Hello my darlings!

Thank you all so much for all the great comments!

Here's another chapter for you, hope you enjoy...

Hobbling along inside the ship was alright… But it could get a little boring sometimes. Like now, when everyone except him and the professor were out trying to save the world…

Gideon was fun to talk with, at least for the first three hours, but that often got a bit boring too. And he didn't know where the professor and him were when talking about friendship. Martin Stein sometimes seemed a bit arrogant and maybe just a tad uninterested in what an ex-thief could offer as company…
Or maybe that was all in his head… Snart had heard of cabin-fever, was it possible to get ship-fever? In that case… He probably had it.

A twinge of pain shot through his knee as he entered the lab. It wasn't all that bad, but still bad enough to get him to inhale sharply.

"Mr. Snart, are you doing okay?" the professor looked up from a book he had been reading.

Leonard nodded as he moved closer.

"Yeah, fine… Starting to get a bit bored, figured maybe we could…" he shrugged, suddenly getting the feeling he had made a poor choice.

"Hang out?" Stein filled in after a few uncomfortable seconds.

An almost nervous chuckle escaped Len. He looked up to the professor, and in a different life… Maybe he would have strived to become like him? Maybe?

"Yeah… Something like that…"

The professor gave him a kind smile as he straightened in his chair and closed his book.

"I was starting to get a bit bored too… Let's have a little coffee and some pastries…" the grey haired man said as he pushed himself off the chair and started walking towards Len.

"Sounds delightful…"

LOTLOTLOT

Gideon-baked cinnamon buns were amazing. There were no other way of describing the heavenly pastries….

Time seemed to fly by as they sat in the kitchen area, with a slight 50's diner layout. The kitchen had booths and checkered flooring, and there were a lot of chrome, all over…

Leonard had placed himself with his back against the wall, parallel to the table, and with his legs spread out on the small couch in front of him. He had learned by now that his leg would treat him a lot better if he followed the doctor's (Gideon's) advice and kept his leg elevated as often as possible.

Stein had started out by sitting normally, but twenty minutes in he had copied Len's position.

"So you walked with the wrong crowd way back when?" Len asked with disbelief in his voice.

The older man nodded.

"Yeah… It was an accident which caused me to pursue science, if not for that I probably would have ended up under a bridge somewhere shooting up on whatever I could get my hands on…" Stein confessed.

"Accident?" a mixture of curiosity and concern filled his voice as he asked.

"Yes…" Stein seemed to sober up from the previous banter, "It was a dark, rainy night… A few friends of mine and I had been out drinking and smoking… We were going to drive to Larry's place I remember. Larry was driving…"

Len didn't like where the story was heading, but somehow he felt Stein needed to tell the story. Like he hadn't done so a million times before…

"We were stupid. Drunk and high on life… And other stuff… I can't remember exactly what happened, but we crashed. I woke up a few days later with a five inch cut across my right shoulder and a pounding headache…" A single tear formed in one of his eyes, but it refused to fall.

"Richard, Paul and Annalise died before the ambulance got there, and Jenny never walked again…" Stein's voice was about to crack.

It was like a hand grabbed a hold of his Adam's apple and held it tight, he hadn't expected anything like this to have happened in the professor's life. He seemed all to put together for stuff like that to happen, like he had been born with enough common sense not to put himself in situations that could lead to stuff like that…

"I'm sorry…"

"I'm sorry for them. It made my life a lot better, took me a few years to quit the green though, but it made my life a lot better… If only the same could have been said for the four others…"

Len couldn't do anything but nod knowingly.

LOTLOTLOT

"You're a lot different than I first believed…" Len admitted after a rather long silence. He was turning his coffee mug around and around, eyes peeled on the dark liquid.

"Oh yeah?" Martin asked, "How come?"

"You're not as stiff as I first feared…" Len said with a small smirk, "And you sure have a lot of stories to tell, which is nice…"

"You shouldn't live a long life without gathering a lot of stories… That would just be miserable."

Len nodded, Stein had a point…

"I guess…"

"I am right..." Martin smiled, "But I bet you have already gathered a bunch yourself…"

"A few… No Hallmark moments to be exact, but I have stories…"

"They don't need to be Hallmark, they just need to be… They just need to be a part of who you are…"

That made Leonard stop and think. He had never really thought about his own screw-ups and mistakes as stories to be told. He wasn't important enough for that… He wasn't good enough for that…

"So… Is this your first time on crutches, young Mr. Snart?"

"Young? You realize I'm the third oldest one on this team?"

"You're young compared to me…"

"Okay… You win…"

"So… First time?"

Len shook his head and let his right hand glide off the backrest to come down and massage his knee.

"No… Far from it…" he paused, "You ever been on crutches, Professor?"

"A couple of times, I did play football in my younger days… Before I went to college."

"You played football?"

The older man nodded, "I did, but don't tell Jefferson… I want to keep that a secret for a little while longer…"

"You've got yourself a deal old man…"

"Thanks." Stein responded with a smile spread across his face. "So… Back to you… What was it like the first time you needed crutches?"

Len grew uncomfortable, the first time he had been in need of crutches had been when he was nine years old and a fight with his father had caused him to fall down a flight of stairs and break his leg. Cast for a month there…

"I can't remember the first time, think I hit my head a bit too…" he answered, way colder than he had during their conversation.

Martin seemed to understand what he didn't say, and let the topic die in peace… If it hadn't been for Leonard himself.

"But I can tell you about the first time I screwed up my right knee… You know… The first part of why Gideon fixed my knee too…"

Martin met his eyes once again, "Okay…?"

"It was back in '02… It was about the last time I hang out with any non-criminal friends…" Len began, and Martin listened carefully.

"We were practicing a sport called freerunning, or parkour, or traceur… And we made long and difficult lines, and we had fun… Boys being boys you know…"

Martin nodded.

"In one of the lines I was doing one of the by far easiest jumps over an obstacle, and I lost focus… My foot caught on the bench and I followed the laws of physics…" Len remembered.

"That doesn't sound much fun…"

"No, it wasn't… I honestly thought my knee was dislocated for a few seconds there. You know, before I managed to uncurl myself and get a look at the limb…"

"And?"

"And I went to the doctor for once in my life, but there was nothing to see on the X-ray so I was sent home with orders to keep off my leg for the next week or so… After the swollenness subsided and the bruises faded, my knee gradually got better, but it stayed unstable up until now…"

"How come you haven't gotten it fixed earlier?"

"Are you kidding? I haven't had the time… My dear father always kept us busy robbing and stealing… And I carried on that tradition when I started for myself…"

"I see…"

"And besides… It wasn't like I knew something was wrong… I thought my trick knee was all in my head…"

"Well, it's a good thing you've gotten it fixed now then…"

"Yeah… Once the recovery time is over and this leg is back to full strength, it'll be fun to see what it can do…"

Wow... Monster-chapter alert!

Hope you enjoyed it though...