Len doesn’t think he actually takes a full, deep breath until Lisa’s arms are wrapped around him.
“You’re alive,” she murmurs in dizzy bewilderment, a buzz against his breastbone, and Len’s heart hums its disquieting reply; Am I? Am I? Am I?
He can’t actually manage a response at first, just presses his ear into her chest and listens to the rumble of her heart, the little reverberation of his own like some biological make up for three decades of siblinghood. But then he laughs at his own sentimentality, and she laughs because he does and not a single day has passed since he wandered off to chase his fortune beyond the stars.
Well, not a day has passed in as much as any day/hour/minute/second exists in the trans-dimensional liminal space the Oculus occupies. He hasn’t quite worked out the mechanics of time here in the real world, would rather stay in the moment than dissect the physics of it. Not all feelings can be compared to something else. Undying, blood and bones and skin rolling in reverse and back into a body, is like that, a profound sensation that shivers down into the cellular level.
In the end it’s all shockingly ordinary, like someone opened a temporal doorway back to Earth and all he had to do was walk right through.
It’s been years, decades even, but it doesn’t feel like it. When he first comes back, Len stubbornly clings to his past personhood. He wears the same clothes, electric blue parka over black skinny jeans that have been steadily gathering dust for the past twenty years, like a morbid joke to himself. Two days after coming back, he robs the Gotham Museum of Antiquities. He doesn’t trip any alarms and is in and out with his loot in less than ten minutes, his heartbeat steady as a metronome.
It isn’t as fun as it was when he’d done it before.
Five days after he comes back, his skin begins to itch. He scratches his own nails down his thighs, scrubs himself raw in the clawfooted bathtub at Lisa’s apartment. He worries one spot under his right wrist with a blunt fingernail over and over until red splits through the pale skin, as if searching for the scar he should have, silver and gummy, soft but not quite as smooth as unblemished skin. What he thinks, as he brings the wound to his mouth and sucks until the sluggish flow stops is, isn’t it supposed to be warm? Don’t I remember it being warm?
At night his dreams are populated by faces and places which slip out his grasp as soon as he opens his eyes. He can’t fall asleep with the ocean of his heartbeat in his ears anymore, just that endless silence. Sometimes he wakes up with a weird gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach and a sense that he’s very far away from home, chronologically speaking.
He can’t really define why being alive is preferable to being dead.
None of this stops him from looking several times to check for oncoming cars before crossing the road.
The extent to which the world has changed is incredible, really. It isn’t just the superheroes—although there are plenty of those to go around, and Len has given up on trying to keep track of them all—it’s honest-to-goodness aliens living among the population, which everyone appears to accept as a fact, although according to Lisa’s Valerian girlfriend there is still plenty of discrimination to go around.
Len has no real knowledge of the current political situation, either on Earth or in any other godforsaken corner of the galaxy. He mostly tunes out Lyra whenever she starts rambling on about her sad little planet and its interminable governance problems—in his experience, politics end in nothing but tears, many of which are caused at the bequest of whichever bloodthirsty tyrant has their grubby paws on the power that decade. Len’s too old and his hands are already too blood-soaked to go through all that again, even if he’ll never regret certain stains.
Nine days after he comes back, Len gathers his few possessions together into a duffel bag, throws it over his shoulder and makes his way out the door when the whirring sound of the Gold Gun stops him in his tracks.
“Lenny?”
The pitch of Lisa’s voice sings, the deceptive girlishness of it; she always says his name like a long pin piercing the heart of a dove.
He wants to shrug off the scrutiny, his tongue already curling around a justification, but Lisa just sighs. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
“Think your girlfriend would object to me crashing on your couch forever, Lise.”
“She’ll get over it.” Lisa crosses the room, her eyes narrowed. “I think we both know this isn’t really about Lyra anyway, so are you going to tell me why you’re taking off like a thief in the night?”
It’s a loaded question, one Len isn’t even sure he can answer. There’s still so much in him, jagged and sore and tender beneath the touch. So much that makes him feel like a millstone, a flood away from drowning her.
“You don’t need me here screwing things up for you, Lise,” he says eventually.
The thing about life is that it goes on.
It’s relentless.
They were close once, but years of absence have worn that away. She survived without him, and he has to learn to survive without her. He’ll always be her big brother, but she’s older than him now. And he’s watched her shake off her old uncertainties in the last few days, watched her stop holding herself back. She was always strong-minded and strong-willed, but she took all of his cues from him, following in his footsteps; she was afraid of trusting people, of being hurt; she thought the world of normal people and cozy apartments with sharp-tongued alien girlfriends wasn’t one she was allowed to have.
But now Lisa can have whatever she wants. And the thing is, Len wants her to have it. She deserves to have everything she wants.
He never liked being protected, so he doesn’t know why he thought Lisa would.
"So we’re not talking about it,” she says slowly. “You’re telling me.”
He’s already thought it through and made the decision. He didn’t let Lisa in on the conversation until there wasn’t a conversation to have. He didn’t want her opinion.
“Don’t say it like that,” Len says. “I’m not trying to punish you. But it’s been a long time for you, and you’ve had time to get used to me being gone, and I haven’t even begun to get used to…to being back. I don’t have any hobbies, or life goals, or political opinions, or even a favorite color. I feel like I’m seeing myself for the very first time, you know? And I need to be alone with that for a while.”
Lisa relents, but still shakes her head slightly. “I don’t want you to go.”
“Why not? Too broken to be trusted?”
Lisa stares at him. “Too dear,” she snaps.
“I see,” Len says after a moment, with dangerous softness. “I won’t be safer tied to a chair, or put on a shelf.”
Lisa raises her eyebrows. “You will if you stay there.” Len laughs, which allows a little of the tension to bleed from between Lisa’s shoulders. “Promise me you won’t just disappear again.”
“I won’t,” he tells her. There’s so much more he wants to say, all of it stopped up somewhere in his chest because he’s not sure if it’s what Lisa wants to hear, if it would help or hurt.
In the end Len tilts his hand towards his sister, fingers curled except for the littlest one.
Lisa’s fist loosens and she extends her pinky in return.
Len makes a loose plan, but he doesn’t really have a destination in mind. He gets on his bike and heads west. Stops for meals at greasy diners and for sleep at cheap motels. Remembers his promise to call Lisa every time he can get his hands on a phone. Occasionally he’ll do something tourist-y, but mostly he keeps to himself.
Any moment now, the exhaustion will fling itself to the far corner, and Len will feel the way he’s supposed to. Relieved, that is. That the world is spinning somewhere on the axis of right. That he is once again restored to the realm of the living.
Any moment now, really.
He can’t really explain what makes him come back specifically to Central City, the scene of so many crimes. Len rides his bike past the new Flash Museum, inside the old Star Labs building, and doesn’t entertain the thought of going inside. It’s like he’s riding past a haunted house. Which might be what this whole city has become to him. It’s been a while, a long while, and he didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to go back.
If there’s one place he can be sure won’t go changing on him, Len thinks, at least he has Saints & Sinners. The decor is like homecoming of an entirely other kind, bitter and sweet memories flood the senses, the walls seeming to quiver with vice and wayward intention.
Still, there’s an outlier, the way there always seems to be lately. A very familiar figure is curled behind the bar, looking older than when Len knew him, but smiling that same boyish smile. He’s the kind of guy, Len thinks, who is going to look boyish when he’s eighty.
It feels like forever since Len’s seen someone he knows. Maybe that’s why the shock of it is almost an ache.
Barry is wiping down the counter and glances up at him with professional curiosity, followed by slack-jawed stupor.
“Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world,” Len drawls, sliding onto an unoccupied bar stool.
Barry’s expression is one of cartoonish shock.
“Sorry, um,” he replies eventually, after several minutes, an eternity for a speedster. “You’re the one who just walked into mine.” He offers Len a weak, reflexive smile. There’s something about that smile, the way it doesn’t quite fit on his face. “What can I get you? Are you—are the Legends meeting you here?”
Len doesn’t feel as satisfyingly smug as he originally thought he might, seeing the shock paralyzing Barry’s face. Instead he feels a sympathetic pang of pity.
“No Legends,” Len says. “Not in a long while. Just little ol’ me.” It comes out wrong, softer and less casual than he intended.
Barry’s face cycles through such a rapid-fire sequence of emotions that Len can barely keep up with it—puzzlement and disbelief and grief and awe and a startling, flare-gun fizzle of longing—
“You’re alive?”
It makes Len’s throat catch, the way it keeps doing, caught on the word alive like a stray fishbone.
“Looks like it.”
Barry’s expression is unreadable but searing, a shock that warms Len all the way through. “How?”
Len tries to reply but is ambushed by his yearning to do nothing else but look at him. He’s grown a small, shaggy beard and it looks like he’s put on a bit of weight. It suits him, somehow, and yet it makes him look adult in a way that gives Len a pang of nostalgia. Len himself feels about a million years older.
A regular approaches the bar.
“Hey, Al,” he says. “My usual, please.”
Barry’s eyes are glistening. He takes a deep breath.
“Coming right up, Rick,” Barry says, sending nervous glances Len’s way, like he’s worried Len will disappear into thin air if he takes his eyes off of him for too long. “I haven’t seen you around lately. How’s life been treating you?”
“Oh my God, you will not believe it,” Rick says. “Guess who’s got Saturn in retrograde until his birthday? This guy!”
Barry can’t seem to think of an appropriate response beyond, “Wow.” Rick nods fervently, sliding onto one of the bar stools.
Len watches Barry reach for a fresh glass, turn to get the bottle. There’s an ease to the way he moves behind the bar that tells Len this is not a new development. He’s good at this, even, cleans the shakers right away, never scoops ice with the glass. He also doesn’t pick up the glasses by the rim, leaving smudgy fingerprints where someone will put their mouth, which is Len’s pet hate.
He’s wearing tight vinyl pants and a plain black t-shirt, but the sleeves cut off right above his biceps and there’s a little notch in the neckline that shows the hollow where his collarbones meet. And, Len notices quickly, no wedding ring. The only thing threatening to ruin whatever look he’s going for is that he wears an apron folded and tied low on his hips. Annoyingly, it draws Len’s eye to the flat line of his stomach, revealed whenever he lifts his arm and pulls the hem of his shirt up with it. Stupid apron highlights the ratio of shoulder to hip, frames his ass every time he leans up against the bar to set down a glass. Suddenly aggravated, Len pulls his gaze away.
He busies himself looking around the room. It’s a Tuesday night, so the bar is mostly empty save for a few weathered regulars, but the clink of pool balls and the background hum of beer-soaked conversations are making Len feel almost out of place, an interloper on his own history. It’s been easier to stick to the standard, the loop of bike-diner-motel that dominates his days, but seeing Barry again, here of all places, has set off some kind of nostalgia bomb in his brain. He longs to be somewhere—anywhere—else.
“Sorry about that,” Barry tells him, right when Len had all but decided to discreetly eclipse himself. “Were you leaving?”
“No,” Len lies. In an effort to distract, he places his elbow on the bar and rests his chin on his hand. “Are you here to listen to all my tales of woe, mister bartender?”
“Always,” Barry says, and of course he means it, the sentimental fool. “But I’d rather hear all about your miraculous return.”
Len sighs. “It ain’t much of a story.”
Barry shrugs, but his eyes are trained on Len, as if the force of his stare can uncover any secret Len might try to keep from him. “Tell me anyway.”
So Len does; he tells Barry about merging with the Oculus when it exploded, and about the stream of pure, unadulterated arcane power eventually resuming its rightful place in the universe and leaving behind a dazed and not-so-dead-after-all human with a thumping headache and several decades out-of-date clothing outside of Lisa’s door, twenty years too late. Like Len said, it’s not much of a story, and it doesn’t take him very long to tell it.
Barry takes that in, unmoving, with this little furrow in his forehead like he’s listening very hard. But as he lifts his gaze, his face clears, and he jokes, “Hey, you know this means you can’t call me a kid anymore, right? I’m actually older than you these days, so you know—respect your elders, and all that.”
Len snorts, and for a moment they both—they don’t laugh, exactly, but there’s an odd levity between them. Len is compelled to say, “Nice outfit, by the way. How much do you make a night in tips?”
“I do okay,” Barry says coyly.
He’s started preparing the drinks without Len telling him what he wants, and that’s presumptuous, or maybe charming, or something belonging to the blurry middle ground.
“And what’s got you working in this fine establishment?” Len asks, adding sarcastically, “Finally got the boot from the pig farm, huh? Shame.”
“Actually, I quit.” Len raises an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. Barry shrugs. “Nothing dramatic, I just needed my schedule to be a bit more flexible. I work here roughly four nights a week. It’s a dive, but it’s a good-hearted dive.” His lips tilt upwards in a tiny, teasing smile. “And that way, I get to keep an eye on my Rogues, make sure they don’t get into too much trouble.”
For the first time in weeks, Len feels a frisson of anticipation dancing up his spine.
Barry pushes a drink, a vodka grenadine made methodically by hand, lime wedges and a twist of mint to garnish floating amongst the ice, across the bar.
“It’s my signature drink,” he says when Len raises an eyebrow at him. “It’s called a Central Daisy.”
Len takes the drink. “You wouldn’t let an old friend drink alone, would you?”
Barry looks surprised, and a little pleased. Len doesn’t really know why he’s being nice to Barry. It took him by surprise the last time it happened, too; the day the speedster brought him back to Siberia. Len had mostly experienced Barry Allen as a pain in the ass in the past, so moralizing and convinced that he was doing the right thing that was infuriating.
And maybe mildly captivating.
In a totally annoying way.
“To old friends,” Barry says, because he’s a sap.
They clink their glasses together. Vodka sloshes over the lip of Len’s tumbler and down his knuckles, which he brings to his mouth and sucks clean. Barry watches, watches Len watching him, the two of them swallowing in unison.
“Not bad,” Len says after several sips. “What’s with the embarrassing name, though?”
Barry runs a hand through his hair, a sight which still makes Len’s stomach feel a little swoopy.
“My daughter, Nora, inspired the name. Daisies are her favorite flowers.”
Oh. There it is.
In a small hollow place under Len’s ribs, he feels a small hope sink, like a coin thrown uselessly into a wishing well that has no magic left.
No big surprise. He never thought things would end any other way. Not really.
“Mazel tov,” he murmurs into his drink. The ice cubes clink softly in the glass as he sets it on the counter. “I’m sure Iris is thrilled that you’re naming alcoholic drinks after your kid.”
“Well, I’m sort of counting on you not to tell her,” Barry jokes, but there’s a sadness in his warm and open face, a kind of resignation.
Len taps his chin with two fingers, pretending to give it some serious thought. “You should know by now that I don’t do anything for free, Barry,” he says, a slight drawl creeping into his voice. He watches Barry tuck his smile behind his hand. “So what’s in it for me?”
Len actually thinks he can feel the years floating away, as if he and Barry are not only back in that same place, but as if no time has passed between them at all. There are lifetimes in that crooked, hidden smile, and Len wants to reach forward and tug until the timelines coalesce for him, wound together around his fingers.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Barry pushes his hair back behind his ears. He shifts his weight and raises one eyebrow. "How about another drink?”
“You drive a hard bargain.” Len gives him a mockingly sweet closed-mouth smile. “I’ll have a bourbon. Ice cold.”
Barry raises his hands, the soft underbelly of his palms exposed to Len, good-natured and yielding. “You gonna drive after this, or do I need to steal your keys?” It’s a condescending tease as he reaches for a fresh glass, turns to get the bottle.
“What are you, my boss?” Len takes the drink, his fingers overlapping Barry’s—the cold glass, the warmth of his skin. Len feels it again, that slight shiver of anticipation, a low current of electricity. “Mind your business.”
Barry shakes his head with a soundless laugh.
“Cops raise such narcs,” Len adds, watching him, and Barry laughs again.
“You’re gonna have to quit it with that. Can’t blame everything about me on working for CCPD anymore.”
“That’s right. It’s just your personality, then.”
In the lull in the conversation that follows, Len sips at his drink and tries not to wince at the switch from vodka to bourbon that he will surely come to regret in the morning.
Barry folds his arms and leans against the bar, gazing down at Len, watching him. Len is conscious of a stillness in the air, a sense of things slowing. Barry’s expression is strange, too, his mouth dropped open slightly, his eyes too soft. It’s torture, sometimes, to be looked at by Barry. It makes Len want to push him.
The pleasant burn of alcohol sliding down his throat and settling into his stomach is what eventually compels him to ask, “What’s on your mind, Barry?”
“Iris and I are actually divorced,” is what Barry ends up telling him, words weighty with implication.
Whatever Len had been expecting, it wasn’t that. Barry hasn’t taken his eyes from him, like he’s trying to gauge his reaction.
Len’s always had a good poker face. He doesn’t react immediately, just sits with the information for a few beats.
“Really,” he says, after a diplomatic pause. He’d noticed the absence of a wedding ring when he came in, but hadn’t thought it necessarily indicative of anything.
They’re quiet for a moment; Len gives him that. Then, “Yeah, I don’t know, once the kids were born, things just kind of…shifted,” Barry says, his voice full of nostalgia. “We’d both seen the future and forgot to work on our marriage in the present. It wasn’t—there was no big blow up, no one had an affair or anything dramatic like that.” He gives a small shrug. “Who knows, maybe we just spent too much time fighting for our lives during the first few years of our marriage to notice that it wasn’t really working. Eventually we realized that we were treating each other like roommates we didn’t particularly like more than husband and wife.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Len says slowly, because what else is he supposed to say here?
Len has never been with someone long enough to get bored with them, or to find out what happens when passion turns into routine. Still, he would’ve thought that their marriage was happy. It is confusing to hear that it’s not. He tucks the feeling away, like a stone in his pocket to take out and examine a bit later. When he’s alone.
Barry shakes his head. “It was for the best, in the end. I didn’t want Nora and Bart to grow up in a house where their parents were fighting and pretending not to be. I’d rather they see us being happy and healthy, even if it’s not together. Iris has a new boyfriend now, and I have—” He waves his arm around at the mostly empty bar. “—this booming business on my hands.”
Laughter bubbles back up—Len gives him that, too.
“And now,” Barry adds, his voice thick with emotion that Len doesn’t understand and doesn’t know how to respond to, “Now, I have you back, too.”
The way Barry looks at him is intense, too intense for his own good; there’s a deep well of something there, something he feels but won’t vocalize. Even in his tired and slightly inebriated state Len cannot ignore the charged atmosphere, just as he can’t ignore the intensity of Barry’s gaze.
But most of all he realizes he is all of a sudden wide awake, and completely sober.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t,” Barry’s voice is arrested, because what could he say? Save Len. Stop him. Wrap him up safe and put him in a box until the world turned over twice. “You left because of me. You became the hero I always knew you could be. And I always wished I got the chance to tell you that.”
Len doesn’t say anything. He thinks if his heart could skip, it might. It isn’t that he doesn’t appreciate the second chance. It’s just that he isn’t sure it’s been particularly good for him on a personal level, really. It seems perverse to say it, but sometimes he feels like he’s been cheated. Like maybe if he’d ended his time on Earth as the man who saved his best friend, blew up the Oculus and gave free will to humanity, he could have found the peace that had eluded him so thoroughly in his last life, and in this one.
Now, here is Barry, apologizing and openly confessing his regard. The thick walls of Len’s emotional defenses are angled to withstand hatred and suspicion, letting respect and concern slip through into tender interior spaces with an ease he finds terrifying. Staring into Barry’s clear, earnest eyes, Len feels uncomfortably vulnerable.
The silence that follows Barry’s confession is charged and awkward. Len throws out one hand in a gesture that is both dismissive and defensive. “Enough,” he rasps. His throat is dry. “Sentimental words will achieve nothing.”
Len stares at Barry, and is repulsed to find pity there, a softening of sudden compassion.
Don’t give me that, Len seethes, silent. What am I supposed to do with it?
His boots hit the wooden floor with a thud as he slides down from his bar stool, propelled by a roar of warning in his ears.
Before Len’s senses can catch up, Barry plants his hands on the bar and leaps over the edge, clearing the distance between them and wrapping his hand around Len’s wrist, his grip gentle, his hand warm. “Leonard, wait.”
Len cannot remember if he’s ever heard Barry refer to him by his first name. The unexpected intimacy of it is a shock. He sets his jaw and sighs from between clenched teeth.
“What is it?”
“You forgot to pay your bill,” Barry says, and it cuts through the room’s boiling air for a moment.
Len shifts his weight, tries to get his bearings again. “Why don’t you put it on my tab?”
“You don’t have a tab.”
“Then start one.”
Barry shakes his head. “How do I know you’ll be back to pay for it?”
“I’ve been coming to this bar longer than you could grow facial hair, Flash,” Len tells him, lower, his words intended only for Barry.
Len can tell from his expression that he wants to say something, his pretty face telegraphing so much and so melodramatically—furrowed brow, mouth drawn tensely so his cheekbones stand out, hazel-green eyes all worried. Len wants to wear him like a sweater.
“What?” Len bites out. “Just say it. Whatever it is.”
Barry holds out another heartbeat, then says, “I think you came here tonight for a reason. Like, on a cosmic-level.”
“Is that so?” Len’s tone is bemused.
“Yeah,” Barry replies, with quiet urgency. His energy only seems to pull Len closer. Without even knowing it, he’s leaned in so close that their faces are nearly touching. “I think maybe something here isn’t finished.”
“Something?” Len echoes, his eyes flicking to Barry’s mouth. His head is swirling with a mix of a hundred different emotions.
Barry looks pointedly at where his hand is still clamped around Len’s wrist. If his fingers slipped just a little, they’d be holding hands. “You know what I mean.” And Len does. “I just feel like there’s unresolved tension between us. Is it just me? Or do you feel it too?”
Len feels a sarcastic comment forming in his brain, his typical defense to anything involving his emotions. He shoves it to one side. He looks Barry straight in the eye.
“I think I do,” he says.
Barry glances towards the bar: nobody is waiting to be served. “C’mon. Let me walk you out. We can talk in private,” he suggests. A good call, considering that the ten or so other people in the room are starting to look uncomfortable.
When Len opens the back door and steps outside, Barry is right behind him, almost smiling. Hesitant, though. Something in his face Len can’t quite access.
The bone-numbing damp and cold of the alley behind Saints & Sinners is a stark contrast to the warmth of the bar. Whatever Len’s about to say is lost to a sudden, abrupt kiss. Len looks away and looks back and there he is: kissed, caught in the curve of Barry’s arm. He clutches the doorframe with one hand, suspended halfway into the room; Barry never steps over the threshold. But Len almost seems to rise into him, without even meaning to. Without thinking twice.
He’s unkempt from the road, hasn’t shaved in days and has put on a few pounds from mostly eating at diners and gas stations, but Barry doesn’t seem to mind, the same way Len doesn’t mind that all the grime and sleaze and cigarette smoke and spilled drinks from the bar are still clinging to Barry like a second skin.
Len’s fingers contract around the fragments of wood he’s holding. His palm prickles. When Barry pulls away, Len licks his bottom lip. Tastes him. His open mouth, the bristle of his beard. Len feels it in his stomach, and elsewhere.
“What was that for?” Len can’t quite look at him, and instead keeps his eyes on his hands. There’s a small sliver of wood in his palm, but it’s easily plucked out, not even a drop of blood left behind.
“I thought I lost you,” Barry says, in a voice that’s a little huskier, a little lower than usual. His thumb presses the skin where Len’s pulse beats calmly as a ticking clock. “I told myself that if I ever saw you again, somehow, I wouldn’t let you go with a handshake this time.”
Len feels the fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stand up, but when he looks there’s no change, just the phantom of one.
His fingertips trace over the shoulder seam of Barry’s shirt. When he looks up, Barry gives him his familiar, gentle smile and Len catches it between his hands, palms against Barry’s bearded cheeks.
“Can you see me?” His voice feels a little frantic, though his pulse is still frustratingly calm. His nerves don’t seem to spark the way they used to.
Barry laughs, a nervous little trill. “In the dark? Not especially well, no.”
“No,” Len says, his hands squeezing around Barry’s face as if to press in the urgency his body can’t reach. His nails dig little red crescents into Barry’s cheeks. “I mean. See me. Am I still the same?”
Barry breathes in a little shakily and frames Len’s face with his hands. There’s so much care in it: a gesture returned twice as gentle. Len presses his lips together against the sound he almost makes, but he doesn’t shut his eyes.
Barry’s energy changes like he’s vibrating from the inside out; like radio static. Len can see his eyes shining gold in the dark as they fill with lightning.
“I see you,” Barry says, his voice not quite his own. “You’re not a time remnant, or an aberration. There’s no negative Speed Force clinging to you or anything. There’s just you.”
Len goes very still. “I’m not supposed to be here.”
Barry tips forward, touches his forehead to Len’s, very soft and very human. “But you are here. Fate isn’t pulling your strings anymore. You can do anything you want.”
Len could say, that’s all I wanted, so why doesn’t it feel like I’ve won? He could say, thank you. But what he does is shift his head a little, enough to brush his mouth against Barry’s, a slick surge of warmth and wanting, Len’s tongue chasing the taste as soon as Barry pulls back.
“Leonard?” Barry’s voice is a breathy echo in the darkness.
“You said I could do anything I want,” Len murmurs, laying his fingers against Barry’s wrist where the pulse spikes like his own doesn’t anymore.
When they pull back, numb-mouthed and glassy-eyed, Barry smiles at him and asks, “And what is that?”
What Len wants is to make love, wants to do it with the lights on, without any masks at all. Wants to look at Barry with his own eyes, let Barry reach the parts of him buried so far down, he isn’t even sure what they look like anymore.
Just to see what it might feel like. He wonders if Barry will notice.
“What do you want, Leonard?” Barry insists, once the silence stretches out between them a little too long, and kisses Len on the cheek. Barry’s mouth is a little wet, his lips a bit swollen from Len’s mouth. It’s an unfairly good look on him.
Len takes a deep rattling breath.
Runs a hand down Barry’s cheek, the scratchy stubble of his beard.
Len’s fingers graze the edge of Barry’s mouth.
“Can’t you just f*ck me?” Len asks. “Can’t it just be this, can’t it be this easy?”
“No,” Barry answers honestly, “I can’t. It can’t.”
“Why not?” Len says, almost petulant in his wanting, but when Barry’s mouth opens Len kisses him instead of letting him speak. Len knows why not. He knows the answer.
Four weeks and six days after he comes back, Leonard Snart lets Barry Allen push him into the alley behind Saints & Sinners and kiss him under the night sky, under the clusters of stars and the opalescent low-hanging moon. The kiss seems to go on and on, Barry’s mouth soft and dry, the brush of his beard against Len’s chin, turning him more inside-out with every second.
The little voice in his head says, all too clearly: At last.
In his heart, and in his mind, Len is forty-four years old and hovering on the precipice of something incalculable and yet inevitable—the gaping abyss of life, spread out for his fingertips. Len feels his entire body tingling with that same feeling now, the terrifying yet exhilarating knowledge that he is about to plunge head first into an abyss of his own making. He still can’t believe where he is in this current moment, but he decides he’s okay with that. Barry pulls Len closer, starts peeling off his clothes and trailing his lips down Len’s body, and it keeps feeling like that—thrilling and hot and electrifying. Len’s body feels warm and raw and flushed with blood.
Concretely and indisputably alive.
Here and now, as Barry does a little trick with his tongue that pushes him completely over the edge, Len feels like he’s having one of those dreams where you’re falling endlessly through space, the kind that jolts you awake in a panic, only Barry is there, he’s right there, to catch Len, to break his fall.
