Dream A Little Dream Of Me
One-shot
His mother had been a telepath.
The world called her schizophrenic, but Len knew better. He remembered the conversations where their mouths never opened, the gentle sound of her voice echoing in his head as she begged him to stay upstairs and away from his father's fists.
He'd still been Leo then, soft spoken and clinging to his mother's dress as she ran fingers through his curls.
My little lion.
He'd never been as brave as she'd thought he was.
She died when he was eight, driven mad by too many voices bouncing around in her head. She'd attacked him, enraged, raving and accusing him of cursing her dreams. Nail marks across his cheek. Hands around his throat.
Lewis smashed one of his toy trains against her head and told the cops she'd fallen down the stairs.
No one called him Leo after that.
His father came home with a woman when he was ten, put a ring on her finger, and said she was his new mother. She was barely nineteen with eyes too bright to be ruined by his father and too infatuated with him to know to save herself. She'd done her best with him, struggling to hold a connection with a son that could have been her little brother, but she'd taken him for ice cream and told him how she wanted to be an actress.
No actress worth anything had ever come out of Central City, but he didn't tell her that.
He tried not to tell her how Lewis had taught him to pick locks and spot a real gem from a fake at a glance. He was pretty sure she still knew.
There was no hiding the bruises from her as they darkened against his skin and hers. She couldn't protect him the way his mother had, not now that his father had gotten a taste for the feeling of his fist against his son's flesh.
Not after he learned that keeping his kid terrified of him meant he could use him easier.
He slipped into her dreams on the worst nights, clinging to her like he used to cling to his mother, and begged her not to leave. Don't leave me. He wondered if it had guilted her into staying as long as she did, if it was his fault that light in her eyes died.
Wondered if he was as big a monster as his father.
She left when he turned thirteen, but she left him Lisa like an apology for breaking the promise she'd whispered in their dreams.
Juvie was a special kind of hell.
His head bled. His ribs ached. His vision swam. His knee twisted.
He saw the shiv through blood-tinted vision and tried to move, but hands held him down. Someone called him a shit. Someone else kicked him in the gut. He threw up and knew right then he was going to die. His father had beaten him bloody, but he needed him too much to kill him. Lewis needed his smarts and his light fingers. These boys didn't. They'd kill him without a thought because he was the son of a cop—corrupt as he was—and because he'd mouthed off.
Then, they were gone. He could hear fighting as his vision blurred, but he couldn't make his eyes focus enough to see what was happening. He pleaded when hands touched him, scared to die and scared to leave Lisa. "Don't kill me," he begged and wished he didn't sound as pathetic as he felt.
Someone scoffed. "Didn't save your ass to kill you. Get your ass up."
He tried, but he collapsed once he put pressure on his knee.
The boy carried him to the infirmary, grumbling the whole way. "The hell's your name, anyway?"
"Leonard."
A snort. "What? Your parents hate you or something?"
He bristled, bloody nails digging into the side of the other teen's neck. "Shut up."
"I'm not calling you that," the guy continued as if he hadn't spoken, but he didn't decide on a name by the time they reached the infirmary. He put him down onto a bed, ready to walk out, but the nurse made him stay as guards came for statements.
Face and vision clear of blood, he saw the way the other teen paled when the nurse stripped his shirt off him to get a look at his ribs. He looked away to avoid the judgement at the scars that littered his torso.
The guy muttered that his name was Mick and said he was going to call him Len.
It was better than Leonard, anyway.
"I don't want your pity," he told him one night as he slipped into Mick's dream. A farm formed around them that was all Mick's doing. It seemed peaceful.
Mick scoffed, leaning back against a tractor. "Not givin' it, kid," he said as if they weren't the same age. "You don't know crap about what's goin' on in here. Those assholes want your head on a platter 'cause of your old man."
"I can handle it."
"Jimmy almost broke you in half earlier."
"Because I told his friends he has a crush on me," Len said. "It didn't have anything to do with my dad."
Mick stared at him for a second, dumbfounded, before he broke off into a laugh. "You fucking didn't. He's not into guys."
Len inspected his nails, smirking. "I never said he was, but it got his friends' attention off me. Anything he does now is going to look like a boy pulling his crush's pigtails."
"He's gonna beat your ass."
Something mischievous lit up in Len's eyes and he plucked a weed out of the grass. "I don't have to worry about that, do I? You won't leave me alone."
"Because you're gonna get your scrawny ass killed."
"You keep talking about my ass, I'm going to think you're the one with the crush."
Mick was still sputtering when he let the dream end.
Len let him stick around.
Mick's family burned and his dreamscape changed.
Before, it was always the farm, big and quiet and peaceful in ways that were foreign to Len and his loud, city upbringing. A phantom image of the family dog drifted through sometimes, as playful as she'd been before the cancer came and they had to put her down. She was buried out behind the barn, but she ran through the dreams like the puppy Len could barely remember her being.
After the fire, it was different. His mother had always told him a dreamscape was centered around where someone felt safe, but Mick's farm had turned into a flat darkness. No safety. No haven. He'd lost it, burned right to the ground with his family inside.
He did what he could to help. He visited in the day, face-to-face with a rookie cop that looked at him like he was the same kind of dirt his father was. Joe West looked at him like he wanted to lock him up right next to Mick, as if he knew Len's fingers were as sticky as a toddler's and that he wasn't about to wash them clean.
"He didn't do it on purpose," he told Officer West. "He has a problem."
It didn't matter. As far as the cops were concerned, Mick was a stone-cold killer who had taken a family of seven and turned it into one. No one cared that some part of Mick had shut down or that he had a diagnosable problem that needed help and not someone to lock him away and throw away the key.
They never let him in to visit during the trial, but he'd been there when Mick broke down and something like sympathy finally showed on people's faces.
The jail time still came, preceded by months of shrinks and drugs that made it hard for him to reach Mick at night.
For five years, Len barely slept. He worked on his walking, closed away in his room with Lisa by his side and ready to pull him out if Lewis came.
He learned to shape worlds instead of simply visiting.
He learned how to force his way through the drugged haze the shrinks kept Mick in.
Shaping the darkness around Mick into something else made his nose bleed every time, but he pushed through it until they sat on the swings of Lisa's favorite playground.
Even in dreams, Mick looked like hell. His head hung forward, dark shadows under his eyes and skin that was too pale. He'd lost weight, Len noticed with a pang. Drugged to the gills and they were still letting him waste away.
He got off his swing and circled around to kneel in front of Mick. "It wasn't your fault."
"I burned them," Mick mumbled as his head lolled against the chain. "Shoulda woken 'em up. Coulda saved 'em."
"It was an accident."
He said it every night for five years.
Mick still didn't believe him, but by the time he was released, his dreamscape had shifted from the darkness to that grimy little playground.
He never outright told Mick what he could do. His mother's old warnings echoed in his head, reminding him that other people couldn't be trusted. What his family could do, they were special, but the world wouldn't understand. They'd be freaks, labelled crazy by doctors that didn't understand what a true psychic was. They'd already done it with her by then, pushing prescriptions at her like she had something that could be managed with drugs.
Sometimes, Len wondered if they would have worked; if they would have saved her.
None of it mattered. It didn't matter that he never told Mick, because he figured it out on his own, staring at him in a dirty motel room one night. Dingy sheets pooled around their waists, but Len already had his shirt back on. He leaned back against the headboard with a cigarette between his fingers.
"What are you?" Mick asked, sudden and curious. "Don't try tellin' me they aren't real."
Len stiffened and tried to cover it up as he took another drag. "What?"
"You've been in my damn head since we met. It ain't that hard to figure out any time I dream about you, you're dead ass tired the next day." He tilted his head a little. "You don't sleep when we have the dreams, do you?"
His mother's words came back to him, excuses forming in his head, but he looked over at Mick and just…stopped. Cigarette burning down to the butt in his hand, he stared at messy hair and big eyes. He had a crease between his brows Len wanted to smooth out in a way that was too intimate for whatever it was they were doing. Thieving. Fucking. They didn't do love.
"No," he said finally. No point in hiding what Mick had already figured out. He passed over the cigarette so Mick could get the last couple puffs and closed his eyes. "I meditate when I do it."
"So after the-"
"Yeah," he said and cut off the sentence he knew Mick didn't want to finish. He never liked talking about the fire. Neither of them did.
"The nightmares…"
His fingers twitched, anxious for another cigarette. "You can't have them when I'm manipulating the dream."
Mick stared at him for a long minute before he leaned his head against Len's shoulder. It was too intimate for something built on pent-up aggression and bruises, but Len took it for what it was; a thank you. He didn't want it.
"Can Lisa-"
"She's normal. Whatever it is came from my mom's side." His mom's, not hers. Half siblings, but she had so much of his heart that he didn't think he was capable of letting anyone else in.
Mick hummed like he understood and maybe he did. He'd been by Len's side since juvie, watching his back and watching Lisa grow up from a clumsy toddler into the pain-in-the-ass preteen that liked all things shiny. Mick had been the one that pierced her ears with a sharp needle and a pair of gold studs he'd lifted from a Claire's. She hadn't cried when he did it, but Len had looked like he was going to pass out.
"These things dangerous?" Mick asked as he grabbed his Zippo.
"No."
"You lying?"
The second cigarette never got lit, crushed under their weight as Len pulled Mick into a kiss and they lost track of time. A distraction if it ever was one, but Mick didn't need to know the risks of Len going too deep.
His shirt hit the floor and stayed there the rest of the night.
People grew. Dreamscapes changed.
They got married at a courthouse in Boston and Mick's turned into the Commons with them sitting along the water.
The pond iced over after Mick burned and they fell apart again.
Len only visited once, staring out as snow fell around them, and wondered if Mick was trying to cool himself down or if he was trying to freeze him out.
He didn't ask and let the dream end without a word spoken between them.
The Flash came and he sought Mick out again. They became something more, even if neither of them put their rings back on their fingers. Partners again. Supervillains. The comic-loving kid he used to be was positively giddy.
"You could probably pass yourself off as a meta now," Mick mused one night as he tinkered with the heat gun. "Let that nerd kid give you a new name. Dreamer or something stupid like that."
He hummed. "I'm partial to Captain Cold."
"Whatever you say, Elsa."
"Mick."
They left Mick behind. They left him behind.
He hadn't felt right since, walking around like he'd torn half his damn heart out. The others stared at him like he was a monster who had murdered the best friend that had stood with him for thirty years. He didn't. He couldn't. It was Mick.
It was always Mick.
They didn't understand. They didn't know.
Sometimes, he wished he didn't know either. He wished he'd continued living his life and only having room for Lisa in his heart, but Mick had worked his way in like a missing piece. His mother—romantic that she was until their lives fell to pieces—would have said that his soul called to Mick's. She would have said that was why connecting with Mick was as easy as breathing.
Not now.
This was worse than when Mick was hopped up on court-ordered drugs. Back then, fighting the fog to hold onto the connection had been the hard part. Now…
Now, he couldn't even find Mick.
It shouldn't have been that hard. Even with them travelling through time, all he should have had to do was focus and find him, but there was nothing. Some instinctive part of him could feel Mick, a glimmer at the edge of his consciousness when he meditated, but the connection slipped through his fingers like sand.
He couldn't hold it.
He tried.
He failed.
The others could tell he wasn't sleeping. He saw the glances and the worry that peeked through the anger and disgust at what they thought he'd done.
Jax tried to ask him if he was okay one day while he was cleaning the cold gun.
Len powered it up like a warning and he was alone again.
Gideon warned him of the dangers of going days without sleep. He ignored her and fell into meditation. It didn't matter. It didn't work. Gideon pulled him out every time he forced himself closer, warning bells snapping him out of his trance.
"I almost had it," he snapped.
"Your vitals were dropping."
He didn't think her programming understood how much he didn't care. He just needed to find Mick. He rattled off an override code he'd found in one of Jax's manuals and slipped away again.
All he had to do was find Mick, he told himself as he pushed. Pain shot through his head. He kept going.
He had to find him.
He had to make him understand.
Sara found him seizing on the floor of his room, eyes rolled back to the whites and blood pouring from his nose.
He didn't wake up for a week.
Everyone asked what happened when he woke up.
Gideon hadn't told them.
He didn't either.
Chronos came.
Chronos was Mick.
Everything fell apart.
His hand froze.
His heart broke.
He didn't expect to see the Commons when he slipped into Mick's dream that night, but he'd hoped he wouldn't see the darkness. It surrounded him when he opened his eyes and he forced it to resemble his quarters on the Waverider instead.
Mick slammed him back against the wall before he could say a word, hands around his throat and eyes that were too cold. "Stay out of my head," he growled in a voice that didn't sound like Mick at all.
The dream fell away and Len gasped as he opened his eyes, hands flying to his throat.
Somehow, he wasn't surprised to see red hand prints across his skin when he looked in the mirror.
The Oculus flared before it blew and Len let go of himself.
He fell.
He drifted.
He got lost.
I'm sorry, Mick.
He thought he'd die, blown to smithereens like the rest of the Time Masters. He wasn't. Logic screamed at him that something had gone wrong, that he shouldn't be there anymore. He shouldn't be anything anymore.
He was.
He wasn't.
He still walked, drifting between dreams when he had the strength, but it was fleeting. A moment here. A moment there.
He slipped into Sara's dream and said he was sorry, kissed her head, and admitted that he didn't think he had room for her in his heart too. She didn't think she had room either, her heart missing a pretty brunette like a lost limb.
"I still miss you," she sighed into his chest.
He lost hold of the dream before he could reply.
She woke up crying.
Ray. Jax. Stein. Rip. Scattered moments of good and bad that ended too soon and left the living to turn to a nightcap or three.
None of them talked about it.
None of them talked about him.
He pretended it didn't hurt, that it didn't make him a little bitter. He'd blown himself up with the thought that he was doing it for them, but knowing he'd done it for Mick.
Being a hero wasn't all it was cracked up to be.
He missed being a crook.
He had to work himself up to visiting Mick, fingers drifting to his neck like he could still remember the last time.
But Mick didn't sleep and Len wasn't strong enough to get through the oblivion the booze caused. Once upon a time, when he'd had a body to anchor him, but to try now…
New girl. New nerd. Good people, but unfamiliar.
Len didn't like unfamiliar.
He didn't know how he did it, how he broke through to the waking world. He shouldn't have been able to. It wasn't his skill. He was a dreamwalker, thriving on manipulating people's unconsciousness. This… This wasn't right.
He held onto it with both hands, though, desperate and trying. Mick was still drinking too much. He didn't hear Len's worried mutters about the state of his liver, but he heard the bitter and jealous words that came when Amaya was around.
He wanted more. More for Mick. More for him. More for them.
He wanted to go back to that damn roof and tell Rip to screw himself, because this wasn't worth it. Being stuck and watching Mick spiral with no one to help him wasn't worth it. They needed home and the comfort of their safe houses. They needed the Rogues that looked at them and knew when something was off and did something about it. Shawna and her not-at-all-subtle requests for Mick to teach her how to flambé. Hartley yammering on about math and numbers like he understood the ever-present clock in Len's head. Mark starting a little tornado over Axel's head just to make the kid pitch a fit and get a laugh out of everyone.
He never thought he'd miss them.
He never thought he'd be scared of Mick getting himself killed before he could see them again.
He never thought he'd be disappointed in the others, but he was and regrets turned into a bitterness that made him wish he and Mick had jumped ship before they'd reached the Vanishing Point.
They kept talking until Stein caught them. Len pulled back after that, lost and hoping that maybe he was simply stuck, because he didn't think he was a ghost. He'd tried walking through Ray a thousand times and the man never so much as shivered. If he was a ghost, he felt cheated.
His hand touched Mick's when Stein found the transmitter, but Mick didn't so much as blink. Len didn't expect him to. Mick never felt him.
It had nothing to do with the crap the Time Masters shoved up in Mick's head. Deep down in his gut, Len knew that. Even after Stein pulled the bloody piece of tech from under his partner's skin, he knew he could still make Mick see him.
He didn't.
He stopped appearing to Mick and let his husband think he could finally move on.
"You guys need to take care of him," he told Sara. "He's going to get himself killed. He does that, I did this for nothing."
Sara never looked up from the readings in front of her and Len's fists clenched as the anger rose. Anger. Bitterness. He'd trusted them to watch out for Mick after he was gone. They didn't. They weren't.
"You're supposed to be the captain now," he snapped. "Are you going to let him die too?"
Blood dripped from his nose and Sara's absentminded humming stopped. She snapped her head up, eyes wide and searching for a threat. "Snart?" she breathed, looking like she'd seen a ghost. He would have thought she had if she weren't looking right through him.
She'd heard him.
It didn't matter.
Pain shot through his head and everything went dark.
There was another him when he opened his eyes again.
He recognized Dhark well enough from the media coverage when he'd been running rampant through Star City, but he wasn't overly familiar with the man.
He remembered Merlyn from an ill-conceived theft when he'd cracked the security system out of boredom and slipped inside to steal whatever looked good. He'd made it out—barely—but only because he'd dived into a closet as a woman passed by with a young boy at her heels. Papers said the woman was murdered a week later.
The speedster was a stranger entirely, but he left Len with the same uneasy feeling in his gut Wells used to. It worsened when blue eyes fell on him and lips curled up into a smirk.
He could see him.
Len wasn't even trying.
He still couldn't do anything, standing by as the team fought. Watched some other version of himself fight Mick and almost take Sara's head off with a shot of the cold gun. Watched Dhark send Nate and Rip back into a wall with a flick of his wrist. Watched Merlyn go against Amaya and Ray, but they didn't know how to fight together. Watched Jax take a beating from the speedster so bad that they'd had to rush him and Stein to med bay the second the Legion—Len hated that he liked the name—had left them to lick their wounds.
They were just toying with them.
They were all going to get killed.
"They brainwashed him, right?" Ray asked when they crowded around the table later. "They brainwashed Rip. They could have done it to him too."
"They can't brainwash someone that's dead." Sara shook her head, hair half-loose from her braid and hanging down in front of her face. She pushed it back and sank down into a chair. "They must have snatched him from another point."
"What about that thing Barry did?" Jax tried, one arm wrapped around sore ribs. "Flashpoint. People were dead when he came back. What if other people were alive?"
"Gideon checked the timeline," Rip sighed. "All record of him disappears after we set off in 2016."
"Who is he?" Amaya cut in, lost.
"Snart," Sara said, "Leonard. He was…part of the team. We lost him at the Vanishing Point."
"Maybe he survived-"
"He blew himself up," Mick snapped harshly before Nate could finish the suggestion. "He's gone."
They all went silent for a long moment, in sympathy and in remembrance. Len called them all idiots, but no one heard him.
"The timeline will know if he's missing, right?" Nate spoke up, sheepish and like he felt guilty for breaking the silence. "If they took a past version of him, he'll have disappeared from the timeline. Gideon could track it."
"She can only track records," Mick said, gruff. "He was good at staying off the radar when he wanted to."
Sara shook her head and pushed herself to her feet. "It's worth a shot."
They didn't find anything.
No one was surprised.
He tried to visit his other self's dream and ripped himself apart.
He screamed, hands clutching at his head as blood poured from his nose.
Everyone came running, skidding to a stop when they reached the bridge, and stared. For minutes, no one moved more than it took for hands to drift to weapons. Sara's hand on a knife. Rip's hand on his gun. Amaya's fingers brushing against her necklace. They didn't trust him, no matter how helpless he was just then. The other him had been trying to hurt them for too long and they couldn't tell the difference.
Mick could. Mick knew every damn part of him. He rushed forward, boots heavy against the metal of the floor, and dropped to his knees next to Len. "What the hell did you do?"
"Walked," he croaked. "Other one's not me…" He didn't think. Couldn't be. He was here. Couldn't be him. It couldn't be.
God, his head…
"Pull back."
"Can't…" His back arched as the pain ripped through his head again. He thought more blood may have started coming out his nose and hoped the wetness leaking from his eyes wasn't more of the same.
Mick's face went gray and he was pretty sure it was. "Pull back," Mick said again, but Len could hear the desperation this time, the fear. The others appeared over his shoulder.
"Mick, he's dangerous," Sara said, a hand on his shoulder like she wanted to pull him away. He shoved her off with a growl, eyes moving from his partner.
"What's happening to him?" Ray squeaked. Len wished he could take some joy in the way he'd gone green.
"He went too far," Mick muttered, hands hovering uselessly. "Dreamwalker's paradox."
"Not a real thing," Len groaned as his back arched. He shut his eyes against the pain.
"You want to talk about what's real right now?" Mick snapped. "You're a ghost."
"Not…" He didn't think. Didn't know. He didn't… He choked on a breath and looked at Stein. "He wasn't hallucinating…"
Eyes turned to Stein fast as a few of them squawked out questions and Stein tried to explain what he and Mick had found. It wasn't right, even if Stein clung to shoddy science and psychology. He wasn't a product of Mick's mind. He wasn't.
Sara looked at him, shell-shocked, and at least she didn't take the professor's words as gospel. "It was you I heard before, wasn't it?" she murmured as she knelt down next to Mick.
He didn't answer. Everything went dark.
There were two of him trapped in one head.
They fought. Bloody noses. Knuckles broken against metal walls. Fingers raking bloody trails across skin.
Thawne locked them up, muttering about flashpoints and some people not having strong enough minds to handle the timestream. He did. They did. They were plenty strong for a few time jumps. It was in fighting their own damn head that they floundered.
Neither one of them lost, but neither of them won either. Exhaustion and the self-preservation that had kept them going for forty years won out.
Two became one in the time it took to give a tired sigh.
It was anti-climactic, Len thought as he broke them—broke himself—out of the cell. No alarms. No guard. The Legion didn't expect him to piece his mind back together.
His fingers itched with the want to kill them all and have it be done. He didn't. Rip's old reminders about keeping timelines intact echoed in his head like an irritating PSA. He could probably get away with killing Merlyn, but not without attracting attention from the others. He wondered if he could kill Thawne—whatever the hell he was—but it wasn't worth the risk of going at it alone. He'd seen how the man killed and if it Dhark caught him…
He left them all behind and breathed an apology to Sara for her sister.
Finding Mick was harder than it should have been. He could feel the dreamscape brushing against his fingers, but he couldn't grab hold of it. It was like when he'd been a child and trying to learn the skill; clumsy and crude. Mick woke up before he could manage it.
It took him a month of practicing on the dingy inn's patrons before he was able to take hold of Mick's dreamscape.
It had changed again when he opened his eyes, turned into the last safe house they'd been living in before they left on the Waverider. It was darker than it used to be, but he saw Mick hunched over on the couch and he let out a sigh of relief.
"Mick."
Mick's head shot up, eyes wide, and he darted forward.
The punch hit him before the hug, Mick's arms wrapped tight around him.
"You fucking idiot," Mick muttered into his neck.
Len huffed softly and smiled around the aching jaw. "Debatable."
"Bullshit." Mick pulled back, hands still clasped tightly on Len's shoulders. "What the fuck happened?"
"No time," he murmured as the warehouse wavered around him. "I can't keep this up much longer. Come pick me up."
"Where?"
"Wales, I think. They like their vowels too much," he said dryly. "Tell Gideon to search for a gem theft. Countryside."
Mick snorted. "You get bored?"
He smirked, wiggled his fingers at his partner, and let the dream end.
The reunion was more dramatic than it needed to be. Ray cried and hugged him too tight. Sara kissed his cheek and called him an ass. Jax hugged him—which wasn't all that surprising—but Rip and Stein did too—which was weird. Amaya shook his hand and cast a smile towards Mick. Nate didn't stop talking.
Mick kissed him and everyone went quiet.
"You're still a fucking idiot," Mick said when he pulled away. "I married a fucking idiot."
"Because you thought I was dreamy."
"Len."
His lips curved up into a smirk. "I'm not the man of your dreams?"
"I'm going to kill you."
The End