To Be Reborn A God
One-shot
Something went wrong.
"It was supposed to blow," Sara said, bottom lip trapped between her teeth as she cast worried looks towards Rip. "Snart-"
"It was almost at critical when Mick took my place," Ray cut in. "There wasn't any stopping it, right?"
"They would have kept it contained. I don't doubt the wellspring was reinforced, but the Oculus would have been destroyed," Rip told them, but he still stared out at the readings Gideon was projecting. They were safely floating in the time stream, trying to land the necessary coordinates to go after Savage and Kendra, but the others were worried. They were all worried.
Mick would have pointed out that they were working themselves up over the idea that Snart hadn't blown himself to pieces, but he was too busy trying to hold himself together. When he was alone, he'd cry. He'd rage. He'd throw things until he had nothing left in him. But not now. Not when they were looking.
Jax cast him a sympathetic look, though, and he gave the kid a tiny nod in acknowledgement. Len had liked him.
"Guys, can we just…not?" Jax requested. Even he sounded pained. Mourning.
The bridge went silent, like the others were finally realizing the weight of it all. Guilt and hurt and apologetic glances shot Mick's way. He held a hand up to silence them before anyone could try to offer any condolences. He didn't want them, didn't think he could fucking handle them.
He still didn't know how he was going to tell Lisa.
"What do you want to do?" Sara asked him after a while, eyes searching his like his answer would actually matter.
He straightened his back, knuckles white as he grasped the edge of the console. "Savage," he said, voice rough, because the Time Masters were only half the reason this happened. The other half still had Kendra and damn it all, but he wasn't going to let her die too. "I'm gonna burn him alive."
They let him do it.
It didn't make him feel any better.
Pain. There was pain, red hot, but his vision went blue instead of white. He screamed, screamed until he couldn't anymore. Screamed until he thought he had worn his throat bloody. He didn't move—couldn't move—but there was fire before there were people and hands. Unfamiliar hands grabbed him and the pain flared even hotter.
Everything went black.
"What's next?" Ray asked as they gathered back onto the ship sans Kendra and Carter. Another mission. Another choice.
Rip dropped down into his captain's chair. "We keep going."
"What's next?" a voice asked as he drifted upwards towards consciousness. There was still pain clinging to every bit of his existence, like a single flare of it might burn him down to dust.
Something heavy and metal and cold closed around one wrist.
"We rebuild."
"Come home," Lisa begged him, voice full of static. The connection was bad. He should show Jax how to fix it, Mick thought dully. They needed to have solid communication lines.
"I can't go back there without him, Lis," he croaked. Not to Central. Central was Len's more than it was ever his. It would be too much like stepping into the heart of a ghost and he wasn't sure he could do that without eating a bullet.
"What about me?" she asked, but it wasn't static that made her voice crack that time. "Mickey, please…"
He disconnected the call rather than listen to her sobs and hated himself a little more.
They brought him to a chair with more restraints and scanners that felt like an odd tickle. He thought he might have felt something like it before, but the memories were lost to the pain coursing through him. Pain until there wasn't and a mechanical voice was declaring him healed.
His head lolled to the side when it mentioned something about his right arm and… Gone. His arm was gone, stopping suddenly at a jagged stump the voice was saying needed to be amputated further. He let out a strangled noise in protest.
"Sedate him," a hard woman by his feet said. "Physical modifications can be completed after we've put him through the induction process."
There was a nod and something got shoved between this teeth. It tasted like rubber. Anxiety shot through him—he hated gags, felt like his lungs couldn't work and he couldn't breathe—and he went to spit it out, but something metallic came down around his head.
"How far are we taking it?" a man in a white coat asked.
"I want a blank slate."
The pain came seconds later. It hurt and hot pain that should have been white was still tinged blue. He screamed until he just…
Stopped.
He sagged in the chair, eyes blank. Everything was blank.
"What's your name?" someone asked.
He didn't know.
They forgot about Len as time went on. Mick didn't think he should have been surprised. They hadn't really known him. They'd had a few crazy months, but their memories of him faded as easily as their memories of Kendra seemed to. Life went on. They didn't talk about the ones they lost by choice and the one they just lost.
Mick didn't forget. He could never forget. He wore Len's ring on a chain around his neck and maintained the cold gun like Len was going to need it any minute. He slept on a bench press, because he didn't know how to sleep in a bed alone anymore.
They forgot Len. They forgot Kendra. They very nearly forgot Mick sometimes as he lived and breathed right next to them.
Life went on, but no one said it got better.
They remade him. Doctors and Time Masters and machines. He stared at them all blankly as they connected metal onto the stump at his shoulder. Silver fingers moved, wrong and right in the same breath, but his.
He didn't speak, answered only in sharp nods and head shakes when asked a question. Hunters didn't speak. Ares didn't speak, simply responded to orders and completed the missions he was assigned.
Mission. Completion. Base. Maintenance. Repeat.
They said they'd send him after the traitor soon—him and the little team he'd put together—but not until he was ready. Not until the time was right.
The Time Masters always knew when the precise moment came.
Jax caught him in the kitchen one night, eyes stalling for a second at the beer in his hands. "Can I ask you something?"
He grunted and waved one hand to urge him on as he brought the bottle to his lips.
"Did all the bounty hunters have the same armor you did?" the kid asked carefully, like he didn't want to go anywhere near the territory the question brought them to.
Mick stiffened, body suddenly so tight that he thought the bottle might shatter in his grip. It didn't. He kept himself under just enough control to stop the reaction. He nodded, words caught in his throat.
"There weren't any guys with a metal arm?"
That pulled Mick's gaze to him, lips turned down in a frown. "What?" he asked, sounding a little rougher than he would have liked to.
"I… There was a guy when we were fighting the Legion. I thought he was with them at first, but…" Jax grimaced. "He started killing some of the time remnants. He had an hourglass on his arm, but it looked like the old symbol Rip said they'd use."
Mick remembered it, remembered the gold color of it when his Chronos armor was new. It had been worn away by the time he went after them in Nanda Parbat. He'd hated that damn hourglass still and judging like he was never going to move forward.
"They never made it past the testing stages with those prosthetics," he told Jax and took another drink. "It was easier to just get new hunters."
"That arm was functional," Jax insisted. "He punched through a time remnant. Through it, Mick. You're sure no one had one when you were there?"
Mick nodded, but it put an uneasy feeling in his stomach. They'd scraped that whole project right before his last mission. His last handler had muttered about what a loss it had been, that they could have built a whole new army for the Time Masters if they could make the limbs work.
"What did he look like?" He could remember a handful of the test subjects, hunters that had lost a limb in a mission gone bad. Maybe they'd managed to get them operational after he'd left, a last ditch attempt by the scientists that had more fun playing God than Time Master.
"He had a mask on," Jax replied, almost apologetic. "I couldn't tell."
"You ever see him again, you tell me," Mick told him, firm. "And don't engage."
"He pulled out a guy's lung, man. You couldn't pay me to go near that."
Rip Hunter's Time Bureau was a joke.
They let him have his fun with it for a while, pretending that his agents didn't have the Time Masters' emblem burned onto their skin. Sleepers were helpful, Ares thought. Let them play with Hunter like a cat taunts its pray. The self-righteous will fall under the heel of the Time Masters and Hunter had no idea his successes were thanks to the ones he thought he'd destroyed.
The Legends were slightly more problematic. They were messes, the lot of them, but their disjointed stumbling had turned into something a little more clean. They were still miles away from proper fighters and lightyears away from proper strategists, but they accomplished their missions. Ares was sure their successes were mostly by accident, but he didn't dare mention it to his handlers. To voice opinions rather than facts was asking to be taken back to the chair for induction.
He hated the chair.
It was almost a relief when they told him it was time. He let the sleepers have Hunter, gifting him to them like you gave meat to a starving animal, but the Legends were his.
He tracked them to the outskirts of Hiroshima in 1945, mere weeks before the atomic bomb would be dropped. A girl raced through the streets, Japanese by appearance, but her speech was hindered by an American accent no one trusted. She screamed warnings about the bomb, thin fingers clinging to sleeves as she begged people to believe her.
He put a bullet between her eyes right as the Legends made their appearance. Blood and brain matter splattered across the Sara Lance's white leather. Firestorm—Jefferson Jackson and Martin Stein, he remembered from his briefings—choked on air. The others floundered, heads spinning as they tried to trace the shot.
Mick Rory's eyes found his in a second. Impressive, but expected for someone trained by the Time Masters.
He landed a warning shot at the arsonist's feet and slipped away.
"It's the Time Masters," Mick told them when they made it back to the ship. Nate still looked shaken, arms bloody from where he'd carried the girl's body back to the ship. They'd deliver it back to 2029, left behind in an alley to look like a mugging gone bad.
Everyone but Sara had looked sick when he'd explained it, like they couldn't fathom the idea of staging a murder, but there were timelines to protect and too much to be discovered if doctors in 1945 had gotten their hands on her remains.
"I'm sure the drinking has had its ill effects, but you should remember that we destroyed them," Stein said, a brush-off if he'd ever heard one. "Nor were they ones to use something as mundane as a handgun."
Mick leveled him with a look that made the older man step back. "It was a sniper rifle," he corrected. "Type 97. They'd wanna keep with the era in case they had to ditch the weapon, but they're big enough assholes that they stamp the casings." He tossed the bullet—the damn warning shot—onto the table they were circled around. The whole thing was mangled from its meeting with the concrete, but the hourglass engraving on the side was still visible near the base.
"I thought you guys said that blast was contained," Nate said cautiously while Sara examined the bullet.
"We never saw any bodies," Sara admitted reluctantly as her shoulders sagged. "And it wasn't as if every Time Master in existence was there when it blew. There had to still be people out there."
"They could have rebuilt," Amaya concluded.
Sara nodded and looked towards Mick. "Did you see anything?"
"Him," Mick grunted. "I know where hunters like to perch." He looked towards Jax, confirming, "It was the guy you saw. Metal arm."
Jax's back went stiff. "You're sure?"
"He waved."
He lurked close to the Waverider, examining the perimeter while he toyed with the gun at his thigh. There was no real sensation—the Time Masters didn't care enough about the prosthetic to offer anything more than slight pressures—but it came with the echo of a memory. He had them sometimes, little moments of recognition when he'd been out of the induction process longer than normal.
The Time Masters would toss him back in if they knew, might have taken him off the mission entirely if they knew something about the rusting ship struck a chord in him. He shouldn't have chords to strike. He was a hunter, a soldier. There was no place for sentimentality in the war against people damaging the time stream.
The spot in front of him burst into flames with a quick shot and he startled. He shouldn't startle. He was better than that.
But the arsonist used to be Chronos. He understood the movements of a hunter.
Ares was okay with being on-level with him, at the very least. Chronos had been the best of the best once, even if it was before his time.
"A warning for the warning," Mick Rory—because he wasn't Chronos anymore, pity—said as he stepped out from behind one of the ship's wings. "Back off."
He tilted his head at him, but he didn't speak. He raised his gun, glowing muzzle to sparking flamethrower as they circled. They should have kept a distance, but they came in closer with each rotation, eyes locked.
Rory seemed unsettled when his eyes began to glow blue—an after effect of the Oculus' energy bonding with his cells—and he took the moment of distraction to slam the butt of his gun into the man's solar plexus.
The fight began. Guns abandoned on the ground, they moved to fists. A solid hit to his right shoulder wrenched at the spot where skin met metal. His booted foot caught Rory around he back of the knee. An elbow slammed into the locking mechanism on his mask. He broke Rory's nose with his flesh and blood fist.
The second punch to his face made the mask fall away, mouth piece falling to the ground in a heap of metal and leather.
Rory went still, skin suddenly ashen.
Ares laid him flat with the next hit, hovering over him with his metal hand ready to land the finishing blow. His gun would have been a cleaner method, but he could disintegrate Rory's body with it afterwards. An upward hit that sent cartilage into the brain. He'd have to wash the blood from the metal plating, but that was nothing new.
"Lenny," Rory gasped, pained and broken in a way a fighter of his caliber shouldn't be. There was too much raw emotion in it, too much for Ares to process. It was enough to make him falter.
Lenny. Leonard Snart. Partner to Mick Rory for thirty-odd years. Criminal. Thief. One of many casualties to Rip Hunter's mission, though the records didn't say where the man had died. He'd been no more than a footnote in the files, irrelevant by the time the Time Masters brought him in. He hadn't even been important enough to warrant a picture in his dossier.
"My name is Ares," he found himself saying, voice rough from disuse.
Rory shook his head and there was a burst of strength as the man managed to flip their positions. Firm hands locked onto his wrists, bearing down on him with a weight that shouldn't have felt even a little familiar. It did. He didn't understand. It didn't matter. Rory snorted like there was something funny. "God of war," he muttered. "They're not even trying to be creative."
Ares grunted in amusement, but the reaction surprised him. He shouldn't have found it funny. The Time Masters were to be respected, not mocked. It was something to be considered later. He had a mission to complete.
He bucked to try and throw Rory off, but the movement barely jostled him.
"Sorry, Lenny," Rory said, sounding truly apologetic right before his fist slammed into the side of Ares' head.
He left their guns in the grass when he dragged Len inside. The armor—even as sleek as this new model seemed to be—weighed him down, but Mick just hefted him a little higher in his arms.
"Mick, what…" Ray's voice cut off suddenly and he sucked in a breath. "Is that Snart?"
"Get out of my way."
"His arm-"
"Move."
He shoved past him and took a shortcut to the med bay. His arms were aching by the time he laid Len in a chair, but he closed one hand around Len's. The flesh one. He stared at the right arm—his fucking dominant arm—in horror. "Gideon, lock down the med bay. Full body scan. I… It's him, right?"
It had to be. The Time Masters never would have bothered to go get another Len just to fuck with them. It would have been too much effort when they didn't dabble in earth-hopping. But there were burn scars licking up the side of Len's neck and lighter ones over his cheek. He'd bet it went all the way down over his shoulder, too. Probably blew his arm right off, he thought sickly. The blast had probably been enough to destroy the Oculus and Len's damn body, but…
Contained, Rip had said.
Fucking contained.
He'd break the guy's jaw next time he saw him.
"Scans confirm this is the Leonard Snart from Earth 1," Gideon reported. "Shall I proceed to heal current injuries?"
"Yeah." He swallowed. "Can you regenerate his arm again? If we got the metal one off."
"It appears to be connected at the shoulder, but there is significant scarring," Gideon told him simply. "Regeneration of that caliber is possible, but not recommended. Probability of mobility in the regenerated arm is 23%."
He was going to throw up. "His head…"
"Multiple induction processes," Gideon said. "Full memory wipes show additional scarring, but I can only regenerate tissue growth to the brain in fractions. Rushing the process could cause brain death."
There was bile rising up his throat. He swallowed it back. That bad, then. If she was right, they couldn't do what they'd done with Rip. One wrong move would just tear him apart more. "The brainwashing. Can you fix it?" She had to be able to. He'd let her scan and study his brain down to the damn atom after Stein had taken the chip from his head and he knew she'd examined Rip after his stint with the Legion. There had to be something.
"Brain regeneration should restore some memories as they had with you," she told him, "but the second personality may be too ingrained to offer more than cohabitation."
That was it. He let go of Len's hand and spun towards a trash can as he lost the battle with his stomach. He threw up until it transitioned into sobs.
He should have gone back. He should have made Rip turn the damn ship around and gone back. They should have checked. They should have made sure.
They could have saved him.
He wasn't sure how long he sat there, ass planted on the floor as his world fell to pieces in ways it hadn't since his family burned. Anger and guilt and self-hatred made him dizzy.
He prayed for the first time in almost thirty years.
Then, he planned. He talked to Gideon while she worked through scans and initial healings. He let her talk him through the procedure to get the chip out of Len's head even though the entire process made the vomit rise back up.
He should have called the rest of the team. No doubt, they were arguing with Gideon on the other side of the door and demanding entrance, but he knew security codes they didn't.
He called the Flash instead, forced his voice steady, and explained the situation. They had another version of Gideon there, one they could link to the Waverider. They had enough people that could understand medical technobabble. They had more than a damn glass box to keep Len in while they hoped for the best.
"You put him on this fucking path," Mick reminded Barry as one hand curled around Len's again.
"I know," Barry sighed and added, "I owe him," with a level of guilt that Mick simultaneously did and did not want to know the story behind. More than Len had told him, he was sure. He could feel it in his gut.
He dropped his head into his free hand and sighed. "Thank you."
It wouldn't be the same. Len wouldn't be the same, but different was better than being left to be the Time Master's puppet. The Flash and his team—he'd call the damn Rogues in if he had to—could stand up to any threats, but the Legends had a timeline they needed to fix. It was a mission he should be part of, but Len came first. Len had always come first.
Mick kept planning.
Len slept.
The End