we are better by design

Your life is still flashing before your eyes when you realize he is still staring at you. Waiting. When the playback catches back up you are left with a realization that he introduced himself or maybe he just asked if you were alright.

“Leonard Snart.” You tell him, and ‘Thanks’ catches in your throat, but it’s the only word that does. “What did you do that for?”

Something flickers across the dark eyes in front of you and you wish that you had actually caught his name.

“Because I could.” he tells you, and you realize he smells like smoke. You are half-waiting for him to ask for something, to reach out to you again and it is a surprise when he doesn’t.

You walk away, adjusting to the new pains over older aches and that night you dream of fire.

You see them again the next day and you try not to tense but it fails. It isn’t until you see their skewed gazes that you realize it doesn’t matter - they won’t even meet your eyes.

He sits at your table and says nothing, tries nothing. Later that day you find out that his name is Mick Rory, that there are a dozen different stories about him but they boil down to this - everything he touches, burns.

He is playing with a lighter when you see him next, the flame twisting and flickering in his hand, eyes entranced even as he just-barely grazes his still-dark fingertips over its tongue.

“By the way,” you start as you approach, like there aren’t something like two days since the conversation ended. “Thanks for that.”

You reach out a hand and he doesn’t blink, doesn’t seem to acknowledge that he notices you but then he does. He smiles, and then blows out the lighter, slides it into his pocket and reaches out his hand to grip yours.

His skin is hot against yours and it isn’t until he’s used you as leverage to help him to his feet that you notice the bruises dusting his knuckles.

“They think I’m gonna set'em on fire.” Mick tells you, and you brace as he half-uses the handshake as he gets to his feet.

“Are you?” You have to ask, and his eyes are dark when he shrugs.

“That depends on them,” Mick tells you and you don’t know whether to believe him but you think that you do. You still don’t know why he cares. Why he hasn’t asked for something.

“Len, right?” Mick asks, and you pull your too-warm hand away and slip it into the safety of your pocket.

“Leonard,” the correction goes, and then another correction on top of that “Leo.”

“Len or Snart,” he tells you and you laugh because names aren’t something that you haggle over. But there you are, haggling, the idea of a name you can’t hear on your father’s lips far too tempting for it’s own good.

“Why?” The question falls from your lips and he crosses his arms.

“Otherwise you sound like a ninja turtle.” Mick admits and it’s so simple you almost give in and laugh.

“I’ll think about it,” you concede. He calls you ‘Len’ in the meantime and you don’t correct him.

You don’t know if you’re friends or not but you know that he’s there. That, god knows why, he keeps looking out for you.

Eventually your time’s done and his isn’t, and you tell him your address, watch as he says it to himself, commits it to memory.

He doesn’t have one to give.

(Forces of nature shouldn’t.)

The next time your father hits you you wonder for the first time what will actually happen if Mick shows up at your door.

What happens is - you open the door and there he is accross the street, sitting on the curb. The flame in his hand is weak and you wish it was a few days later than it was, that the bruise on your jaw and cheek was gone.

There is hell in his eyes when he sees your face. You steal a new lighter for him off someone smoking in the shelter of the bus stop.

Mick doesn’t say thank you, but he grins full force and something in your stomach does a little flip.

You see each other when you can, by foot or bus or bike and sometimes you do nothing and sometimes you do and sometimes you talk.

You talk mostly late at night, a bike that isn’t exactly yours leaned against the house that isn’t exactly Mick’s, both of you on the twin bed he’s been sleeping on. You are sore, the back of your head tender and he keeps asking and then he gives up and starts telling you instead.

He tells you about the fire that he didn’t set and didn’t stop, the flames licking the sky and the feeling like there was nothing else in the world at that moment and then he tells you that his father was in there.

You knew that. You knew that he was eight then too, though he didn’t say it - had looked for old newspapers in the library.

There is nothing to say so he keeps talking, and you listen to him talk about the fire that you wouldn’t have met him without and he can’t tell you whether or not he set it.

You look at his hand in place of reaching for it, and notice that his fingertips are clean.

What he is and isn’t responsible for is blurred along the lines somewhere. He talks about setting fires in wastebaskets and laughs at the places that sent him back.

He runs out of words eventually - you don’t think they’ve ever been Mick’s strong point, but you feel like maybe you’ve solved a puzzle. That you are some kind of penance or recompense or attempt to otherwise make good on some kind of guilt.

Knowing, finally, is a relief and a knife in the chest - unless that’s just a rib.

You don’t find out the truth until later - until he kisses you in an alley with sirens blaring nearby.

The truth was that he did it because he could.

You build yourselves up together, staying interwoven even during the times that you are seperated. The two of you are a controlled chaos, a warning.

You can remember your mother talking about angels, once upon a time. Protection and god and a dozen other things that you’ve only been able to laugh at, but you dream sometimes of the day that the two of you met and in those dreams you watch fire rain down.

You are on top of the world when that part of the dream comes true. It’s another reason not to believe in angels - not that you ever have. But you stare as he catches fire and the job as well as everything else goes to hell and you can barely find anything recognizable in his eyes.

You visit him while he’s healing, hesitating at the door and hating yourself for the uncertainty, for that very hesitance.

You don’t know what you were expecting but it was never resignation. You shrug off the discomfort and push forward - survive- and when you leave it is colder than you remember.

Everything and nothing changes. You are still a force to be reckoned with, even against the impossible. You dig your heels into the city and you do your work.

(You tell yourself things that you know aren’t true, but are convincing enough over coffee with your sister.)

You ignore the things that remind you - arson, the shiny display of zippo lighters in the gas station. The other lighters that you find in your pockets like reflex on your way home every day.

The cold. The heat.

Your dreams.

Your crew abandons you but then they were a joke anyway. They were yours, yes, but they were pieces of the puzzle - employees rather than partners.

You are the one who told him to go, and part of you that you hate wants him to show up at your door anyway.

You are only human.

You are only human – and the gun is the last straw.

For the first time in a long, long time you bend. You can forgive yourself some other time.

You can see the burns that come out from under his sleeves when you enter the cheap room but you find yourself looking for traces of black on the tip of his fingers instead. It isn’t there, but you can still smell smoke lingering in the room like it lingered in so many of your clothes.

You think to yourself that this is it - if he says yes, you will burn.

A lifetime ago his hand felt like a brand as you shook his hand, like it was headed for the core of you.

He does - you do.

You smile.