#razzleyd

Mick Rory Appreciation Week: Day Two - Favorite Relationship 

Ooooh that’s a really interesting theory. I feel like maybe Ray trying to do what’s best for Mick might sit well in an atomwave fic? But Mick would have to suffer significant trauma for straightforward Ray to do something like that.

Canonically, I don’t think Mick’s been given room to deal with his traumas on the show itself: I mean, he got back from a place where he had been tortured for decades, if not longer, and all we got was ‘I thought about the team’ and that basically solved the problem, nobody thinking twice about what Mick went through and how it changed him or how he dealt with it all. Then Len’s death - okay, we got a few scenes where Ray acknowledges that loss, which is why I do think that maybe Ray really would be the most likely candidate to try and help Mick... but I see Ray as the ‘try and talk it through’ type, or maybe just trying to distract Mick somehow and be there for him. Ray strikes me more as the type of guy who would believe in remembering the good and the bad, because it made him stronger: I just finally got to watch the latest LoT ep, and what struck me as character-defining for Ray was that he never tried to tell his younger self ‘it gets better’. He never told little!Ray that he would get people in his life who would be there for him, he never said ‘you grow up strong and smart and capable and there will be people who will appreciate that.’

Now, of course, that could be read as Ray not really believing that even now, which would be understandable, because he would, and does, risk his life for the team, for any single member of that team, but maybe he doesn’t feel like the sentiment’s mutual. Maybe the trust exercises and bonding he was trying to work into their lives weren’t completely about Zari: maybe they were about Ray’s own desperate need for that connection and trust and mutual (platonic) love that he’s missing.

But I’m getting sidetracked - what I wanted to say that I choose to read Ray’s refusal to tell his younger self about his future is at least partly because Ray acknowledges that the loneliness in his life had a purpose, or at least shaped him in significant ways and made him who he is today. So I don’t really believe he would want to erase Len from Mick’s memory, because Len was (has been?) a similarly significant influence on Mick’s life. Ray would probably be all up in Mick’s face if he heard about Mick’s own plan to ask the Time Bureau for such erasure.

Which, incidentally, I don’t think Mick would do, at least not the Mick the way I see him: still significantly influenced and traumatized by the Time Masters’ meddling with his brain. We’ve seen Mick so scared when he though there was something wrong with his brain: with the hallucinations, with the zombie infection... so I don’t believe he’d let just anyone into his head, and definitely not Rip. Mick seems to nurse his traumas and water them with beer, so what I see realistically happening is Mick descending deeper into the alcoholic haze - I would love to see that addressed on the show as more than an off-key joke here and there.