"What are we doing back here?" Mick asked as the group exited the Waverider, looking around them at the skyline of Star City.
"Savage has a timeship, courtesy of the Time Masters. The timeline is unclear, due to our destruction of the Oculus, meaning-" Rip explained.
"Savage is lost to history." Stein cut off.
"Which is why I brought you all home."
"Mission's not over, man." Jax said once Rip had stopped talking and the group came to a stop on the roof they landed on.
"Jax is right." Ray said. "We've lost Savage before. We'll find him again." None of them liked the idea of giving up their mission. They were so close to finishing what they had started.
"And then what? We have no way of killing Savage, particularly now that Kendra and Carter are in his possession, assuming that they're still alive, which is highly unlikely." Rip came back with. Len looked at Rip like he was crazy. All this talk of the greater good and protecting the world and Rip was just going to give up on it like that, giving up on their teammates as well.
"So, that's it? We're...we're just giving up?" Ray asked, incredulous.
"I'm on the way to the refuge to retrieve our younger selves and return them to the timeline. It will be as if you never left."
"What, you think we can just return to our old lives and pretend like none of this ever happened?" Sara questioned. It seemed they were all angry at this new turn of events.
"Mm, that might be a tad difficult. So, I had to bring you to May twenty-sixteen, not January twenty-sixteen."
"Great, so what you're saying is, for the last five months, my mom probably thinks that I'm dead. Thanks a lot, man." Jax said.
"Okay, wait, why?" That was Sara. Len noticed that, out of all of them, she seemed the most steamed. "Why the change of plans, Rip?"
"If you're getting back on that ship, we're get back on that ship." Mick growled, poking at Rip. As he did that, Rip's form flickered. It was a freaking hologram!
"In truth, I never left it." the Rip-hologram said. "I'm sorry for all that I've asked of you, and that it all came to nothing. I wish you all well." As he disappeared, the Waverider lifted from the rooftop and took off.
"I never liked that guy." Mick grumbled, looking at Len. Len just shrugged.
"I'm wondering what we're gonna do about this." he said, motioning to his stomach. They were back in twenty-sixteen. No males were pregnant in this time period. What would happen if people found out about him? Surely, he would be poked, prodded, and experimented on. Mick took his jacket off and gave it to the slighter man. Len took his own, smaller, jacket off and handed it to his lover, putting Mick's on and zipping it up.
"Better." Sara said, examining Len. After a moment's hesitation and discussion, the group went their separate ways. For now.
~x~x~x~
Len and Mick stepped out of the car Mick had hot wired and headed into the apartment building. They were planning to get changed and cleaned up before going off to find Lisa. Needless to say, they were surprised when they saw Lisa sitting on the couch, watching television. She looked up when the door opened, automatically pulling out her gun and aiming it at the intruders. Her eyes widened and she threw the gun down on the coffee table. Len winced.
"Not the safest of moves." he mumbled. Lisa ran over and threw her arms around Mick, who was standing slightly in front of Len. She then punched him on the arm, causing Mick to swear under his breath and rub it, and moved to her big brother. She moved in to hug him, too when she bumped into his stomach. She looked down, quizzically, at his middle, gently poking him.
"Uh...you've gained some weight..." Len rolled his eyes and unzipped Mick's jacket, taking it off. Lisa's eyes seemed to bug out as she took in his figure.
"If you were a woman, I'd say you looked pregnant." she snickered. Mick gave her a deadpan look as her eyes shifted between the two.
"No." she whispered. "How?"
"Well, first thing's first. We've been time traveling with a man from the future." Lisa began to laugh outright.
"Yeah, right! Come up with a better excuse." Len scowled at her.
"You have a crush on a guy that works with someone who can run faster than mach two..." Lisa had the decency to look chagrined. "Now, apparently, in the future, there's this drink that men can ingest to have the ability to become pregnant."
"And, genius here drank it." Mick cut in. Len glared at him as Lisa crossed her arms.
"I didn't know what it did!" Lisa sighed.
"Lenny, that's even worse! You don't just go around drinking whatever you find." She then shifted her gaze to Mick. "And you, you knocked up my brother!" she exclaimed, punching Mick in the arm again. He growled at her and Len just laughed.
"Children, please." he said.
~x~x~x~
After sitting down with Lisa and talking for a while, she basically told them to get off their asses and go find the others so they could all finish Savage.
"Nobody hurts my family and just gets to get away with it." she had said. Thus, here they all were, standing in the parking lot in Star City that they had all started this crazy mission in as Ray and Stein worked with some device or another.
"I don't understand. This should have worked." Ray said.
"Did you account for subspace interference?" Stein asked him.
"It's the first thing I thought of. Did you adjust for temporal polarity?"
"Oh, Raymond, you insult me."
"Can you reach the Waverider or not?" Sara asked, becoming frustrated. There was something wrong with her, Len just couldn't be sure what it was. He made a mental note to ask her about it later.
"We're working on it." Ray and Stein said at once.
"Actually, guys, I think it just worked." Jax said, looking up at the sky. Everyone looked up to see none other than the Waverider swooping down to land in front of them. Ray and Stein grinned and high-fived each other as the door opened. Rip came walking swiftly from the ship, throwing his arms out.
"I thought I made my intentions perfectly clear." he said, frustration evident in his voice.
"And we wish to be equally clear about ours." Stein said forcefully. Just then, Mick walked forward and hit Rip in the arm.
"Do you mind?" Rip asked, annoyed.
"Just checking to see if you're real this time." was the reply he got.
"You're not ditching us again. When the mission's over, then we can all go our separate ways." Jax took it upon himself to explain.
"And this mission's not over." Stein continued.
"Yeah, just curious how much headway you've had tracking Savage without all of us." Ray wondered aloud.
"None. But, neither have I gotten myself into bar fights in ninteen seventy-five and the Old West, put dwarf star technology into the hands of terrorists, or got myself turned into a scary bird monster." Rip ranted.
"We get your point." Mick growled. "Now, get ours. That ship's not taking off without us. You got that?" And, there he was, the man Len had fallen in love with. Mick may not be refined or possess a normal person's moral compass, but, when he put his heart into something, he put it in entirely. Len had always admired the man's passion. Everyone looked at Rip and Jax motioned for him to lead the way back onto the Waverider. Len had to hesitate for a moment and put a hand to his stomach as a sudden pain shot through it. He breathed heavily for a moment, thanking whoever was watching over him that nobody had noticed. After a moment, the pain passed and Len was able to resume his walk to the timeship in front of him.
~x~x~x~
Once everyone had made it onto the ship and Sara had her outburst about her sister, everyone congregated on the bridge a while later.
"We're going to Saint-Lo, France, nineteen fourty-four." Rip explained.
"Why?" Len asked. "A lead on Savage?"
"Yes. It seems Kendra was able to send us a message." Rip answered, holding the handwritten note up for Len, Mick, and Sara to see. They nodded and strapped into their seats so that they could time jump. Len tried to get himself to remember to talk to Sara about what had happened after things settled down.
They arrived in nineteen fourty-four and Gideon quickly located Savage. Len put his goggles on and armed his cold gun as they all waited in the cargo hold of the Waverider for the door to open. He felt another stabbing pain in his stomach, but attributed it to nerves. Once the door was open, they all walked off of the ship and to the coordinates that Gideon indicated. When they got there, Savage was in the process of killing a group of Nazis. For whatever reason, they didn't know. Mick fired his heat gun at Savage and Len fired his cold gun at the Nazis. Sara and Ray came up behind them and began fighting as well while firestorm was sent to the location where Gideon thought a time ship might be. It was a free for all. Nazis, Savage, and his men were being taken down left and right. Len was busy fighting the man in front of him, whacking him in the head with his cold gun, when he was hit from behind. He stumbled forward and spun around to see a smirking Savage.
"This will be entertaining." he said, hitting at Len with a crowbar he had picked up. Len managed to dodge it every time until he tripped backwards over a root. He managed to keep his footing, but Savage hit him in the stomach with the crowbar. Hard. Len stumbled back, shock written all over his face as the pain swept over him. He grabbed his stomach and looked at Savage who was laughing.
"I need to go check on my prize now." With that, he walked away and toward a large box that some of his men were moving away from the Nazi truck. Len couldn't concentrate on that, however, as the pain he was in was excruciating. His vision was blurring at the edges and he wasn't able to catch his breath. He suddenly felt something warm and wet trailing down the inside of his thighs. Looking down at the small puddle of liquid on the ground, he began panicking.
"Guys, I think my water just broke!" he gritted out over the comms before collapsing to the ground in pain.