Author's Note: Late response for the FiccingCaptainCanary prompt, "Small Spaces," and a follow up to my S1 missing moment story, "White Lies." Another missing moment, this takes place during S1 episode 1x5, Fail-Safe. I meant for this to be a one-shot, but I got a bit carried away with the idea - so look forward to chapter 2 of this coming soon. Thanks so much to Crazygirlne and ClaudiaRain for all your encouragement on this and for listening to me rant and tease about it for literally weeks. You're the best! Hope you guys enjoy it.
You play better in your sleep.
Or at least, according to the handwritten note Leonard left tucked under Sara's pillow. It was the first thing she saw when she woke that morning – the words, and the man who wrote them, the first things on her mind.
Eyes still heavy with sleep, she smiled, her last memories of the night before pooling up into her consciousness.
"Am I that boring?" he'd asked, as she nodded off.
"Winning's too easy," she'd slurred, her cards falling to the bed.
"You lost the last three hands."
"Gotta…feed your…ego," she'd sighed, before the darkness pulled her under.
She turned his note over in her hand, glad they'd been in her room. He must've left and –
And she froze, her stomach dropping as she realized just how completely she'd let her guard down, with him.
The fact that she'd slept at all was incredible enough. She barely slept lately, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd fallen asleep in front of someone. Laurel, maybe, right after her resurrection, in those days when sleep had been a welcome relief from the bloodlust. How quickly that relief had faded.
You play better in your sleep.
She dropped the note to the floor, groaning as she rubbed her hands over her face. In the League, Nyssa was the only person she'd ever slept in front of. She wracked her brain, trying to remember anyone else, realizing that in years, she could count on one hand the number of people she'd trusted that much – Ollie, Sin, Nyssa, Laurel –
And now, Leonard.
Leonard.
Of all people.
They'd spent the past two days together, what with Rip busy trying to identify the gulag where Stein, Ray and Mick were being held. Jax had been relegated to the med bay with some kind of sympathy torture sickness. Tensions were still high between Sara and Kendra since their failed training session, and they'd been avoiding each other.
That left Leonard. He was struggling, she knew, furious with Rip for putting him in a position where he was forced to leave his partner behind. She didn't blame him. She'd seen enough of Mick and Leonard together to know how much they meant to each other. They reminded her of how she was with Laurel, really. They had their disagreements, sure, they got on each other's nerves. But at the end of the day, she'd be hard pressed to think of anyone more important in her life, and she knew that if it were Laurel in that gulag, she'd be handling it much worse than Leonard was.
So, she'd taken it upon herself to distract him. With cards, of course.
And with cards, had come flirting – harmless, she told herself, and talking. With talking, had come sharing, too much, apparently, and his note was a brutal reminder that she was letting him in, and far too quickly for someone she couldn't risk letting in at all.
It was bad enough that she'd been relieved when he was the one who made it back from the mission that had left three of their own imprisoned. She hadn't even known it was happening, so it was even worse that when Kendra said, "They've been captured," her heart had dropped as her mind turned immediately to him.
You play better in your sleep.
The words haunted her through the day.
She tried to ignore them, especially through their planning with Rip, but they were practically screaming in her head when Leonard leaned in close, breaking into her space as he was becoming more and more fond of doing.
By the time she had the chance to work out her frustrations on a few Russian goons, she'd already resolved to put as much distance as she could between them. Once they had Mick back, she knew it would be easier – the less time they spent alone, the better. She just had to get through this mission, and then he'd be safe from her, and she…she would be safer without him.
It was a great plan. Flawless. For all of about ten minutes, it worked.
Then they got locked in that closet in the Russian banya – or bathhouse, sauna, steam room – basically, all synonyms for damn hot.
Alone.
"It's stuck."
Sara jostled the door again. It was useless, without any handle on the inside. She kicked it in disgust, then turned to Leonard, glaring at him. "This is all your fault."
It wasn't really, she knew that. If it was anyone's fault, it was Rip's, like always. He was the one who left them to investigate an unusual noise while he went off to bargain with Yuri the Bear. The most she could blame Leonard for was following her so closely that they were both in the closet when the door swung shut, trapping them inside.
"Yes," Leonard drawled, "because all I wanted was a good steam."
Sara crossed her arms, leaning as far back against the wall as she could. There was maybe two feet between them – if that – and it was all the personal space they were going to get.
She fought back a sigh. The tension was bad enough while they played cards, with more than twice as much space to work with. This closet was barely bigger than a shower, and not the kind with a tub, either. In fact, now that she was thinking about it, she was certain she'd had sex in showers bigger than this.
But it wasn't a shower. And they weren't about to have sex. Even if he was looking at her like it.
"It's gotta be like a hundred degrees in here," she complained, not that thinking of the heat much improved her previous train of thought.
Making the tight space feel even tighter, one corner was crowded with a pile of towels. Unfortunately, they looked just as likely to be dirty as clean, as tempting as they were compared to the leather that was already sticking uncomfortably to her body. She glanced up, searching for the source of soft orange light that was filling the space. There was an opening at the ceiling, connecting the closet to the rest of the complex. At least they'd have a steady air supply, she thought – even if it was letting the steam in, too.
"It's more like a hundred-fifteen degrees," Leonard said, casually studying his nails. "At two hundred percent humidity."
Easy for him to say it like it was boring. He was the one wearing a robe.
"And you know this how?" she snapped.
"It's important to know all the facts before you go in on a job, Lance."
"Yeah?" She crossed her arms. "How about the fact that we're gonna die of heat stroke if we don't get out of here?"
"Oh, we'll be found long before that happens," he replied, easily. "Isn't the idea of getting caught so exciting?"
She rolled her eyes, resisting the urge to draw one of her daggers on him. Judging by the way his mouth twitched in response – faint hint of his trademark smirk playing at his lips – he'd read her thoughts exactly. It was infuriating how much pleasure he took at the idea of being skewered.
"Rip'll be back in a minute," she said, refusing to be needled.
"Mhm," he hummed, sarcastically. "Funny, how easily he got rid of us. Guess we couldn't be trusted in his negotiations. So why bother coming back for us?"
His words sent a trail of unease running down her back.
"He wouldn't leave us on purpose," she argued.
He shrugged. "You're right, he probably got himself killed without us around to protect him."
"He needs us," she insisted, even as she remembered how Rip had left her out of the last mission entirely.
"Oh yes," Leonard drawled. "Killer and klepto. How would the 'team' survive without us around to do all the dirty work?"
She grimaced, his words leaving her cold despite the oppressive heat. "I told you. I'm done killing."
He paused, pinning her with a knowing stare. "Don't think he won't ask you to again."
She looked down at that, stomach twisting uncomfortably. She didn't want to believe it, but he was probably right. Sara knew she was only good at one thing, and it was the only reason Rip had recruited her in the first place:
She was a killer.
As much as she wanted, she wasn't sure she could ever be anything else.
They lapsed into silence, Sara losing herself in the dark thoughts. The longer they stood, the more the heat pressed down on her, seeping into every pore and stifling her every breath.
"Are you plotting something, I hope?" she asked, eventually. They hadn't been waiting long, yet, but she was already way past uncomfortable, and she hadn't been kidding about the death-by-heatstroke thing. In these temperatures, she really wasn't sure how long they'd last.
Leonard took a deep breath at her words, as if they'd drawn him out of his own haze. As cool as he always seemed, he'd been in the banya for longer than her when they got locked in, and he had to be feeling it now.
"No," he said, the word falling out in a sigh, "just replaying the memory of Yuri the Bear beating on Rip. Over, and over, and over. Wish you could've seen it."
"Seriously, Len?" She couldn't keep the frustration from her voice. "This is not the time. We need to find a way out of here."
He scowled. "There is no way out of here," he insisted, growing agitated himself. "My partner is out there, locked in a gulag, being tortured and maybe murdered. You think I wanna be in here?" He shook his head. "No."
Sara softened at that, forcing herself to take a deep breath despite the stickiness of the air.
"I get how much Rory means to you," she said, calmly. "We're gonna get him out. And Stein, and Ray."
"Don't care about them," he snapped. "My priority is Mick."
Sara dropped her head back against the wall behind her, stifling a groan. Of course Snart didn't care about the rest of the team.
"Well," she started, returning to the problem at hand, "we can't do anything for anyone stuck in here."
He nodded, slowly. "Alright," he agreed. "Let's worry about us first."
She bristled, glaring at him. Did he have to turn everything into an innuendo? It was probably best to ignore it and not feed his desire to tease her – and yet…
You play better in your sleep.
If he was even a little serious, she needed to squash this – right here, right now.
She made sure to put as much conviction as threat into her words when she replied, "Don't say it like that."
He merely lifted an eyebrow.
"There is no 'us,'" she clarified. "It's just me…" she paused, putting her hand to her chest, "and you." She pointed at him. "Not, 'me and you.'" She swatted at the air between them. "Got it?"
"I'm starting to."
A devilish smile played at his lips, and she had a sneaking suspicion that she'd just made everything worse.
For a while, they just stood, arms crossed and watching each other.
"Stop it," she said, finally.
"What?" The way he said it, the word dropping from his mouth like it was hardly a question at all, proved that he knew exactly "what."
She was seething by the time she could answer. "Looking at me."
He titled his head, eyes wide in mock innocence. "There's nothing else to look at."
That much was true, she supposed – not that she needed the reminder that there were less than two feet between them, at best, and the walls were closing in every second.
"Well then stop looking at me like that."
"Like what?" he challenged. "You're the one undressing me with your eyes."
She put a hand on her hip, wincing when her elbow scraped the wall.
"You wish," she spat.
"Are you sure it's just me who's wishing?" he said, words thick with suggestion. Then he sighed, rolling his shoulders and wiping sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. "Right now, all I wish is to get out of this heat." He glared up at the ceiling, as though the steam rolling down on them had personally offended him. "But I'm sure we could find a few ways to pass the time, if you're interested."
She rolled her eyes, choosing to ignore the suggestion, even if she was, she could admit to herself, just the teeniest bit interested. That was exactly why they couldn't go there.
"Why does the Russian mob hold meetings in a steam room anyway?" she asked, avoiding a direct response.
"It's pretty simple, really," he started, taking her subject change in stride. "It's a test," he continued. "You, and your potential business partner, are both exposed. Vulnerable." He paused. "The banya is all about learning who can be trusted," he said. Then he met her eyes, and even through the steam, the blueness of them made her breath catch. "Tell me, Lance," his eyes stayed on hers, dark and startling in their intensity, "do you trust me?"
It took her a moment to register the question, a moment for her to wrench her eyes away from his long enough to realize what he'd asked.
'Bout as far as I can throw you, was what she wanted to say. The retort was on the tip of her tongue, ready to be thrown out dismissively when it hit her like a punch to the gut – it wasn't true.
You play better in your sleep.
He'd never have had the chance to leave that note if she weren't, at least on some level, starting to trust him. It was incredible, ridiculous, unfathomable – after she'd died, she hadn't thought she'd ever be able to trust anyone again, besides maybe her sister. But then...
The words died in her throat.
"Do you trust me?" she countered, instead, shifting uncomfortably.
"With my life," he replied, easily. Like it was nothing.
She scoffed, telling herself it was smoke and mirrors, just another lie to get under her skin. But then he raised his eyebrows at her, and she had a sinking feeling that he was telling the truth.
"Why?"
Even more absurd than her trusting him was the thought that he would return it. She was a killer. He knew that. He knew what she could do. So why –
He paused, looking down as he considered. "I don't know."
He said it with such sincerity, so rare on him, that she had to believe him. He trusted her without knowing why and she trusted him, without even asking herself why.
And she had to get out of here.
"You shouldn't," she warned him.
"I'll be the judge of that," he replied, smoothly.
"Then you're a lousy judge."
He just shrugged, effectively ending the conversation, and they slipped into another uneasy silence. Sara wasn't sure how long they'd been locked in, but judging by the pounding in her head, already too long.
The steam was everywhere, pushing beads of sweat down her forehead and water particles down her throat. She was drowning, she realized, slowly, in the heat, in the humidity, in Leonard – she avoided looking at him at the thought – because she could not, would not, be tempted. No.
"Aren't you hot?" she asked, finally, when she couldn't stand it another second.
"A little chilly, actually," he snarked, wrapping his robe tighter around him.
She sighed, wiping vainly at the sweat covering her arms. Her legs were screaming at her, sticky and sweltering in her leather. And it didn't matter what it might or might not do to him. She had to get out of this suit.
"You might be fine, but I'm not," she said, turning to loosen the strap at her neck and eyeing him for a reaction. "Do you mind?"
He gave her only the slightest twitch of an eyebrow and sweep of his hand in agreement. "Be my guest."
She nodded, forcing herself to stop fussing with the neck piece, despite how desperate she was to get it off, and deciding to start with her boots instead. She supposed it made more sense given she had nothing else to cover herself with and a far too attractive man watching her every move.
She bent over as much as she could to get at the laces, trying to ignore the sight of Snart's feet and hint of legs as she came eye-level with them, trying even harder to ignore her imagination filling in what the rest of him might look like.
She stood abruptly, kicking one boot off, then the other, pushing them to the side with her now blissfully bare foot. Slowly, she relieved herself of her belt, watching Leonard's impassive expression for any break, dropping it to the ground with a heavy plunk. He held until she fished out her loose weapons, letting each follow the next to the growing heap on the floor. That was when his eyebrows raised – grudging admission of admiration – and she had to bite back a smile.
By the time she had her last knife in hand, twirling it absently, she found her eyes moving between the pile of towels (who knew how many sweaty, smelly men had used them before her, or when they were last washed) and the hem of Leonard's robe.
It was an easy choice, really.
The only warning she gave him was a wicked grin, before she went at him with her knife.
"What's happening?" he asked, just the slightest hint of panic in his voice, and she took maybe a little too much satisfaction at the way he pushed himself back into the corner. Still, he didn't flinch at her approach.
"Just borrowing this," she said, mildly, grabbing the loose edge of the robe and cutting it in one swift motion, ripping off a swath of fabric about large enough for her chest.
"That's stealing," Leonard corrected, but her grin only widened as she held up her spoils.
"What do they call a thief of thieves, hm?" she wondered, eyeing Leonard's exposed calves before dropping the knife and turning to face the wall.
"A rogue," Leonard suggested, annoyance directed at her back.
Sara smirked to herself, releasing her neck strap finally, and pulling her corset loose.
"'Seductress' might also apply," he added, lightly, as she tugged the front piece away. She breathed out, swallowing a sigh of relief.
"That would imply there's someone around for me to seduce," she replied, rolling her shoulders before tying the piece of robe around herself like a bandeau.
"You're certainly welcome to try."
Sara's hands hesitated at her waist as she decided on her next move. Her legs were begging for freedom from the leather, and it wasn't like she had any quibbles with modesty. And yet…
You play better in your sleep.
She was supposed to be putting a stop to – well – whatever this was between them. Undressing in front of him was about the opposite of that.
But she had to do something if she wanted to stay conscious. She was already swaying on the spot, and she had to throw out a hand to brace herself on the stone wall. Really, she had no choice.
It left her feeling both pleased and regretful that she'd chosen to wear red lace under her suit today.
She turned around, leaning back against the wall for support and meeting Leonard's eyes.
"This is not an invitation," she warned.
"Course not," he replied, seriously, although his eyes said something a little more mischievous.
She swallowed, tugging at her waistband, never letting her eyes leave his, lest he get any ideas. To his credit, his gaze didn't waver, not even as she slid the pants over her hips, not even when she bent to tug them off leg by leg. After that, she couldn't say – she lost herself in an audible moan, too overwhelmed by the relief of her exposed skin.
Her body sang with contentment as she stretched, lifting up onto her tip toes and raising her arms above her head as high as they would go. And maybe that little white strip of fabric stretched with her, letting more of her skin breathe. So what? Snart could deal. When she released the stretch, she gauged his reaction, feeling a little more smug than she had a moment before.
She decided she'd never get tired of that look on his face. It was something like surprise, mixed with respect, and a healthy dose of desire. She tried not to enjoy it. She failed.
"Now what?" he asked, several lingering moments later.
"I guess we just wait, and try not to die."
"In a steam room," he added, running a hand over his face. "This is ridiculous."
"Well," she said, "there are worse ways to go."
He inclined his head to her in agreement. It was brief, but she still felt it the moment his eyes finally trailed over her body, leaving goosebumps in their wake.
His voice was rough when he responded. "There certainly are."
