" 'Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,' she returned. …"
"At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and (he) sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be."
- Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol"
...
Mick … and Rip, when they arrive at the Vanishing Point … presume this impromptu trip has to do with the Oculus, and honestly, they're not wrong.
Rip wants to know what's going on. (Len ignores him. He's not in the mood to deal with the Time Master right now.) Mick just watches him with those narrowed eyes, and honestly, that has more of an effect. But he can't bring himself, right now, to explain his inner turmoil to his friend – although, if he's being fair, the other man (who has, after all, gone from crook to Chronos to a bit of a Time Master in his own right) would probably understand more than even Sara would.
This is his own dilemma. This is his own crisis. He needs to come out the other side, one way or another, on his own.
The presence in the chamber brightens … he really doesn't have another word for it … as he strolls in and leans against the wall, taking a deep breath.
He sends that presence … call it the Oculus, call it a manifestation of the Time Force, whatever … a wordless greeting, which is enthusiastically returned, and then followed by the clear feeling of a question. It's getting better at communication, he thinks.
He composes his thoughts very carefully, then shapes a query:
The choices I've made, the road I'm on, the path I'll go down… do they make any difference at all?
It hangs in the silence a moment.
Then, the Oculus, showing a bit more attitude than he'd have given it credit for, sends him an image of the wellspring – not as it is now, slowly growing, but in the original Vanishing Point, right before he blew it all to hell.
You think? is its wordless commentary.
Go figure. It's a smartass. How Sara would laugh.
I know that, he sends back, acerbically. It's just …
How can he say it?
In the end, he just sends it his feelings of frustration, of anger … and to be fair, his satisfaction at certain elements of his new life and his love for Sara. He pours it out, and the images before him slow their ceaseless spinning, slowly change as it seems to consider …
And then, light.
When his vision clears, he's standing on the front steps of a familiar house. There's a layer of snow, just a few inches, on the ground, and Christmas lights on many of the houses around it … but not here. He's only able to register where he is when he hears the cry of a young, female voice echo from inside.
Lisa.
He surges up the steps, but when he grabs for the door, his hand passes right through it. He's prepared for another try when something, someone, tugs at his arm. He looks down and sees … Lisa. At about 5 years old, hair in ponytails, wearing that damned pink, glittery shirt she liked so much.
Her eyes are all blue light.
Ah.
The Oculus-as-sister looks up at him, then grabs his sleeve and walks right through the door. With a deep breath, he follows.
What he sees makes his heart plummet.
He still remembers this night. The combination of Lisa chattering about Christmas and bouncing around the house – especially when he knows there won't be much of a holiday, although he's stowed a few small things away for her – has done something he'll later regret. It's driven him upstairs to his room, where, he knows, he's listening to music and contemplating asking this other kid he'd met in juvie if he wants to go into … business. He already knows he'd be muchbetter at it than his dad.
That was Mick, he recalls, briefly.
He's still not sure what happened, just that she'd spilled their father's beer, apparently the last one in the house. An accident, a product of childhood clumsiness and rare high spirits. Now, he gets a glimpse at what he'd missed. She's trying to mop it up, tears pouring down her face. Lewis is standing over her, and his face is getting redder and redder as he screams, taking out years of frustrations and rage on one small girl.
Lewis doesn't really look human as he lifts the empty bottle, brings it down on the table, sending splinters of glass everywhere. A few of them hit Lisa and she flinches, staring at him with wide eyes, but still, somehow, innocent enough that it doesn't occur to her, yet, to run as he lifts the bottle back into the air.
Then his teenage self thunders down the stairs, as much as that skinny stick of a kid can thunder. He makes it just in time to throw himself in front of her, raising his arms in front of himself in a defensive gesture. The jagged edge of the beer bottle comes down, hard, on his left forearm, and the blood gushes immediately.
Lisa screams. The scene grays out. The Oculus-Lisa looks at him soberly.
It was, really, a minor miracle that he hadn't bled out that night – if the knife had hit higher on the arm and then dragged down, he almost certainly could have - or that the tendons were undamaged enough that he still has a full range of movement in his fingers.
He'd had the presence of mind to grab the fistful of towels Lisa'd been using to try to clean up and stuff them against the wound before grabbing her and running, bundled arm jammed against his chest. The clinic, thank God, was only a few blocks away, and the tired and overworked personnel there had somehow believed his tale of accidentally bringing his arm down on a broken bottle … or, more likely, pretended they had. He sort of figures they think he might have done it to himself.
The movement in that hand is still touchy, once in a while, and it's a good thing he's right-handed. (He recalls thinking, which a touch of gallows humor, that it was a pity he didn't think to freeze that one that day on the jump ship.) And the scar is still a sight to behold, one of the reasons he doesn't wear short sleeves often if at all.
Still, it's an emblem of what couldhave happened, if he hadn't heard something through his headphones upstairs, and as such, a badge of dishonor, no matter what Sara says about his scars.
He looks back at the Oculus-Lisa … which slowly shakes its head and lifts a hand to splay its fingers across its chest.
"He'd have stabbed her?" It nods. He hesitates. "Would she have … made it?"
It just stares at him. That's answer enough, and he closes his eyes, sorrow and rage warring. No kid should have to deal with this crap. (And it wasn't the last time, either. When they returned "home," Lewis was passed out on the couch and never did acknowledge the incident. Probably didn't remember it. Len cleaned up the blood, one-handed.)
Light flares against his lids. When he opens his eyes, he's somewhere else.
A room. The rough feel of a warehouse, maybe, a cavernous space full of equipment and battered desks and tables. Tools and blueprints are spread on them
The man standing near the front is holding forth in pompous fashion to other half-dozen men in the room. He's sure of himself to a fault, you can hear it in his voice, and he waves his hands as if directing an odd sort of orchestra.
"… last transport before the holiday. It's going to be huge, and the guards will be thinking about their goddamned Christmas dinner and not their surroundings. And the square's going to be so full of people they won't want a fuss; we can flank 'em with no problem. And, hey, if they won't surrender, just pop 'em, then we can take the truck and get the hell outta there, people'll get outta the way …"
He remembers this night, too. Which means ...
"That's going to be a fuckin' disaster."
He knows the voice, knows the drawl, knows the studiously bored tone. It's his, after all.
The Leonard Snart who slouches against the desk in the back of the room is a much younger man – if he remembers correctly, half his current age. Early 20s and cocky with it, now out from under the thumb of his father. Still skinny, but finally with a little muscle, with dark, close-cropped hair that's only just starting to show a fleck or two of silver at the temples. (That started early. It's a longstanding joke between him and Lisa: She teases him about it and he blames her for it.)
Arkin - a two-bit petty thug, really, but one who likes to fancy himself a leader of the Central City criminal element and, as such, the sort a young up-and-coming crook has to edge around at first - stops mid-word, speechless.
"You go in there like that, really to start 'poppin' people," Leonard's younger self continues, the disdain thick in his voice, "this is going to turn into a clusterfuck so fast you won't even see it coming. There will be too many people around, too many witnesses; you gonna kill all of them? There's no real planhere."
Arkin's eyes narrow. "You some sorta bleeding heart, Snart?" he sneers, making the words sound like the worst of insults. "Not ready to run with this crowd? You're just here on sufferance, since Rory said you do good work. He didn't say you were soft."
But the younger Snart's voice stays cool. Cold, even.
"You want bleeding? People start bleeding, kids start crying, cops show up real quick: westart bleeding. Gloves will be off. No one gets outta there. That what you want?"
The others are murmuring now. He's making sense, the new guy, and they know it. They're not idiots, not really, just followers, and they're not particularly bad men. They don't want to be part of a bloodbath, and definitely not as the ones whose blood is shed.
Arkin is losing control, it's obvious, and things could go very wrong anyway as the anger flashes in his eyes and his fingers twitch. But Leonard Snart hasn't survived to this point in his life without knowing how to manage people with anger issues.
The older version watches his younger self's head tilt to the side in a rather familiar gesture, notes the flash of distaste and scorn in his eyes as he speaks up again.
"But you said it yourself," he adds. He's never been able to manage obsequious, but he does manage thoughtful. "The guards will probably be distracted. And they'll have to pay more attention because of the crowd in the downtown shopping district, too …"
No one, least of all their self-proclaimed mastermind, picks up on the gambit. The older Snart can almost see the internal sigh his younger self heaves before continuing. "… If we timed it right, we might be able to maneuver the armored car into a position where we could get in and out with none the wiser ..."
Arkin perks up again at that and with judicious interjections by his group's newest participant, they manage to hash out a bona fide plan. The man from years later remembers a heist that went off smoothly and cleanly, if with fewer proceeds than anticipated (because Arkin, who was supposed to be sure they were lifting the biggest transport of the day, didn't do his homework). But no one is caught, no blood shed … and within six months, the older man botches a solo heist and pulls a stint in Iron Heights, letting a younger, cleverer crook pick over the best of his people.
The scene grays out again, like the last one.
What on earth was he supposed to get from this?
"If I hadn't been stubborn, talked them out of it, came up with a better plan, what would have happened?" he says, suddenly, to his companion.
Oculus-Lisa blinks, then, out of nowhere, holds up a copy of a newspaper dated Dec. 25, 1994, one that the Central City Picture News never actually had to print.
"Fifteen dead in holiday massacre," screams the headline. The subhead notes that eight people, including several children, were mowed down by vehicles, while seven – including four suspects and a police officer – were killed in a firefight, but the paper is gone again before he can read more.
"I didn't really do it for humanitarian reasons," he tells it. "It just made sense."
It shrugs, ponytails bouncing, the gesture oddly eloquent.
Then: Light, again.
And he's outside the gulag.
She's there.
Sara.
Clad all in black, her bright hair confined, rifle up to her shoulder, ready to fire. Trained on Stein.
"Sara, don't do it."
He hears the voice, knows it for his own, not so many months younger. A man who's only starting to acknowledge he feels somethingfor one Sara Lance, who has no idea what to call it or do with it but knows, as sure as he knows anything in life, that shooting Martin Stein would breakher.
He'd come so close to not returning, to just following Mick out the door. Changed his mind, in part due to Mick's stubborn refusal to abandon Ray. How can he do less for someone … for … for Sara?
Nothing more than that, he told himself then. Consideration for a teammate … teammates, both Stein and Sara. Disrupting Rip's plan is always a fringe benefit, of course.
"That's how a killer thinks … and that's not you anymore."
She hesitates … and then concedes, bows her head. He's standing at another angle now, sees the anguish on her face, reaches out involuntarily ...
Everything grays out. Slowly, he pulls back his hand, turns to the Oculus.
"What would have happened? If she'd shot Stein?"
Its head tilts. He blinks as a rush of images flash through his mind's eye – Stein bloody on the ground; Sara, pale and stoic, avoiding him, the crook who had more of a conscience than she did, the man who knows what she's done. In 2046 Star City, she rages at Rip, refuses to listen, loses control and gives in to the bloodlust while he's off with Mick.
Dies again, lost in its depths, there in her devastated city. Another teammate down.
He loses track of the images then, too shocked to breathe, but they end with one common denominator: All of them, dead.
And Vandal Savage, ascendant, laughing.
Oh.
The shock of seeing Sara, watching that scene play out again in front of him, of seeing what would have come of her if he'd done one thing differently, makes his tone sharp.
"OK. Maybe I've done a decent thing or three, for whatever reason, during my life. But that doesn't mean what I'm doing … trying to do … now is going to mean jack shit."
It sighs. And light floods his vision again.