100 Days of Arrowverse 2017 Volume B: The Flash & Legends of Tomorrow

93 days until Supergirl - 94 days until Flash & Legends - 96 days until Arrow

"THE DEPTHS & THE HEIGHTS"
(Legends of Tomorrow: Sara Lance, part 1 of 5)

She didn't need to be up here at this hour. It might have felt pointless to even speak of night or day when flying aboard the Waverider, but eventually they had all developed this rhythm, and now it was night time on the Waverider, and as far as she knew, everyone slept, everyone but her. Sara Lance stood by her chair, the captain's chair, looking at all that stood just outside the ship. There had always been something about seeing it all, stretching as far as her eyes could see and beyond. Her mind was clear here, and with no voices, no noise but the ambient sounds of the Waverider, she would find herself nowhere as much as she did in this very spot.

She needed this, sometimes. Maybe she came off as having it all together most of the time, but if that was the case, then she was better at pretending than any of them realized.

What would her mind have looked like to the rest of her team, if it was through her thoughts they'd had to search instead of Rip's? Even she couldn't say for sure; all she knew was that it was a fairly safe bet that she didn't want them anywhere near it. She was their Captain now, they had appointed her, chosen her to lead them. If they hadn't done it, would she ever have offered herself up for it?

She was the captain. She had come up to sit in that chair after Rip had gone, they had almost accepted, for good. And then he'd come back if with certain adjustments, and he'd been believed lost in another way. But now they'd gotten him back, right of mind, all of it. He had been their captain. He had gone away, she had replaced him, and now he was back. What happened now? Did she step back? Should she? Or was this still her chair, her team to lead? Whatever doubt she might have had needed to be dealt with right here and now and not in the morning, when they'd be following Rip's information to track down Commander Steel and his piece of the Spear of Destiny.

If stepping back was the right thing to do, of course she would do it, with no amount of hesitation. She had always tried to do what was best for the team when that was what they had become. The last thing she wanted was for all of them to become distracted or divided by this situation. Now more than ever, they needed to keep moving forward.

It might well have been that the best thing to do would be to let the answer reveal itself as they all learned how to be a team that included their old captain gain before they could know what to do, but even if that was the case, then she couldn't let it pull focus away from what they had to do.

Gideon was quiet that night. At times that wasn't the case, but it was tonight, as though the artificial intelligence knew that this was a moment where she needed the silence. She sat down on her chair now, still looking ahead. She remembered the first time she'd settled into it, not even as captain yet. Was it odd to say that even then she had felt a connection to it? How connected could one feel to something that should have been so unlikely?

Nothing about her life seemed to say that this would be where she was headed, which might have been normal, because how many people were recruited to hop aboard a spaceship and travel through time? Even so… The dead girl, alive again but soulless, the assassin, the shipwrecked… Who would have pegged the girl who'd set foot on the Queen's Gambit for any kind of leadership position? Even as she'd spent her first days on this ship, she was as far from captain material as any one of them as far as she was concerned. In these silent nights, she had never felt as in need of this peaceful escape as she'd ever done. But by morning she would be captain again, ready to lead her team, maybe for the last time.

See you tomorrow in Volume A for Supergirl!