It's like this. One day, Leo wakes up and realizes that nothing about his home life is going to change. It's just not, and that's a fact he needs to face. Nothing about his life is going to change unless he gets the hell out of Dodge.
He only has one real regret about that, and that's Lisa.
But he isn't stupid. He's seventeen years old and all his dad's friends think he's a compulsive liar who's upset that his mom left.
Lisa... Lisa is younger. She's barely ten and he can't take care of her and himself on the run. It just won't work. It's too dangerous-not for him, but for her. And he can't be the reason she's hurt, he just can't.
He leaves the house that night as his dad's on shift, kisses Lisa good night and promises her that one day he'll be back for her. She sleepily nods and clings a little tighter than usual when she hugs him, and that's that.
Except, it isn't.
See, Leo comes back five years and a few new aliases later, and Lisa remembers him-of course she does, it's Lisa-but she refuses to go with him.
"Look Leo, I want to. I really do. I need to get out of here. But you don't get it."
And he doesn't. He's spent years-sometimes on the wrong side of the law, even though he doesn't like it because he's not his dad-years getting ready for this. He has a place for her, a life for her. A chance for her to get out of this and live.
He doesn't until he hears the noise coming from his old bedroom and Lisa doesn't hesitate to open his door to show him.
They have a little brother. He's five years old. His mother was probably pregnant when he left.
Leo looks at Lisa and she nods, and they know what this is going to do. How could they not?
Leo made a choice once, to get out of here. He made a choice and a promise to come back for Lisa, to make it possible for her to get out of here.
But it's not just her anymore. He can't leave their brother behind, and he can't take them both.
"Leo, I'll be okay. Give me a few years and I'll get the hell out of here on my own. I can handle the bastard."
"Make it good, Lise," Leo tells her before he leaves that night. Make it good, he says.
And they both know what it means.
That night he breaks the worst law he's ever broken, covers his tracks the best he can. He does his best to disappear from the pits of Central City, with no intention of ever coming back.
He can't.
Leonard Snart disappears that night with no intention of ever returning. No one even knows he was there. Lisa made it good. Lisa made it good and he knows she suffered for it.
He sees her a few weeks later, her face plastered all over the nation in a TV spot as she cries with their father at her side in his dress blues looking stony faced.
Little Michael looks up at the news with confusion on his face and asks him why Lissy is crying and it's all he is not to break.
Because Leonard Snart is dead for all intents and purposes. Leonard Snart is dead and Michael Snart is plastered on the news as a kidnapping victim presumed dead, and there are no leads because Lisa made it good, and the break in her arm was probably punishment for letting someone take Michael that they played off as part of whatever story she spun.
But he'd had to make a choice, and they both knew that the moment he snuck back into their childhood home.
It's like this. Leonard and Lisa always had each other, from the moment she was born. Lisa always knew he was going to come back for her.
They had each other in that hellhole, and that's how they survived.
And Michael never would have without one of them.
"You need to take Mikey, Leo. You need to take him and make sure he never knows what he's missing here."
And so he did.
-x-
"Hey, Len!" his brother says one day, eighteen years later when he walks into his office at STARlabs Insurance.
Len looks up with a wide smile, stops typing up his report on the retrieval of the Kahndaq Dynasty Diamond.
"Ronnie!"
-x-
Except, it's not the end of the story, when Ronnie Raymond walks into his brother's office at STARlabs. It's not the end of the story, six months later when Merlin "Len" Raymond helps his brother's fiancee Caitlin plan the funeral.
It's not the end of the story two years later when Len is sitting drunk in a bar and Wade Eiling of Goldfinger Aerospace buys him a drink and throws him the bait to pull one over on his former employer with a band of thieves while doing the "right thing".
No, that's just the beginning.