#coldwave prompt

Mick hasn’t spoken to Snart since the fire that burned him. He doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing. All he has is the number of a disposable phone for emergencies and a lot of resentment. Then one day a woman drops off a baby, a little girl, the unwanted product of a one night stand with an unstable woman that realized she isn’t willing to take care of a child.

Snart almost doesn’t answer when he gets the call. He doesn’t expect to find Mick sitting on the floor surrounded by baby stuff while he desperately tries to sooth the colic he has no idea how to handle. He doesn’t expect Mick to beg him to just hold her for one night so he can sleep, just one night of sleep is all he needs and then Snart can leave again because he can’t ask anyone else because he doesn’t trust anyone decent not to call child services on him.

He doesn’t expect to fall in love with small, angry baby. He doesn’t plan on stopping at the store, he plans on leaving after one night. But he can’t just leave a baby in the care of someone so woefully unprepared no matter how much Mick loves his daughter.

Mick manages to ignore the empty space by his side, the lack of snarky remarks, and the way the new guy always sits in Snart’s preferred chair when the team has a rare moment of celebration in Rip’s office. He manages to ignore it all until the day Rip tells them to break into a bank vault to steal a military-grade missile guidance chip, and turns dramatically in his ridiculous coat to the group and announces that he needs klepto, killer, and pyro. Then Rip pauses, horrified, and Mick realizes that he wasn’t the only one that was trying to ignore Snart’s absence.

He was supposed to wear the goggles every time he fired the cold gun. The glare of the cold flame was bright, painfully so, and he was always slightly blinded when he forgot to wear the goggles. Or they were torn off in the middle of a fight. Or they didn’t fit in with whatever stupid time period Rip dropped them in. But it always faded after a few minutes and then he could see again.

Until he noticed that it started to take longer for the dark spots to fade, for colors to return back to normal. He didn’t want think about it, so he ignored the warning signs.

He stops reading before bed, and his usually gracefully lazy body language becomes more purposeful, controlled, cautious. 

Mick notices it first. He can see that Snart is becoming frustrated by mission briefings, which often include reading material. More than once Len doesn’t notice that he’s dragged his sleeve through his food. Then one day, he takes apart the cold gun and can’t see the parts well enough to put it back together.

That’s when Mick steps in and all but drags him to the med-bay and tells Gideon to fix him. And Len can’t believe he was so blinded (ha, pun) by his reluctance to seem weak in front of his crew mates that he completely forgot they were on a ship with advanced medicine and healing lasers and stuff.