin, accepting his help as she rose off the chair. "You get Ray."
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure," she said. "He's going to regret this if we don't stop him."
She bundled up and set out into the cold to pass on the favor Oliver had done for her years before, when he shot Anthony Ivo twice in the chest.
For the first year or so she was on the Waverider, Sara didn't decorate her room. She kept her clothes in drawers and everything else in a trunk in the corner. After all, it wasn't really her room, was it? It was the place she had been assigned to sleep, for the mission. Even after the team's place aboard the Waverider became permanent, the only change she made was to start leaving her toothbrush and shampoo in the bathroom. The others followed her lead, which meant both the Waverider's bathrooms were a cluttered mess unless it was Ray's week to clean them.
Her room was a slow process. The first thing to go up was a corkboard she had Gideon fabricate, where she hung photos from back home (several of her family from old days and three of various iterations of Team Arrow, courtesy of Thea). After Jax left her a page out of one of his books (she knew it was him, even if he didn't sign it), she hung it in the left corner of the board.
Jax came by after their mission at NASA, right before shit really hit the fan.
"Are you and Rip okay?" he asked. "Things got pretty tense earlier."
She patted a spot next to where she was sitting on the bed, sitting criss-cross to make room for him. "I talked to him. I think we worked it out."
He settled next to her at the foot of the bed and looked up at her corkboard.
"You should really put a picture of the team up," he commented.
She scoffed. "I can't let everyone know I actually like them. It would compromise my authority as captain."
"I think they already know, Sara," Jax replied. He tugged on the threads of one of her blankets.
"What's up?" she asked. "I'm guessing you aren't just worried about me and Rip."
"Nate's really torn up. And something's up with Amaya, something besides Commander Steel."
"We'll keep an eye on both of them," she assured. "What's really going on?"
He looked up from her blanket to meet her gaze. "I'm really glad you didn't go back to open the airlock," he said. "That's all."
At another point in her life, Sara would have seized the moment, leaned over, and kissed him. For a split second, she thought he would instead, but he just smiled sadly at her, and she felt too dark and heavy to initiate anything.
"I'm glad, too," she replied instead. She reached up to clutch her necklace. Laurel had fought very hard for her life, and she intended to keep it for as long as she could.
Maybe it was a mistake to hesitate, but things were too muddled and complicated in their lives at the moment. Jax was solid. Their relationship was simple. They both needed each other to lean on, and Sara knew it wasn't the right time to try anything beyond friendship.
Jax leaned back on her bed, hands folded across his stomach. They both sat in silence for a long time, thoughts running in circles.
The dinosaurs were a problem. To their credit, Sara's team kept it together, by Legends standards. One aberration after another pinged in on Lily's device, and the Waverider still couldn't make jumps reliably. Jax borrowed Ray for the first few days to do whatever he did down in the engine rooms, but eventually their initial suspicions were confirmed. There was nothing wrong with the ship- time itself was broken.
Sara sent them to go retrieve Nate and Stein from where they were holed up in the library, examining the timeline. She, Mick, and Amaya had been the only boots on the ground, working nonstop, while the others tried to figure out the damage. Now that she was fairly certain they had the whole picture, she felt comfortable letting everyone fall back into their old roles.
"The mission hasn't changed," she told them. "We find aberrations, and we fix them. Hopefully the pace will slow down. If it doesn't, we'll figure something else out."
So they launched right back into their rhythm at a breakneck pace. Jax started devising titles for her mission reports in the style of Magic Treehousebooks, a reference which the rest of the team missed. Polar Bears in Pompeii wasn't nearly as fun as it sounded. Train in the Thames clocked in at 311 words, four times the length of her normal reports, because it ended with Ray naked in the river and Nate having to toss him clothes off a bridge. Sara wasn't about to let that incident go undocumented.
The aberrations were finally starting to taper off when an alert went out from 2017. A rush of adrenaline carried her through a short conversation with Cisco- news from home was rarely good, and this conversation was no exception.
"What do you mean, Barry's gone?" she asked him. "He's dead?"
"Not exactly." His hair was much longer than the last time she saw him, and he was also carrying himself differently. His shoulders arced straight back.
"Is he missing?"
"No."
"Did he just….leave?"
"It's complicated. He's gone, though. Just a heads up. Also, we were hoping you all could come help us out like….now."
"Please tell me it's not dinosaurs. That might be our fault."
"Alright, first of all, that's the coolest thing I've ever heard. Second of all, no. It's robots, and also possibly a supervolcano. This vibe's not gonna hold for long, can you all come back?"
"Forward," Sara corrected. "We're in the Neolithic era right now. You catch all that, Gideon? Set a course."
"Right away, Captain," Gideon responded. "Setting course for Central City, 2017."
People were already swarming S.T.A.R. labs by the time they arrived, several whom Sara didn't recognize from the Dominator invasion a little less than a year ago. This time, there was no spare moment for introductions.
Sara had an armful of twenty-two year old the moment she entered the cortex. "Hey!" Thea greeted her, pulling back to reveal that she was in costume, which was weird, because the last Sara heard she wasn't using Speedy anymore. "Can Dig, J'onn and I take Nate? We're dealing with the volcano, and we need to see if he can go in without melting."
"Sure, take whoever. You don't even have to bring them back."
"Go ask Felicity and Iris what's going on," she ordered, grabbing Nate by the arm and pulling him back the way they came. "Thanks."
Sara turned to Mick and Amaya, the only members of her team who hadn't already peeled off. "You guys good?"
"We're fine," Amaya assured. "Go."
Felicity and Iris were on the far side of the room over some set-up someone had rigged out of the normal S.T.A.R. labs monitor.
Felicity looked up to meet Sara's gaze, and something faltered in her expression.
"What?" Sara asked, heart dropping.
Felicity shook her head. "Sorry, nothing. Well, no one's dead. It's good to see you."
"My dad's fine?" Sara asked, getting her worst fear out of the way. Thea probably wouldn't have greeted her so casually if anything else was the case, but she wasn't sure.
Felicity rose and pulled her into a hug. "Your dad's fine. I'm sorry. I just realized that there's some stuff you should probably know. Nothing bad, just….complicated stuff."
Sara hugged her back. "Complicated seems to be the word of the day."
"Speaking of-" Felicity turned around to gesture to the spread of technology. "We're about to have twenty people out in the field. Codename only over the comms."
She pulled up a map on one of the screens and zoomed in. "This is the town we're evacuating. Two hundred miles away from Central City, and a population of four thousand people. The robots- no snappy name yet, Cisco's working on it- have blocked off most of the traditional modes of transportation, so we've decided to really mess with them and evacuate to a whole different dimension. Vibe- that's Cisco's codename, and Charmer- that's Cynthia, you'll like her- are in charge of that, but they need a lot of extra hands."
Sara nodded. "Take Amaya. She's helped man mass evacuations before, she knows what she's doing."
"Great," Iris said, swiveling her chair to join their conversation. "Sara, can we use the Waverider to get our people to the evacuation zone? We've got two speedsters on hand, but they can only take one person at a time."
Sara considered it for a moment, and then nodded. "You want me, Ray, or Jax to pilot. Martin or Nate in a pinch. No time travel though, and I wouldn't make any jumps either. Long story, but it'll just make everything worse. Oh, the jump ship. Ask Jax if it's back in working order. That's a long term project of his. I kind of crashed it into a meteor, but it could be useful."
Iris leaned over toward Felicity's screen and grabbed what Sara guessed was the S.T.A.R. labs approximation of a computer mouse. "The supervolcano is thirty miles out from our evacuation zone, along the New Madrid faultline. We've got three tasks right now. The evacuation has already started, and it's pretty straightforward, but time consuming. Right now we have no clue what to do about the volcano, but we just sent Dig and Thea to do recon."
"They took Nate with them," Sara informed her. "And someone named J'onn?"
"Codename Martian Manhunter," Felicity said. "He's one of Kara's. As in, she brought him with her, but also in the sense that he's an alien."
Iris pointed to a woman with short hair and a man in a mask who were gathered over a map with a kid in the Flash suit who definitely wasn't Barry. "That's Alex and James. They're also friends of Kara's, but they're not aliens, apparently."
"I thought Kara said Alex was her sister?" Felicity asked. "Kara's an alien but her sister isn't?"
"That's definitely not the weirdest thing about what I just said," Iris pointed out. "Sara, there's a lab straight down the hall and to the left. Cisco and Oliver were in there earlier drafting a plan of attack for the robots. If we can overtake them fast enough, we might not have to deal with the volcano at all. Can you find Kara and look over the plan together?"
"Sure," Sara responded, but before she could walk away, Felicity grabbed her by the wrist.
"Hey," she said. "Seriously, talk to Oliver if you get the chance. It's stuff you probably need to hear from him."
Which meant it wasn't going to be a pleasant conversation. Sara braced herself for whatever was coming her way and left to cortex to find Kara.
