{There's a gap in my memories where you used to be

[myheadisaprison]

PSL with strongerthanyouknow & bringstheheat

My house of memories is all I own, and they've all faded to grey [Len/Mick, Len/Sara]

Just a reflex taking over me, automatic response of the body it haunts [Len/Mick, Len/Sara]

Don't go screaming if I blow you with a bang [Sara/Mick]

Waiting [Mick/Sara]

Things feel like they'llbe forever, but they won't [Mick/Sara]

Sometimes quiet is violent

Your hand is like a torch each time you touch me

Comments

[strongerthanyouknow]

"You already know why that is." He did. Even if people dance around that point.
It's a shade on everything. This thing no one can ignore. Existed then. Painted against now.

"You meant more to us. Different than the rest of the crew." Except that us still smarts, smolders in a clash, on the crater his earlier words have left lanced inside her chest. She doesn't like that word. Doesn't want to use it against those. Because there had been an us, and one man broke the strings of the Time Masters, and Sara knowingly let him, and us never existed again. Like maybe it never really had before. "But you meant more to Mick for longer."


This is tiredly, irreverent. Maybe as much as it is direction.
Sara gave a wave of two fingers. "You basically met when I was just being born."

[mypriority]

"Which is why I know you're just deflecting when you choose, so easily, to focus on Mick. His pain, his loss... pretending that if you don't mention it, your own could almost have never existed."

But for all of his pointed words, he's just as lost in every conversation he has with anyone on this ship. He drowns in it, constantly, barely even treading water half the time. His eyes drop away from her face before he finds the rest of his words. "I hate not knowing you, when I know I should." Her. Mick. The rest of the crew. His sister. Whatever other pieces and people he's not missing because they're not there to miss at all.

[strongerthanyouknow]

That fact he can say that only highlights just how much he doesn't know her.

Which makes it unsettlingly eerie when he says he hates not knowing her at the same time she thinks it.



It left her looking at him over the table, staring at Leonard staring at his lap. It shouldn't have been an easy admission, without a world of build up, and yet, they were the things they might have told each other once. Late at night. In the cargo bay. In bed. After far too long trying not to, or after someone called you on it, without calling you on it, which was nearly the same thing.

There's a give to her shoulders when she wishes she wouldn't, can't help that she does. He's a mess, and it's not his fault that he kicked her in the face with the words he chose. She lets a breath out and tries again, doing with pain what she always does with pain, the thing she was trained to do with pain for nearly a third of her life: making it not exist.

Like he just said she did all too well. Ignoring her pain now, because he wants her to talk about then.

"I had other--" What is even the right word for that?
Sara's gaze shifted to the office all around them.

This unlikely place, where things like this had never happened, never been talked about between them, because Sara was Captain when Mick walked out on the team, but she wasn't Captain when Leonard died. This wasn't the room that housed this kind of thing for her even now really. "--responsibilities--" --is a weak word for it, an excuse masquerading as an explanation, true and not enough all at once, but she can't find another one, a right one. "--I had to balance during all of it."

The part they're talking about, and the part Sara can't untangle from it. "It didn't mean it didn't happen."

It did. It hurt. Losing Leonard, and then losing Mick, and then losing two too many others on top of it. Even the list, even categorizing it, didn't change it. She felt Leonard's loss all the time. She'd never even tried to replace either of them. Not for more than seconds. Sara shook her head, after a second. Because all of it was.So tangled up. And it only got more so.

"If I hadn't--" Sara had to settle a faint breath out of her nose. "--maybe the whole other world wouldn't have happened."
If she hadn't let him send her away, and every day hadn't had something else needing her. That she didn't refuse louder.
She tries not to let it keep her up at night, but sometimes it does. Whether all of it is her fault. Too. That it is.

[mypriority]

There's a stillness in the silence that stretches long enough to make his ears ring. He doesn't know what to say to any of that. Or how he's supposed to feel. That's one of the ongoing issues he's faced in all this, too. Knowing he's supposed to feel some kind of way about things, but their weight or sharpness doesn't touch him the way it should

This though, is different. He doesn't have to have the memory or the connection for the weight of that to crash over him. But the part that sticks out to him the most is the one where she seems to blame herself.

"Don't do that," he shakes his head a little. "taking that when it isn't yours to shoulder doesn't help, and it doesn't change anything that happened."

[strongerthanyouknow]

"I have to. I'm the captain." Maybe there's even a dry bit of a laugh in her words, that isn't even a laugh, is nothing like a laugh from Sara sounds like, when his response to her owning it is just as much refusal as her one ignoring it. There's a shake of her head, and what comes out she can't stop: "Which you weren't even here for, Leonard."

"I lost you, and I lost Laurel, and then Rip, and the Waverider still needed a captain." And it needed her to be better, even more. More than she'd ever tried to be the earlier year. More than she'd maybe ever tried in the whole of any of the periods when she'd been alive. You answer to a higher calling now, Sara. I'm sorry, Martin had said, making her choose them over Laurel's legacy even.

Sara raised a finger and made a gesture of a circle with it, meaning everywhere. Everyone everywhere else. "All of them are my responsibility. If they are okay. If they aren't. If they are hurt. If they aren't. If they get off the ship. That they all get back on the ship. All of it. All of the time. Every time. And that includes Mick, and everything that happened, and how it happened."

As well as the fact, she let him down. As his Captain. After his already thinking she'd let him down in every other way. After everything that already happened that made it so easy to choose over her as Leonard so easily pointed out.

[mypriority]

"They may be your responsibility, but their decisions aren't your decisions." He's not budging on this opinion, Sara, sorry. "They may be a team, your team, but they are still people with choices, and they won't always make the right ones."

They.
They're a team.
No inclusion of himself in that. Because he doesn't feel like he fits there. Like he has a place anywhere, with anyone, least of all this crew as a unit.

[strongerthanyouknow]

"Sweet and all," Sara says, just as dismissively edged as it sounds, "but I don't get that prerogative when it affects the whole of reality."

Just like it was something she couldn't change and once Mick had come back, once they'd fixed it, and been disbanded, and kicked back off the shackle that, and stolen their ship back, it was something with closed doors. Something done. Fixed. History. Fucked up, all around, but already over. Until someone needed to put their sticky, dead, absolutely careless and unknown fingers in it all over again.

[mypriority]

She's so dismissive, it sort of leaves him empty-handed. As the conversation progressed and drew on and circled around, he'd had a slow realization that, actually, everything she was detailing to him were missing pieces of the same story Mick had given him earlier. Weird, how so same-page those two always seem to be. Weirder still, that Leonard feels like he should be right there in step with them, but he's always a little too far behind to catch up.

He stares again at his hands, clasped and hanging loosely between his knees, maybe more than a little overwhelmed by everything that has been this conversation, this day. Eventually, he looks back up at her. "I guess you'd know better than me." There's the smallest pull at the edges of his mouth, that doesn't actually add up to anything like a smile or even an upward quirk of his lips, before he shifts to his feet. "I think I've had enough history lessons for today."

[strongerthanyouknow]

His words shouldn't be able to score. Those last ones. But they still do. The settle a little too hard, come a little too twisted, personally, when all she does is lift her eyebrows faintly. Not about to stop him, and not entirely able to stop the thought that comes to mind. That him sitting here is its own fucked up kind of history lesson. Too.

She could get past almost two years of him dead, and an evil version of him, and he could still look at her and say four words and leave her feeling rubbed raw, stripped naked and stabbed straight through with the sword of her own willing blindness. Without even meaning to, and without having a god damn clue about the amount of power that meant he had. Or stupidity that she did. Or both.

Or screw it. All three of them. Since it's not like she can even leave Mick out of the equation.
Even if he could, obviously, leave her out of it. That was Leonard's point, wasn't it?



There's something of a half-nod, and it's more rote repetition of people telling her things than anything that could even pretend it was a dismissal or a want to keep him there. Which is, maybe, why Sara reaches down and turns the display back on over the tablet.