Hey.
So this is it: final chapter. I had plans of getting this done sooner but I got a little distracted.
I would like to thank everyone who has read this, favorited, followed and given me very precious feedback. I have written in a lot of fandoms for a lot of ships but there is no other community that is as warm and kind as the Captain Canary one. Thank you so much, you guys.
I hope this chapter makes up for all the angst of the previous chapters. Enjoy!
First, Sara has a headache, a crippling pain that forces her to collapse onto the floor of the Waverider. She feels her memories being toyed with, being arranged and rearranged, flung across her mind carelessly and she almost screams because it hurts too much. And then the ache is gone, the biting pain being replaced by a dull steady throb, a reminder that something has changed.
"Gideon?" she manages.
"Miss Lance?"
"Did something happen to-"
Then, the ship trembles violently, rocking unsteadily in the time stream.
Sara is thrown against a wall, and she barely manages to hold on till the ship finally steadies.
"What the hell was that, Gideon?" she groans.
"It was a time aberration, I'm afraid, Miss Lance. Something has happened that has wreaked havoc in the time stream.
Shit.
Sara begins to panic at that. She knows what is wrong, knows it a little too well.
Her head still throbs dully and she is beginning to figure out everything slowly, every piece of the jigsaw finally fitting when the speakers built into the walls of her room almost explodes with their Captain's voice, "Team meeting in the bridge, right now!"
She is the last to arrive because she walks with deliberately slow steps.
She knows what has happened and she cannot even bring herself to think of what they will have to do next to fix a mess that she created because she couldn't help but whisper a few words to a man with the hope that it would save the crook she had started to fall in love with.
So much for that plan.
For all she knows, her next mission might just be to ensure that Leonard blows himself up along with the Time Masters, because from what she can understand, that event has been thwarted which has resulted in this aberration.
She does not believe she can live through that again.
There is already excited chattering going on when she enters the bridge.
"So what exactly are you telling us, Gideon?" Rip asks impatiently as the team stands in a circle around the hologram of the artificial intelligence.
"It appears that even though the Oculus has been destroyed, it hasn't had the same effects on time, due to which we felt that tremor."
How?
Sara is thoroughly confused by now. This isn't what she was expecting: if her actions had indeed made a change and she is sure they did, because her memories are messed up right now, the Oculus should still exist.
"What kind of effects are we talking about?" Martin questions.
"I'm unable to fully comprehend the aftermath at the moment," Gideon replies. "I have very limited access to the time stream and it will take me more time to survey the timeline and detect changes."
"So what can we do now?" Ray asks.
"We can try to figure out the source of this aberration," Rip says. "While Gideon scouts the timeline for changes, we manually look for events that could have led to this."
"Can't your genius computer do two things at a time?" Mick grumbles from the sidelines.
"Technically, I am a supercomputer, Mr. Rory," Gideon instantly replies before Rip can express his scorn and distaste. "And no, with the time stream in such a precarious position, I cannot run two programs with optimum efficiency."
Mick shrugs nonchalantly.
"Miss Lance, you have been awfully quiet," Martin suddenly notices.
"I..." Sara flounders for words.
She had not realized how odd it must have seemed to the rest of the team to see her not participating in the discussion; she had been lost in her own world, trying to make sense of it all.
"Do you have something to tell us that we don't know?" Rip suddenly asks, scrutinizing her.
Damn.
She knows she has to tell them whatever she suspects: her time jumps and encounters with Leonard had resulted in this aberration.
"Actually, yes," she finally says, her heart beating inexplicably fast in her chest. She feels her breathing hike as everyone shifts their attention to her. "I think this has something to do with Leonard."
But before she can tell her team what she believes has caused the aberration, she collapses onto the floor, senseless.
It's her memories swimming around in her head that make her collapse.
Sara no longer remembers kissing Leonard Snart while he had his hand firmly inside a killing machine. She doesn't remember that desperate final kiss of death. In fact, she realizes, she is starting to forget ever being there in the first place.
What she remembers though is kissing Leonard within the safe walls of the Waverider, the slow yet assured brushing of their lips, the idiotic grins that had spread across both their faces.
She must be going mad.
But then another memory hits her and she feels herself reeling: a fading figure running behind her with the cold gun in his hand just as the Oculus exploded in the background.
She wakes up in the med bay a little while later, the entire team surrounding her.
She feels like a spectacle and she hates it.
"How are you feeling, Sara?" Martin asks her.
"Just great," she mumbles, attempting to sit up a little straighter.
She can feel the expectant gazes burning into her, the silent questions in them weighing her down.
"You said something about Leonard before passing out," Mick is the first one to voice everyone's thoughts.
"Jesus, Mick, she just woke up," Ray gasps.
"Nah, I'm fine," Sara dismisses his concern.
There is a pause, one beat of silence, till Rip assumes control. "Why do you believe this has something to do with Mr. Snart?"
"It's hard to explain," Sara sighs. "I... I just know. You have got to trust me on this."
No one looks convinced so she continues, "Before the tremor today, I had this headache. I passed out because of that. And ever since that, I have been remembering certain things and forgetting other things. It's like my memories have been rewritten."
Rip's expression clears, realization dawning upon him.
"Gideon!" he says hurriedly. "I need you to run a biometric scan through the entirety of time and throw up results that match with Mr. Snart's."
"You have got to be kidding me," Jax gasps as Gideon displays five men looking exactly like Leonard on the screen.
"What is this?" Mick asks, clearly surprised.
Sara hasn't been able to get a single word out. She has been staring at the screen, in numb disbelief.
"It's something called time scattering," Rip finally says, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Now I have never seen anything like this ever happen before but theoretically, this occurs when time undergoes a change that it does not want to-"
"Time wants things?" Ray wonders aloud, evidently impressed.
"In a way of speaking, yes," Rip explains. "And it scatters the source of that unwanted change throughout itself to perhaps save itself from further damage."
"So let me get this straight," Jax says. "Time changed and Snart changed it, so he has been hacked off into different parts and scattered throughout time as a form of punishment?"
"That's one way of looking at it, yes," Rip ascertains.
"Fascinating," Martin gasps.
"But what did he do to change time?" Jax asks.
"Oh, the Oculus!" Ray says excitedly but slows down almost immediately. "But we stopped Sara from telling him about it. He couldn't possibly know."
"Yes, about that, I'm hoping Miss Lance can answer a few questions for us," Rip says, giving her a meaningful glance.
"What?" Sara asks, genuinely confused.
"The last time we jumped to Central City, 2015, did you tell Mr. Snart about the Oculus?" Rip asks, a shadow of a doubt lingering in his voice.
"What? No!" Sara exclaims in disbelief.
"Then how do you explain whatever has happened?" Now there is accusation in his voice and Sara detests it.
"I don't know! You're the captain of a time ship, aren't you supposed to know?" she spits out.
She hates herself the moment the words leave her mouth and tries to salvage the situation; Rip may be annoying but he has good intentions. "Why don't we get all these Leonard aberrations on board and ask them what happened?"
Sara knows there will be another person on this ship who will be affected by the turn of these events just as bad as her, perhaps a little worse.
She wanders through the ship till she finds him.
"You okay?" she asks.
"Just fine," he replies gruffly as he torches a few empty bottles with the heat gun.
"I have been having these flashes of memories, Mick and they seem too... real," she tells him.
He glances at her uncomfortably, unsure of where this is going.
"I can't tell the others because they probably think I'm either crazy or I'm lying," she confesses.
She has noticed the shift in everyone's demeanor ever since that confrontation with Rip on the bridge. She doesn't blame them completely either.
"What is it, blondie?"
"I remember Leonard running behind me as I boarded the ship while the Oculus exploded."
"You mean you don't remember leaving him behind?"
"No," she whispers.
"Maybe this is something you want to believe," Mick tells her sagely, almost surprising her.
There is a pause and then he continues, "I saw Leonard for a few days after the Oculus. It's normal to wish for things that could have happened but didn't."
Sara sighs.
"Thanks, Mick."
"Not a problem, blondie."
Their first stop is the year 3167 where despite the virtual extinction of criminals thanks to strict laws and advanced technology, time scattered Leonard Snart has managed to set up a lavish empire on the strength of stolen goods.
"We do it my way this time," Rip says, waving what Sara recognizes as the instrument that knocked her out in a long forgotten time in Tibet.
"Look look, it's the kidnapping gun," Mick says drily.
"Where to, next?" Sara asks tiredly as Ray carries the unconscious Leonard from 3167 into the Waverider.
"The roaring 20's," Rip says, without any humor in his voice. "It appears Mr. Snart has been pulling the strings in the notorious razor wars down under."
They continue till they pick up all five of the time scattered Leonards.
The third Leonard had ensconced himself in the ancient Roman empire, as a much respected architect, much to the team's surprise.
Their next stop is the Middle Ages and Leonard is rescued from a dungeon he had been locked in for stealing from a knight.
Their quest ends in a pirate ship as they take Buccaneer Leonard hostage.
"What do we do now?" Ray asks as the team stares clueless at the different Leonards.
"We coalesce these fragments of Mr. Snart," Rip says proudly.
"No way!"
"You can't do that!"
"Gideon?" Rip calls out. "Time for a few miracles."
It is a miracle indeed.
Sara watches in fear and amazement and joy as a beam of light falls on the different versions of Leonard followed by a blinding burst of energy followed by the appearance of one Leonard.
Still unconscious but alive.
She gasps and has to take measured breaths to keep herself functioning.
"I'll pretend like that wasn't weird," Jax mutters.
And she finds herself laughing at that, uncontrollably and senselessly.
She doesn't leave the room till he wakes up; she has abandoned him too many times before.
Mick stays with her too but they hardly talk: simply sit there waiting for the man they had believed was gone forever to wake up and somehow lessen the pain of both their existences.
"What the hell am I wearing?"
Her head snaps up at his voice, her eyes immediately meeting his in one clear moment of absolute happiness, till he tears his gaze away to absorb the surroundings.
"Your time apparition was a pirate," Mick tells him. "So that's what you are wearing."
"My time- what?"
"He means, aberration," Sara says, fighting hard to keep the tremble from her voice.
He regards her with a long glance this time, observing her keenly and reverentially and then he drawls, "Sara, that black wig back in 2015 didn't really suit you."
It's another team meeting in the bridge.
"I already knew that the Oculus had a failsafe," Leonard tells everyone. "So I went in with some preparation."
"Why didn't you tell the rest of us?" it's a sincere question from Rip.
"What was I supposed to say? I suddenly have psychic powers and know your former bosses are not complete idiots."
"Not in those words, maybe," Rip mutters. "Please continue."
He continues with a self satisfied grin on his face, "So I took a few handy devices because I had no idea how the failsafe worked-"
He gives her a meaningful glance.
A little more information would have helped.
She nods.
Shut up, asshole. I saved your life.
Everyone else is oblivious to this little exchange and Leonard picks up where he left off, "Turns out it was the most standard of all systems so I put my device in place so that the failsafe wouldn't connect and then I escaped that freak show. But then there was a blackout and I don't remember anything after that."
"Wait, what device are we talking about?" Ray asks.
"A handy substitute for a... hand," Leonard rolls his eyes. "It's what I use to hold things in place on a heist."
"And why don't I know of this device?"
"Because you are not a thief, Raymond," Leonard drawls.
"Okay," Rip interrupts. "But how did you know the Oculus has a failsafe in the first place?"
"I'm a little confused about that too. I had these flashes of being on this ship, and I remembered Sara telling me that the Oculus had a failsafe."
"That's impossible," Rip gasps. "We stopped that from happening."
"You still want to call things impossible after merging five human beings into one?" Jax quips.
"Touché," Rip shakes his head.
They manage to find an empty room at long last.
They look at each other for the longest of time in silence, simply marveling each other and wondering how they have managed this second chance.
Neither knows who moves first but suddenly Sara is pinned against a wall, Leonard's lips pressed firmly against her: messy and desperate. It's rough and exactly what they need.
"I thought I lost you," she gasps into his mouth.
"I'm sorry," the words are genuine and they make her heart swell.
Their lips connect again with renewed ferocity and before long they find their clothes discarded, leaving two broken souls trying to fix each other.
She wakes up before he does but just as she is about to leave the bed, a strong pair of hands holds her back.
"Don't go," he whispers.
She doesn't.
"Miss Lance?" Gideon tells her much later, when she is alone in her quarters.
"Yes?"
"Can I tell you something?" Sara swears she hears hesitation in the artificial intelligence's voice.
"Of course."
"I presumed you wouldn't want the entire team to know this so I decided to inform you in private."
"Should I be worried, Gideon?"
"Of course not."
"Okay," Sara says unsurely.
"I was running a few tests on Mr. Snart when I noticed something... peculiar. It appears your kiss acted as a trigger of sorts for his memory."
"What?" Sara almost chokes on her breath.
"The first time you warned him of the Oculus was preceded by a kiss. And although we successfully rewrote those memories, your kiss before the ship landed at the Vanishing Point jogged back those memories," Gideon explains.
Sara does not know how to reply. She wants to laugh, because this is hilarious, but is unsure if that would be the appropriate response.
But Gideon continues, "A lot like true love's kiss."
And this time, Sara bursts into laughter and doesn't stop for a good ten minutes.
