Author's note: New chapter :o) This weekend's going to be busy (my brother-in-law's getting married! I love weddings!), so I thought I'd post it now. 'Cause I'd like your opinion :o)

A bit of context before we go? The first time we see the Weather Wizard (aka. Mark Mardon) in the cartoons, it's in an episode of Superman: the Animated Series, where Supes and Flash have a race to determine who is the Fastest Man Alive. His brother Ben decides he's going too far when Mark threatens people with Ben's "weather wand" in order to get money, and leaves to call the police. Superman and Flash save him from a freak hail storm courtesy of his brother, and go stop Mark and put him in jail. Since the Weather Wizard we later see in JL and JLU seems to go from group to different group – eventually making the deadly mistake of siding with Grodd against Lex Luthor – and his brother is never mentioned again … Well. Here goes.

Disclaimer: I don't own anybody here except for Harry (but not his pub!) and Janet (although it's the brief mention of a Mrs. Snart in Flash and Substance that made me write her – see Wife for details :o) Come to think of it, though, that weather wand would be quite handy … If such a thing existed :P

Everybody Comes To Harry's

FAMILY MATTERS

Rain was falling – no – pouring on the windows of the bar. Lost in his own personal foggy mist of alcohol, Mark Mardon idly wondered whether people noticed the gloriously multicoloured sunset just across the street.

He could correct the anomaly if he wanted. But right now, he really didn't give a damn about it.

He didn't even marvel at the way the weather wand worked. Not anymore.

Mark Mardon had never been one to marvel, anyway. He'd left that to Ben.

And now Ben was dead.

Mark took another large gulp. The liquid burned his tongue and rekindled the fire in his throat. No, not good enough. He could still feel. He still couldn't forget the dead eyes of his brother staring at him, accusing and scared and shocked and sad…

Mark emptied his glass in one gulp and wordlessly pushed it in front of him for Harry to fill it. The barkeep – and owner – was known to be one of the most accommodating of his profession, never asking unwanted questions and as reliable as can be. But this time there was something in his eyes as he picked up Mark's glass.

"I'm not in the habit of judging customers," he said quietly. "But I'm not sure you should –"

Mark's hollow stare went right through him, and he backed up slightly, almost flinching.

"I got money."

"That's not what I mean."

"Fill it up."

Harry didn't move an inch for a little while. Mark looked at him – really looked at him, leaving aside the aimless see-through gaze – and he sighed, then picked up a bottle under the bar.

"Customer's always right," he muttered, disapproval underlying his tone. Mark shrugged.

Another gulp. Ben's eyes still stared at him in his mind.

If it hadn't been for that damn lightning storm… If he hadn't tried to grab the wand… If Mark hadn't grabbed it first… Then maybe…

It wasn't like they hadn't had fallouts before. Mark almost snickered at that. Ben had had a hand – a pretty damn big hand, at that – in landing him to jail in the first place. Hell, Mark had even tried to kill him back then, when Ben had bailed out in his car to sic the cops on his own brother. But… This was different. He hadn't been looking at his brother that day as he unleashed a hail storm on his car. He hadn't seen the face he knew since he was three years old contort in terror and denial and shock. He hadn't heard him screaming.

It hadn't felt real.

Not like last night had felt, when the lightning struck.

All Ben had to do was to hand over the weather wand… Instead he'd threatened to call the cops again, this time because Mark had escaped from jail. Stupid. Stupid and soft and…

Another gulp. Mark closed his eyes. The stuff made his eyeballs sting.

…Stupid.

The downpour outside became louder, a sign that the door had opened. The next moment, Mark blearily noticed that the stool on his left had someone on it. Someone who was dressed in blue and white and looked tired and wet.

"Looking for me?" Mark asked, too groggy for his voice to sound remotely as sarcastic as he intended. Captain Cold took off his glasses and put them on the bar before ordering a coffee. But Mark wasn't fooled. Even with the glasses off and the hood down, Len Snart was always the captain. And – but that was surely the booze talking – maybe there were times when it wasn't such a bad thing.

"Figured you'd come here at some point. Then I saw the rain. You're not exactly inconspicuous."

"'The hell are you doin' here?"

"Having a coffee." Len took one of the slowly melting ice cubes from the bowl near Mark's glass and plopped it into his steaming coffee. Mark didn't comment. They all had their quirks.

"We heard something on the grapevine. About a guy dying yesterday at the observatory, of natural causes, they said." When Len looked sideways at him, the sharpness in his eyes cut straight through the fog. "Name of Benjamin Mardon."

Hearing his brother's full name instantly turned Mark's insides – those that were not currently churning courtesy of the whiskey – to lead. He grabbed his glass with a shaking hand and downed yet another gulp.

"You didn't answer m—my question."

"Yeah, I did. You're just too plastered to get it." Len put another ice cube into his cup. The steam was completely gone. "You want to get drunk like there's no tomorrow, fine by me. Just thinking you might want somebody to drink with." He took a sip of his coffee, frowned, and a third ice cube went into the cup. "Or to haul your ass back home before Harry here leaves you to sleep it off on the pavement at closing time."

Harry – who would certainly never think of doing such a thing, but who usually made it a point of honour and a trademark not to interfere with customers' conversations – raised his head sharply and opened his mouth. He closed it when Len shot him a look that Mark couldn't decipher, and didn't care to.

"Well, I don't."

"Tough break. I'm not moving from here."

Damn. Mark took another gulp, deliberately avoiding looking to his left. This one didn't burn as bad as the previous did.

The silence – not perfect silence, but some kind of low background noise that included quiet conversation, shuffling and rustling of cloth, and a Bruce Springsteen song somewhere in the mix – was unsettling. Especially since Mark had been so completely wrapped up in his whiskey and his black mood and the image of his dead brother hanging in front of his eyes that he hadn't been paying the least bit of attention to his surroundings. The sky could have fallen on him, he wouldn't have noticed.

But he noticed now. The world was still foggy and the lines blurred, but the silence was too obvious to be ignored.

Len put yet another ice cube in his coffee.

Something snapped in Mark's brain, and he found with the last remnant of horrified self-consciousness that alcohol really did loosen people's tongues.

"He was an idiot. And I'm a murderer." He paused to down the rest of his whiskey. "I think," he added thickly.

Len said nothing, taking a gulp from his ice-cold coffee. Mark's stare remained fixed on the row of bottles in front of him. The labels all looked the same from here.

"Got out of jail yesterday, and the ob – obs – Ben's place was nearest. Thought he'd lemme crash the night. Crappy night, with storms and rain and lightnin' all over the place."

There had been so much electricity in the air… It had made every single hair of Mark's stand on end. Even before he got there.

"Thought wrong. He said he was gonna call the cops, he had to call the cops, 'cause what I did was wrong – his own brother – he woulda turned me in like that. And I didn't want to go back…" His hands began shaking even harder than they had. "I didn't want to go back. So I reached for the wand – figured I'd threaten him – he reached for it too – and –" He swallowed, carefully keeping his eyes on the bottles in front of him. "Lightning struck. Struck him. I don't know if… That could've been me, that must've… That might… I don't know."

Springsteen shifted to Johnny Cash on the stereo, and nothing else changed. Ben's dead eyes were still there. But there was something in Len's eyes now, like an echo of the emptiness Mark had been trying to fill with whiskey, and it meant something. Mark wasn't sure what. He wasn't sure of anything by that point.

"You may never know."

"Yeah, I… Yeah. And… I mean, I tried to k—have him killed before. But now… I just… I can't get his eyes outta my head now, I can't… Can't think of anything else. My brother's dead. My family. The only person in the world who gave a crap whether I live or die… and I killed him."

To his absolute horror, Mark felt his throat start to close in on itself, his eyes to sting, and this time he didn't have the alcohol to blame for it.

If Len noticed anything, he didn't comment on it. Instead, he downed half of his cold coffee in one gulp and turned to look at Mark in the eye, leaning on the bar.

"See, that's where you're wrong, Mardon. If your brother really was the only person in the world who gave a crap whether you live or die, Mick wouldn't be watching the observatory in case you returned, Digger wouldn't be on his way to Wyoming to check on your old place, and I wouldn't be sitting here drinking coffee. There you go, Harry," he added, paying for the coffee – and possibly for the whiskey as well. Mark just sat there, too soused and tired to do anything else than blink blearily.

"When are you getting that into that thick head of yours? We're Rogues, goddammit! We look after our own!"

"Not family," Mark uttered thickly.

Len's eyes burned.

"Exact same thing. 'Cept we don't dump judgement on you like some others do. You think you're the only one with a screwed-up family around here?" His voice dropped, getting downright chilling. "Look around. There's a man here who saw a mugger slit his mother's throat when he was six. Blond guy, over there? Just got out of jail because he murdered the friend of his parents' who used to get into his room every other afternoon when they weren't home and have his little fun. Hell, even –"

He stopped short, and Mark was not so drunk yet that he didn't notice the fire in Len's eyes die out, replaced for a second by something ugly, savage, and hollow. And through his whiskey-induced mist he realised that he really didn't want to be privy to whatever was making their de facto leader look like that.

It was gone as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Mark unnerved.

"Look," Len went on as though nothing had happened – and Mark certainly wasn't about to correct him, "that's the way we do things here. We deal with things, and we do it together."

"Oh, come on," Mark muttered in spite of himself – booze talking again, probably. "I been a crook for years. Just started this –" he pointed to the weather wand, "– a while back, because I saw an opportunity. You know me, Len, I blow with the wind. You need me, okay, I'm here, but… I don't stick around much."

Len was silent for a few seconds, as though hesitating, then seemed to make up his mind on something.

"Well, we need you now. There's supposed to be some extra-secret shipment of freshly-printed bills going through Central next month, by train. Plan still needs adjustments, and there's always room for someone who can provide getaway fog at the very least. What do you say? Can I count on you?"

Mark's head was starting to get really heavy, and he idly wished that he could check in a mirror whether it had doubled in volume or whether it was just an impression. But he vaguely nodded, wincing.

"Yeah. Yeah, probably. You… Lemme think on it."

"Sleep on it, more like," Len corrected, finishing his coffee – Ice-cold coffee, Mark thought, man that must be disgusting – and getting off his stool. "C'mon. Let's get you to a place to crash."

"Haven't got one."

"Figured that out."

Len swung one of Mark's arms across his shoulder, and heaved. Mark sagged, his head lolling and his neck muscles completely useless.

"Hey, don't fall asleep on me now. I'll have enough trouble getting you past the wife and to the basement, so don't you start drooling on my shoulder as well."

Mark did make an effort. He hadn't met Janet Snart many times, but he knew how scary she could get if she had a mind to.

When Len pushed open the door of the bar, it felt like some punk kid had played on them the old pail-of-water-balancing-on-the-door trick. Icy rain poured on them straight down, and soon both men were soaked to the bone.

At least Mark was feeling slightly more awake now. Slightly.

He also felt compelled to say, "Y'know, B—Ben wuh—was an idiot b–but he… he was a good idiot. A g… a good m—man."

"Yeah. We can't afford the luxury of being either in our profession, Mark."

They walked in silence for a little while, sloshing their way through the rain, Mark leaning more heavily on Len every minute. He felt like he was treading through cement.

"There seems to be a rain cloud just over our heads," came Len's voice at some point, and Mark knew him well enough to know that he was doing his best to sound mildly annoyed when he was actually really pissed off. "Just over our heads. Can't you do something about it?"

Mark grunted, his hand closing on the weather wand as though by itself. After some seconds of intense effort, he finally felt the rain lessening, giving way to…

Len sighed resignedly.

"That's… Not really helping."

Snow.

He'd set the wand on snow.

… And right now, he had no clue about how to set it on anything else. The term 'blissfully drunk' did not apply here – not with Ben's ghost following him step by step – but whatever he was apart from tired and dripping wet and cold, he was too much to use the wand properly.

Len's shivering kept him awake for maybe ten minutes after that, but he eventually blacked out before they reached the house.

Which made Mark wonder for quite a while when he finally woke up in relatively unfamiliar surroundings.

He was on a couch with a couple of blankets over him and –

– and Ben was dead.

And he had the mother of all hangovers.

Pain the size of Metropolis hit him like a baseball bat on the nose at the exact same time his guts seemed to drop out into the pit of his stomach. Ben. Ben staring at him, Ben saying he'd call the cops, Ben reaching for the wand…

Mark groaned and screwed up his eyes against the splitting headache.

"Mr Mardon? Are you awake?"

The voice hadn't screamed loudly into his ear, Mark was aware of it – in theory – but it certainly felt like it. When he had blinked a couple of hundred times, he looked up into a woman's face where curiosity vied with casual annoyance.

"Wuh – what – where…?" Even the sound of his own voice made him flinch. Was that really his voice?

"Oh for God's sake, there's no need to shout," she said – Janet – Len's wife. Yeah. Memories crawled back into his brain as though they were ashamed to get back home so late.

When he propped himself up on his elbows – still blinking furiously – his eyes went from Janet, who was putting the wet washing into a basket (throwing each item of clothing as though it had done her personal harm) to Len, who was slouching in an armchair with his feet propped up on a chair, snoring quietly.

"Watched you all night and all morning," Mark heard Janet say behind him, and he managed to sit up properly and turn his head to look at her. "To make sure you wouldn't get alcohol intoxication or whatever it's called."

There was a weary sort of disapproval in her voice as she finished putting her laundry into her basket, as though being used to this sort of thing didn't stop her from voicing her discontent. Mark avoided commenting on that.

He didn't know Janet that well, but odds were that they were both thinking the same thing. Len might be many things, most of them not really pleasant, but when push came to shove he really took the 'Captain' part of his nickname seriously.

Rogues did look after their own. And Len looked after his Rogues. It was pretty much a given.

Sometimes it didn't leave a lot of room for Janet, but she was used to that.

She planted herself in front of Mark, still holding the laundry basket and staring at him pointedly, interrupting his train of thought.

"Do you think you can make it stop snowing now? Only I've got to hang these out to dry."

"Oh – yeah, sure." Mark picked up the wand, and set it to the right coordinates. "Done now. Sorry about that."

"That's okay. The neighbours will have something else to gossip about for a while. It was just getting hard to open the front door with all the snow." She stared at him a few seconds, then blurted out, "I'm sorry about your brother."

Her voice came out curt and brisk, as if she'd heard about the concept of comforting someone but had never really picked up on it. But the words themselves sounded genuine. Mark nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and not knowing what Len had told her about it.

After a few seconds of awkward silence, she put down her basket as an afterthought, and went to arrange the blanket around Len. Her eyes softened as she tucked his arm inside, just for a second. Then she turned to Mark again, her eyes back to their usual impersonation of a pair of gimlets.

"Come on upstairs. I'll make you some coffee."

As Mark sat in front of his steaming cup – a sensible, thick thing which for some absurd, unfathomable reason had a penguin on it – he stared at the wall opposite and let his thoughts wander.

He wasn't all right. Not by a long shot.

But, he reflected as the hot liquid burned his tongue and his throat on the way down, at least he had a reason to stick around. If only, he later found, in order to pay the remainder of his rather impressive tab at Harry's.

…Because Len's twenty bucks had not been nearly enough to cover the whole thing after all.

Mardon does make a cameo in Flash and Substance in the pub where the Rogues hang out, along with a very enjoyably-Silver-Age-y bunch of Flash villains :D But since in the very next episode he's in Grodd's lair in a swamp somewhere (possibly in Europe), I'm taking this as a let's-make-as-many-Rogues-cameos-in-one-scene kind of thing. Which means that man, does that guy get around or what!

…erm. Anyway. I like to try and build bridges between DCAU and comics!verse; I don't quite agree with the Question on the "A is A" thing, but I believe there's a core to each character that you can find resonating in every universe, like for instance Lex Luthor being very smart, good or bad guy. Sure, maybe somewhere on Earth 876 or something Lex Luthor is dumb as a post and Central and Keystone Cities don't have a bunch of colourful-clothed misfits on either side of the law, but I wouldn't count on that :D

(2018 addition: I know in the comics and the TV show Mark's brother is called Clyde. I don't know why they went for "Ben" in "Speed Demons", the episode of Superman: The Animated Series the Weather Wizard appears for the first time in the DCAU, but I rolled with it. Shame to lose the name - it's a great JJ Cale song - but there ya go.)

Hope you liked, but if you did, please tell me! I don't usually go fishing for reviews, but I'd like to know if/what you did or didn't like, because I can't very well guess :o)

Next up: Mirror Master hadn't figured that the Thanagarians' martial law would change anything for him. After being caught on a heist, beat up, shot at and forced to run for his life, he had to admit that, maybe, he had figured wrong.