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Title: Entwine
Fandom: Legends of Tomorrow
Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with DC. It's not my toy box and I'm merely playing. I also don't own anything to do with Star Trek or Star Wars.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Post S3E9 Beebo The God of War. Mick and Leo hash out their differences.
A/N: Mick and Leo discuss several things starting with Mick's drinking and why what Leo did was dangerous. They also discuss the differences between their worlds, some of their past trauma's and Len's. If any of this is going to bother you please don't read.
Entwine:
Mick lounges, tilting the comfortable chair in Leo’s room back as far as it will go, as he tries not to scoff at the sparse room. Man hasn’t even stolen anything good from the Vikings. He lets his feet hit the floor when the door opens and greets Leo. “Question.”
“Is this a thing on your world, just breaking into people’s rooms?” Leo asks, crossing his arms and leaning in the doorway. He takes Mick in slowly. There’s a flirt in Leo’s tone, but Mick dismisses it, Leo flirts with everyone.
“My partner was a thief, you pick up a few things. I said question.” Mick points out.
“Was that a thing between the two of you? You say question he says what?”
“Ah, gloves off? Finally,” Mick drawls, letting himself tilt the chair back again. “Now my question, what were you planning to do when I started detoxing in the middle of a mission?”
“Detoxing?”
“The Snart I knew, he planned. He had back up plans on top of back up plans, each one calculated down to the second.”
“Barry had a different story.”
Mick laughs. “He would. Snart wouldn’t give his process away, not if he planned on have more fun with The Flash.”
“Fun?”
“It was fun,” Mick admits scrubbing a hand over his face, before glancing away as he admits reluctantly. “I miss it being fun.”
“Then let me help you.”
Mick wants to laugh and for one brief moment he wants Leo to help him hash out the differences between him and the man Leo knew, while another part of him wants to continue to point out why assuming someone is an alcoholic, without discussing it with them first, isn’t the safest route.
Leo finally steps into the room, letting the door shut behind him. He eyes Mick thoughtfully, almost warily. Mick forces himself to keep his posture open, he grips the arm rests of the chair to keep from crossing his arms, as he asks, “Finally get it through your head that I’m nothing like your partner?”
“In some ways you are, in others you aren’t, but you are hurting,” Leo counters.
“And how does that concern you?” Mick challenges.
Leo frowns for a brief moment before asking, “Is my being here hurting you?”
“It could have, if I was an alcoholic.”
“You drink…” Leo starts, then pauses before he admits. “I’ve never seen anyone drink like you do.”
“They’d probably die on your planet from not being alert,” Mick hazards a guess. “You probably don’t get too many alcoholics on your world, which is why I’m giving you a pass.”
“You didn’t even try.”
“I tried to bargain you from forty eight hours to forty two,” Mick reminds, then continues. “My Snart, Len, he’d have told me what he wanted, we’d bargain, barter, maybe compromise, but he wouldn’t just make a decision for me unless it was a dangerous situation.”
“On my world, drinking like that is a dangerous situation. I’ve seen it get lesser men killed.”
Mick rocks forward. Lesser men? The words give him pause. He wants to ask about Lewis, but he’s not sure he has a right to. Leo tilts his head slightly, expression softening. Mick lets the chair fall forward again, leans his arms on his knees and looks up at Leo, not sure how to phrase what he wants to ask. He wets his lips. “What was he to you, the me that you knew?”
“My partner. What was my counterpart to you?”
“Partner, but I’m not sure it means the same thing,” Mick concedes.
Leo crosses an arm over his chest, resting his other arm on it at he taps a finger against his mouth.
Mick groans as an apology. “Didn’t mean to give you a puzzle.”
“Deciding what I want to ask first. A person detoxing from alcohol can die?”
“Gideon?” Mick prompts.
“Depending on the severity of the detox and without proper medical treatment death is a possibility,” Gideon answers. “Also tremors, high blood pressure, hallucinations, seizures…”
“Thanks Gideon.”
“You’re welcome Mr. Rory.”
“In the middle of a mission and you didn’t try and talk me out of it?” Leo broaches.
“You had that don’t argue with me look on your face and I was annoyed, but I wasn’t going to detox.”
“Every time I see you you’re drinking a beer,” Leo protests.
Mick opens his mouth to answer, then laughs. Leo raises his eyebrows. Mick shakes his head. “I was going to compare it to synthethol, but now I know a you that’s never seen Star Trek.”
“Star Trek?”
“I’ll introduce you,” Mick promises, “Just whatever you do don’t let the geeks know he was one too.”
“Len?” Leo attempts to clarify.
Mick raises his eyebrows in a clear indication that he wouldn’t be referring to anyone else. Leo smirks slowly.
“Synthethol?” Leo questions. “Is alcohol that Gideon synthesizes different than fermented?”
“If it wasn’t what would we have given the Vikings?”
Leo considers this briefly, then asks, “What’s different about what you’re drinking?”
“You can get drunk off of it, you just don’t stay drunk for long.”
“You’re saying you’re constantly drink to stay drunk, but you’re not an alcoholic?” Leo raises his eyebrows.
Mick silently mouths the words Leo said with a frown, then responds, “I don’t stay drunk. If I wanted to stay drunk it wouldn’t be something Gideon gave me. I won’t detox from it. It’s got all the nutrients I need. It doesn’t taste awful. The future forgot what sugar is. Half what’s supposed to be junk food tastes like the damn rations the Time Masters used to shove down me.”
Leo’s face turns contemplative as he attempts to clarify. “You were captured by the Time Masters? Who are they?”
“Don’t you live in Star Wars on Earth? You should be worried about sugar.”
“Don’t deflect.”
Mick lips curl in distaste. “Don’t tell the geeks you don’t know about Star Wars.”
“If you’re not ready to talk about the Time Masters then…”
“No,” Mick cuts him off. “You don’t get to be concerned just because I wear another man’s face and the two of you meant something. I’m not him.”
Leo tilts his head. “I know that, but I get to decide if I want to be concerned. Mickey was a good man, he…”
“The irony is,” Mick interrupts. “You’re telling me that the version of me that’s wasn’t fucked in the head lived on a world where everyone’s fucked in the head.”
“He had his problems too,” Leo tempers.
“I’d tell you pyromania is an actual diagnosis, but I’m guessing your world doesn’t have a DSM.”
“Temper,” Leo tells him. “Always so quick to anger.”
Mick bites out a grumble, but reigns in his temper. “I want to talk. I hate talking about fe-feel…I won’t like it, but you stayed and now we have to.”
“You sound overjoyed,” Leo observes with hint of amusement in the quirk of his lips.
Mick blows out a long breath, then admits, “I miss him.”
“I’ve moved on, but there will always be things I want to tell him,” Leo agrees.
“Do you have a puppet?”
Leo laughs. “It helps people move on.”
“You live on a world where everyone’s fucked in the head,” Mick reiterates.
“The ability to be functional does mean life or death,” Leo agrees. “But I was able to move on and you aren’t, you’re stuck.”
Mick scrubs a hand over his face again and looks away.
“It doesn’t mean you cared for him any less,” Leo tries
“Len knew all of my scars and I knew all of his,” Mick isn’t sure how to take the tone of his own voice. He knows he’ll never trust another person the way he trusted Len.
Leo takes a step forward. Mick turns to glare at him. Leo throws his hands up and moves back to leaning against the wall.
Mick growls out a breath before looking away briefly. He shifts again to look at Leo as he admits, “I still do things because I know I’d have enjoyed telling him about them.”
Leo considers him silently for a moment before he offers, “Maybe we have the same sense of humor?”
“You do, that’s what makes this,” Mick pauses as he searches for the right word.
“Difficult?”
Mick nods.
“Tell me one thing you’ve done recently because you wanted to be able to tell him about it,” Leo pushes.
Mick meets Leo’s gaze. “Julius Caesar fucked up my vacation so I tied him to a chair, made a Caesar salad, then ate it in front of him while telling him how much it sucked.”
Mick isn’t sure what to do with the hope that blooms in him at the amusement on Leo’s face. For one brief moment he’s not so alone, not an outsider among the outsiders, but he remembers feeling this way about Zari too and he knows better, he should know better.
“Tell me one thing that different about your Len and me,” Leo continues.
Mick stills. He almost asks about scars, wondering if Leo would let him trace them with his fingers like Len had. What would he do if there were barely any hidden beneath those long sleeves? What if Leo somehow had more than Len? Mick’s fingers itch to move for one brief moment, before Mick huffs out a breath, “Leo. That was Lewis’ name for him. Len hated it.”
“You sound like you hated him, my dad.”
“I never met him, but I saw what he’d done. When did you lose him?”
“I was five,” Leo admits slowly, voice suddenly rote in the way of information that’s been repeated enough to be routine, but hollow as if each word still has the weight of the hurt behind it. “My mom was taken when I was nine. I found what they…I figured out what’d happened to her when I was fifteen. She’d died when I was eleven.”
Leo glances away.
“Siblings?” Mick asks to break the tension.
“Family isn’t always blood.”
“Len had Lisa. Younger, different mom. I don’t know if she’ll want to meet you, that’s on her. Len was protective, I have to respect that.”
Leo is carefully still, wanting, but still. Len would’ve feigned indifference. “I’d appreciate that.”
Leo is as hungry for family as Len ever was and Mick suddenly feels the weight of it, this shared history that neither of them fully knows or is ready to articulate, and yet neither of them can walk away. Mick’s tired. What he and Len built between them wasn’t simple or easy and Mick knows he doesn’t have the energy to hash out their history to a man that is so much like Len and yet in some ways a complete stranger. Mick doesn’t have it in him to be rejected, again. Mick tells himself he should walk away.
He stands. Leo shifts to face him. Mick steps towards the door as he searches for a biting remark that would end this. Leo tilts his head, just slightly, just enough that Mick recognizes the look on his face. Mick pauses. Leo’s intrigued and not ready to back down, if he leaves Leo will follow, will poke and prod until he’s satisfied. Leo doesn’t know him like Len did, he won’t recognize when Mick needs space or when he doesn’t, except maybe Mickey had the same tells?
“There’s still one thing I want to know,” Mick says as he turns to face Leo.
“Yes?” Leo prompts. He doesn’t moved when Mick closes the distance between them. He holds Mick’s gaze and raises his eyebrows. Mick leans in, presses his nose against Leo’s parka. He turns his head till his cheek is resting against Leo’s shoulder. He breathes out slowly, then in again.
“Fuck,” Mick drags the syllable out. “You smell like him.”
Leo’s arms wrap around Mick, holding him, but not trapping him as he lets Mick lean heavily against him. He doesn’t comment on the tight fists Mick has tangled at the back of his parka.
Sequel:
Versed
Fandom: Legends of Tomorrow
Disclaimer: I own nothing to do with DC. It's not my toy box and I'm merely playing. I also don't own anything to do with Star Trek or Star Wars.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Post S3E9 Beebo The God of War. Mick and Leo hash out their differences.
A/N: Mick and Leo discuss several things starting with Mick's drinking and why what Leo did was dangerous. They also discuss the differences between their worlds, some of their past trauma's and Len's. If any of this is going to bother you please don't read.
Entwine:
Mick lounges, tilting the comfortable chair in Leo’s room back as far as it will go, as he tries not to scoff at the sparse room. Man hasn’t even stolen anything good from the Vikings. He lets his feet hit the floor when the door opens and greets Leo. “Question.”
“Is this a thing on your world, just breaking into people’s rooms?” Leo asks, crossing his arms and leaning in the doorway. He takes Mick in slowly. There’s a flirt in Leo’s tone, but Mick dismisses it, Leo flirts with everyone.
“My partner was a thief, you pick up a few things. I said question.” Mick points out.
“Was that a thing between the two of you? You say question he says what?”
“Ah, gloves off? Finally,” Mick drawls, letting himself tilt the chair back again. “Now my question, what were you planning to do when I started detoxing in the middle of a mission?”
“Detoxing?”
“The Snart I knew, he planned. He had back up plans on top of back up plans, each one calculated down to the second.”
“Barry had a different story.”
Mick laughs. “He would. Snart wouldn’t give his process away, not if he planned on have more fun with The Flash.”
“Fun?”
“It was fun,” Mick admits scrubbing a hand over his face, before glancing away as he admits reluctantly. “I miss it being fun.”
“Then let me help you.”
Mick wants to laugh and for one brief moment he wants Leo to help him hash out the differences between him and the man Leo knew, while another part of him wants to continue to point out why assuming someone is an alcoholic, without discussing it with them first, isn’t the safest route.
Leo finally steps into the room, letting the door shut behind him. He eyes Mick thoughtfully, almost warily. Mick forces himself to keep his posture open, he grips the arm rests of the chair to keep from crossing his arms, as he asks, “Finally get it through your head that I’m nothing like your partner?”
“In some ways you are, in others you aren’t, but you are hurting,” Leo counters.
“And how does that concern you?” Mick challenges.
Leo frowns for a brief moment before asking, “Is my being here hurting you?”
“It could have, if I was an alcoholic.”
“You drink…” Leo starts, then pauses before he admits. “I’ve never seen anyone drink like you do.”
“They’d probably die on your planet from not being alert,” Mick hazards a guess. “You probably don’t get too many alcoholics on your world, which is why I’m giving you a pass.”
“You didn’t even try.”
“I tried to bargain you from forty eight hours to forty two,” Mick reminds, then continues. “My Snart, Len, he’d have told me what he wanted, we’d bargain, barter, maybe compromise, but he wouldn’t just make a decision for me unless it was a dangerous situation.”
“On my world, drinking like that is a dangerous situation. I’ve seen it get lesser men killed.”
Mick rocks forward. Lesser men? The words give him pause. He wants to ask about Lewis, but he’s not sure he has a right to. Leo tilts his head slightly, expression softening. Mick lets the chair fall forward again, leans his arms on his knees and looks up at Leo, not sure how to phrase what he wants to ask. He wets his lips. “What was he to you, the me that you knew?”
“My partner. What was my counterpart to you?”
“Partner, but I’m not sure it means the same thing,” Mick concedes.
Leo crosses an arm over his chest, resting his other arm on it at he taps a finger against his mouth.
Mick groans as an apology. “Didn’t mean to give you a puzzle.”
“Deciding what I want to ask first. A person detoxing from alcohol can die?”
“Gideon?” Mick prompts.
“Depending on the severity of the detox and without proper medical treatment death is a possibility,” Gideon answers. “Also tremors, high blood pressure, hallucinations, seizures…”
“Thanks Gideon.”
“You’re welcome Mr. Rory.”
“In the middle of a mission and you didn’t try and talk me out of it?” Leo broaches.
“You had that don’t argue with me look on your face and I was annoyed, but I wasn’t going to detox.”
“Every time I see you you’re drinking a beer,” Leo protests.
Mick opens his mouth to answer, then laughs. Leo raises his eyebrows. Mick shakes his head. “I was going to compare it to synthethol, but now I know a you that’s never seen Star Trek.”
“Star Trek?”
“I’ll introduce you,” Mick promises, “Just whatever you do don’t let the geeks know he was one too.”
“Len?” Leo attempts to clarify.
Mick raises his eyebrows in a clear indication that he wouldn’t be referring to anyone else. Leo smirks slowly.
“Synthethol?” Leo questions. “Is alcohol that Gideon synthesizes different than fermented?”
“If it wasn’t what would we have given the Vikings?”
Leo considers this briefly, then asks, “What’s different about what you’re drinking?”
“You can get drunk off of it, you just don’t stay drunk for long.”
“You’re saying you’re constantly drink to stay drunk, but you’re not an alcoholic?” Leo raises his eyebrows.
Mick silently mouths the words Leo said with a frown, then responds, “I don’t stay drunk. If I wanted to stay drunk it wouldn’t be something Gideon gave me. I won’t detox from it. It’s got all the nutrients I need. It doesn’t taste awful. The future forgot what sugar is. Half what’s supposed to be junk food tastes like the damn rations the Time Masters used to shove down me.”
Leo’s face turns contemplative as he attempts to clarify. “You were captured by the Time Masters? Who are they?”
“Don’t you live in Star Wars on Earth? You should be worried about sugar.”
“Don’t deflect.”
Mick lips curl in distaste. “Don’t tell the geeks you don’t know about Star Wars.”
“If you’re not ready to talk about the Time Masters then…”
“No,” Mick cuts him off. “You don’t get to be concerned just because I wear another man’s face and the two of you meant something. I’m not him.”
Leo tilts his head. “I know that, but I get to decide if I want to be concerned. Mickey was a good man, he…”
“The irony is,” Mick interrupts. “You’re telling me that the version of me that’s wasn’t fucked in the head lived on a world where everyone’s fucked in the head.”
“He had his problems too,” Leo tempers.
“I’d tell you pyromania is an actual diagnosis, but I’m guessing your world doesn’t have a DSM.”
“Temper,” Leo tells him. “Always so quick to anger.”
Mick bites out a grumble, but reigns in his temper. “I want to talk. I hate talking about fe-feel…I won’t like it, but you stayed and now we have to.”
“You sound overjoyed,” Leo observes with hint of amusement in the quirk of his lips.
Mick blows out a long breath, then admits, “I miss him.”
“I’ve moved on, but there will always be things I want to tell him,” Leo agrees.
“Do you have a puppet?”
Leo laughs. “It helps people move on.”
“You live on a world where everyone’s fucked in the head,” Mick reiterates.
“The ability to be functional does mean life or death,” Leo agrees. “But I was able to move on and you aren’t, you’re stuck.”
Mick scrubs a hand over his face again and looks away.
“It doesn’t mean you cared for him any less,” Leo tries
“Len knew all of my scars and I knew all of his,” Mick isn’t sure how to take the tone of his own voice. He knows he’ll never trust another person the way he trusted Len.
Leo takes a step forward. Mick turns to glare at him. Leo throws his hands up and moves back to leaning against the wall.
Mick growls out a breath before looking away briefly. He shifts again to look at Leo as he admits, “I still do things because I know I’d have enjoyed telling him about them.”
Leo considers him silently for a moment before he offers, “Maybe we have the same sense of humor?”
“You do, that’s what makes this,” Mick pauses as he searches for the right word.
“Difficult?”
Mick nods.
“Tell me one thing you’ve done recently because you wanted to be able to tell him about it,” Leo pushes.
Mick meets Leo’s gaze. “Julius Caesar fucked up my vacation so I tied him to a chair, made a Caesar salad, then ate it in front of him while telling him how much it sucked.”
Mick isn’t sure what to do with the hope that blooms in him at the amusement on Leo’s face. For one brief moment he’s not so alone, not an outsider among the outsiders, but he remembers feeling this way about Zari too and he knows better, he should know better.
“Tell me one thing that different about your Len and me,” Leo continues.
Mick stills. He almost asks about scars, wondering if Leo would let him trace them with his fingers like Len had. What would he do if there were barely any hidden beneath those long sleeves? What if Leo somehow had more than Len? Mick’s fingers itch to move for one brief moment, before Mick huffs out a breath, “Leo. That was Lewis’ name for him. Len hated it.”
“You sound like you hated him, my dad.”
“I never met him, but I saw what he’d done. When did you lose him?”
“I was five,” Leo admits slowly, voice suddenly rote in the way of information that’s been repeated enough to be routine, but hollow as if each word still has the weight of the hurt behind it. “My mom was taken when I was nine. I found what they…I figured out what’d happened to her when I was fifteen. She’d died when I was eleven.”
Leo glances away.
“Siblings?” Mick asks to break the tension.
“Family isn’t always blood.”
“Len had Lisa. Younger, different mom. I don’t know if she’ll want to meet you, that’s on her. Len was protective, I have to respect that.”
Leo is carefully still, wanting, but still. Len would’ve feigned indifference. “I’d appreciate that.”
Leo is as hungry for family as Len ever was and Mick suddenly feels the weight of it, this shared history that neither of them fully knows or is ready to articulate, and yet neither of them can walk away. Mick’s tired. What he and Len built between them wasn’t simple or easy and Mick knows he doesn’t have the energy to hash out their history to a man that is so much like Len and yet in some ways a complete stranger. Mick doesn’t have it in him to be rejected, again. Mick tells himself he should walk away.
He stands. Leo shifts to face him. Mick steps towards the door as he searches for a biting remark that would end this. Leo tilts his head, just slightly, just enough that Mick recognizes the look on his face. Mick pauses. Leo’s intrigued and not ready to back down, if he leaves Leo will follow, will poke and prod until he’s satisfied. Leo doesn’t know him like Len did, he won’t recognize when Mick needs space or when he doesn’t, except maybe Mickey had the same tells?
“There’s still one thing I want to know,” Mick says as he turns to face Leo.
“Yes?” Leo prompts. He doesn’t moved when Mick closes the distance between them. He holds Mick’s gaze and raises his eyebrows. Mick leans in, presses his nose against Leo’s parka. He turns his head till his cheek is resting against Leo’s shoulder. He breathes out slowly, then in again.
“Fuck,” Mick drags the syllable out. “You smell like him.”
Leo’s arms wrap around Mick, holding him, but not trapping him as he lets Mick lean heavily against him. He doesn’t comment on the tight fists Mick has tangled at the back of his parka.
Sequel:
Versed
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