Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Day 1: Friday, October 17^th, 1975

Dear Lisa,

Yeah, I’m not going with the whole ‘Dear Diary’ crap, but maybe it feels less like I’m writing a diary if I pretend that I’m writing letters to you.

So no, the date’s not wrong, and no, I’m not writing this as some super-genius three-year-old. You see, two days ago, I was knocking over the C.C. Bullion Exchange with Mick, and as we were making our getaway, we nearly ran over some lunatic who stood in the middle of the street and knocked us out with some freaky flashing thing. The next thing I knew, we were waking up on a rooftop with six other people. One of them was Martin Stein, a professor who was thought to be killed in the STAR Labs explosion but turned out to be alive. He’s also a friend of the Flash (I sometimes cased S.T.A.R. Labs when I got bored last summer and saw him going in and out of there a lot). Then there were two people in bronze armor who looked kind of like those pictures on the internet of people with wings flying around New Orleans, and that Ray Palmer guy from Star City. Guess he didn’t die in that explosion last May, either.

Basically, we were surrounded by heroes. The flying girl even said she and her boyfriend knew the Flash and the Green Arrow.

Point is, we then got approached by some guy in a trench coat – the same nutjob we nearly turned into roadkill – who said he was from the future, and he went on into a spiel about how some guy called Savage was going to take over the world 150 years from now and he wanted our help to stop him.

I told him there was no way I was joining up with a bunch of heroes, but then he told us we would be famous legends, or something like that. Palmer seemed to be sold by that, the idiot. Mick and I walked away, and it sounded like one of the others was going to do the same – smart kid.

Then I got to thinking. We were being given a chance to travel through time. All I could think about was the sort of opportunities that could give us. Where we could go, what we could steal. I told Mick just that, and we decided we were on board after all, and we’d probably get to kick a lot of ass along the way.

Confession: that’s not the only reason I decided to go. It’s just the only one I told Mick. Bar The Flash once visited me in prison after I iced Dad. He told me that I didn’t have to let my past define me, and that I could do better. Dad’s gone. Half the reason I became a criminal was to prove that I was better at it than he was, but look how that turned out. He’s dead now, and he went out knowing that I cooperated with a hero. Maybe I want to be more than just some low-life crook people look down their noses at. Maybe I want to be remembered for something else.

I really have no clue.

Well, now that the introspective crap is out of the way, back down to business.

We showed up at an empty parking lot. I honestly wasn’t sure where to go, since I never bothered to look at the address Rip (the time-traveler) gave Stein before I left. I had to stake out STAR Labs and spotted Palmer leaving – probably saying goodbye to his pals there – and we followed him. The looks on their faces when we actually showed up were kind of hysterical. And we weren’t the ones who showed up with an unconscious guy in the car. Apparently, the kid who was planning on turning Rip down was partnered with Stein in some way, and the old man actually roofied him to bring him along. Mick’s still bugging him for a sample.

I figure I should give you a ‘cast of characters’ at this point.

You know me and Mick, two master criminals with fire and ice guns.

Stein and the kid – Jax – are apparently that ‘Burning Man’ who appeared in the tabloids last year – sorry, Stein was. Seems it takes two of them merging into what he calls ‘Firestorm’, and Jax is his second other half. The first one died closing that big black hole last May, and was engaged married to Caitlin from STAR Labs. Small world. Stein comes off as stuffy and arrogant; we’re going to have some problems there. From my first impression, Jax is alright, or at least less judgemental and stuck-up, but I’ve barely known any of these people a day.

Palmer’s got some high-tech suit he built himself that lets him fly around and shrink and shoot lasers. This is what happens when billionaire techies get bored, I guess. He’s one of those overenthusiastic, optimistic people that remind you of a puppy dog. The annoying kind of puppy dog that won’t shut up. Two minutes in his presence and I wanted to ice him, but his brains could be useful.

As for the bird people, they’re not actually dating. Or they are. It’s really hard to tell. They’re sort of as old as Savage (who is apparently immortal and 4000 years old), except while he can’t die, they reincarnate over and over and he kills them over and over. He’s killed them 206 times. The guy, Carter, joined because he wants it to stop at 206, and he figures having a team will tip the scales. Kendra thinks joining this gig will make it 207, and I guess they had a big fight over it and Carter won. She was not pleased to be there. Carter said he remembers all 4000 years of his past lives, and how he and Kendra are soulmates. Kendra barely remembers any of it, and only met Carter and started remembering 2 months ago, and I think his ‘soulmate’ talk kind of creeps her out a bit.

And then there’s Sara. She looked like an ordinary woman at first. From what she and Palmer were talking about before Stein showed up (yes, I was eavesdropping, what else would you expect?), she’s been trained as an assassin, so she’s not just a pretty face. Then she told me later that she was dead for a year. And no, she didn’t tell me how the hell she came back, but she did call me out for staring at her ass. What can I say? She’s got a good one.

If you actually wind up reading this, Lisa, don’t smack me. This wasn’t actually meant for your eyes. So stay out of my journals. I know where you hide yours.

And then we have Rip. I really don’t like him, for reasons I’ll go into later.

He showed us his huge time ship, which looked like something off an episode of Star Trek. Then he took us to some neighborhood in New Orleans called St. Roch in 1975 and then told us about the side-effects of time travel, which include nausea (Mick threw up), vertigo (Palmer face-planted into the floor right in front of me), temporary blindness (Stein), and bleeding behind the eyeballs (thankfully none of that happened on this trip). The rest of us just got mild headaches and were disoriented for a minute or two. And this was a ‘short’ jump of about 40 years.

And just when I thought we’d be having some fun, Rip went and benched me, Mick, and Sara, because he didn’t need crooks or killers yet. He took the rest to talk to some historian who knew a ton about Savage and was going to die soon so that they couldn’t change his actions so drastically it could alter time. Stein called it “brilliant”; Kendra called it “depressing”. I’m with Bird Girl on this one, but if Rip wants to be all anal about the timeline, it is the most practical route.

So, there I was, stuck on some flying time machine with Mick and Sara and Jax, who stayed behind out of protest, and would rather hang with a couple of criminals than the guy who roofied him. Can’t blame him for that. Maybe he figured that since Sara has history with the other hero types, he’d be safe with her there. The ship has TV, but there was nothing good on, so Sara suggested we go get a drink. We ditched Jax – he’s underage anyway, and we don’t exactly have the resources to make him a fake ID – and found a dive bar. Although it turned out that the ID thing might not have been an issue, because nobody asked us for any, which is a good thing because Mick and I weren’t carrying any and Sara’s lists her as being born in ’87. As in 12 years from now. But Jax is young enough that he still might’ve been carded.

Then things finally got fun. Sara was on the dance floor for less than five seconds before some moron came up and propositioned her. Didn’t even bother to keep his voice down. Sure, I wasn’t being all that subtle about continuing to stare at her ass, but I just look, I don’t touch unless invited, especially not when dealing with an assassin. The idiot called her a bitch when she turned him down and grabbed her arm, so she broke his wrist. That was badass, plain and simple. A halfway-intelligent person would walk away, but he just smashed a beer bottle and came after her with that, right in the middle of the bar, so she beat the crap out of him and five of his buddies before they stopped coming at her one at a time. Then she invited me and Mick to join in and we trashed them. I’ve been in plenty of bar fights before, but this one was the most fun by far.

After the fight was over, we jacked a car for the hell of it (turns out pre-assassin Sara was a bit of a delinquent herself) and headed back, and that was where the fun ended. We got back to the ship to find some guy in sci-fi armor shooting at the others, so Mick sideswiped him with the car and we covered everyone as we got on the ship and got the hell out of there. Kendra and Carter tried to bring the historian along (Stein said they were the guy’s parents in a past life – again, small world), but he got shot and later died in the ship’s infirmary.

Now we get to the reason why I don’t like Rip. Turns out he lied to us. The organization he works for didn’t send him to recruit us and stop Savage. They told him to do nothing, so he stole the time ship and did it himself, so they sent their bounty hunter after us. That part doesn’t bother me so much, but then he admitted that we were never going to be legends; he picked the 8 of us because if we got killed on this crazy mission, history wouldn’t be screwed up because we were insignificant to it. We’re just expendable cannon fodder. I get why he’s pissed at Savage, because the jackass apparently killed Rip’s wife and kid, but I won’t be used like that.

At that point, I was ready to pack up and go home. Then Sara made an excellent point. She said that we were on a mission to take down an immortal psychopath and change history, so why couldn’t we change our own role in history?

So I decided to stay on. And somehow so did Mick. If history wants to call us insignificant, we’ll flip history off and prove that we’re not.

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Day 2: Saturday, October 18^th, 1975

Dear Lisa,

To go with the old cliché, if you’re reading this, either I’m dead or you’re just too nosy for your own good.

I’ve said many times that even the best-laid plans can go sideways. We didn’t have any well-laid plans today, and now Carter is dead.

It started off badly to begin with. Our next stop was Norway, where we were supposed to infiltrate an illegal arms auction, find Savage among the buyers, and kidnap then kill him. Stein got us through the door, pretending to be a high-ranking member of some terrorist group called ‘Scimitar’ – which is a good thing, because I admittedly screwed up the entry plan. Not that I’ll ever admit that anywhere other than in here.

Note to self: when swiping a guy’s ID to gain entry, check to be sure it’s a name the bouncer will believe I could have; there’s no way he bought my claim that I’m half-Arab.

Of course, Savage turned out to be selling a nuke, so there was a lot more attention on him. There were a lot of dangerous people there; Sara IDed Damien Darhk, the guy who’s been terrorizing Star City in 2016. He’s well-known to the League of Assassins, the really old organization that trained her. Their leader, Ra’s al Ghul (I admit I needed her help to spell that right – it’s pronounced ‘Roz Al Ghoul’) is hundreds of years old, thanks to some sort of Pit, which I’m guessing is what brought her back to life, and Darhk is somehow just as old. If there were any more of those at the auction, I’d start thinking this was some sort of social club for immortals.

Darhk probably made us the second he laid eyes on us. Stein insisted on bidding on the nuke to ‘blend in’, but we wound up winning and standing out. Darhk got right in our faces, said he knew everyone in the ‘business’ (if he’s as old as Sara says, I believe it) and didn’t know us. We got made when Stein chose his words poorly, and Savage offered a massive discount to whoever could kill us, so naturally a big fight broke out, and Firestorm had to fly off and contain the explosion when Savage activated the nuke as an added distraction. We got away with nothing – actually, less than nothing. A piece of Palmer’s tech got knocked off his suit and got scooped up by Savage’s goons. Rip showed us what would happen by 2016 if we didn’t get it back before his scientists figured out how to reverse-engineer it: his plans would be sped up by decades and Central City, at least, would be a flaming wreck. All I could think about was whether or not you were alive in that mess. Or if the city hadn’t been destroyed with Mom and/or Dad dying before you could even be born. I think now I get what Rip meant when he was talking about maintaining the timeline. One small oversight could destroy everything we care about.

So, Rip split us up into teams. Stein and Palmer figured out a way to track the missing tech, and Rip sent the Prof with Jax and Sara to grab something they needed from 1975 Stein. Kendra and Carter found something in Dr. Boardman’s (their historian son from a past life) journal about an ancient dagger that could be used to kill Savage, then bugged off to go try unlocking more of her memories to translate some inscription on it. Naturally, I volunteered myself and Mick to go steal the knife from its current owner, but Rip made Palmer tag along, instead of going to retrieve his own lost tech.

It all went to hell pretty quickly with the idiot genius tagging along. How someone can be simultaneously so smart and so stupid is beyond me. The amateur fell for a dummy box barely a minute after our arrival, so Mick and I had to deal with the security guards, and then he threw a fit about us stealing some other artifacts and triggered another security measure that got me and him stuck in a cage. Seriously, a big cage dropping out of the ceiling like we were in some sort of cartoon. He was moderately useful in deactivating the alarm, but by then, the owner came into the room, dragging Mick in a headlock. Guess what? Turns out ‘Sasha Mahnovski’ is just an alias for Vandal Savage. I wish I’d done more research into the guy we were stealing from. Just a picture would have alerted us to that little fact!

He had us call the team over, to give himself a chance at offing Kendra and Carter again, but he got more than what he bargained for, because Firestorm showed up first and blasted him across the room before breaking us out. Seems their part of the mission went better than ours. I gave Carter the dagger and the rest of us held off the guards while he and Kendra went to take down Savage.

By the time we got to them, Carter was dead and Kendra had been stabbed, so we grabbed her and ran back to the ship. 2 days into this insanity and we’re already down a man. If it were any old job, I’d say the hell with it and walk away, but not only are we stuck in 1975 until Kendra heals, but I signed on to this team, and Carter wasn’t just some lackey.

Savage is going to pay for this. Maybe Kendra’s the only one who can kill him now, but before she does, I’m going to make sure I let him know what it means to mess with my crew.

One other thing: I started this as just a journal that wasn’t meant for you to read, Lisa, but today’s been a wake-up call. Like I said, we’re a man down only 2 days in, so I really don’t know what’s going to happen next, or if the rest of us are all going to survive. If something happens to me, sis, at least you’ll understand why.

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Day 3: Sunday, October 19^th, 1975

Dear Lisa,

Overall, today was a good day for the mission. We got Carter’s body back for a proper burial and put Savage down, however temporarily. For me, personally, it was a pointless failure.

After Carter died, Rip decided to mope about how we couldn’t do anything until Kendra recovered from her stab wound. We apparently can’t do any time-jumps with a seriously injured person on board. Well, we can, but not without killing them. So he seemed content resigned to sitting and waiting for the ship’s high-tech infirmary and Stein and Palmer to heal her up. Sara came up with some sort of idea involving a bank, but Rip wouldn’t let me or Mick participate – Sara had to fight just to get him to let her in on the mission, and it had been her idea in the first place!

So, we were left with nothing to do, and I got an idea. On October 21^st, 1975, Dad got caught breaking into Central City Museum trying to steal the Maximillian Emerald. It sent him to prison for the first time in his life. You don’t remember this, but he wasn’t as bad before that. I was only 3, but I remember he was a decent dad, at least. He never hurt me or Mom until he got back 5 years later.

I got to thinking that maybe I could change things. That if we were on a mission to stop an immortal warlord from taking over the world, changing one man’s life shouldn’t be that hard. That maybe I could keep him from going to prison, from becoming the monster who terrorized us for the rest of his life. That maybe we could get a better shot at a real childhood.

When Rip was talking to us this morning, he mentioned something called a Jump Ship. It’s like a mini-jet docked on the Waverider, and it was damaged when Chronos (the bounty hunter from Friday) shot the place up. He had Jax working on it all day, and I have to give the kid credit: the 20-year-old auto-mechanic fixed a 22^nd century spaceship. We… coerced him into taking us to Central City, to be our getaway driver pilot while we robbed the museum. Mick grabbed pretty much anything he could fit in his pockets, but I zeroed in on the emerald.

I wish Mick had kept his mouth shut when I told Jax to take us to our old house on Hadley Ave. I didn’t think the kid needed to know about my past. All he saw when he looked at us was a pair of thieves, and nothing else, and that was fine with me. But then Mick blabbed about how Dad got caught stealing that emerald and how I was trying to change that. I still gave the kid further explanation when it was over, since otherwise he might’ve gone and told Rip on us if he didn’t understand why I did what I did. Okay, so I wasn’t all that worried about Rip finding out – he brought a couple of criminals on this mission, so it’s his own damn fault. And Jax did deserve an explanation for what we’d dragged him into.

When we got to the house, I had Jax and Mick wait outside while I went in. It never really hit me that I’d traveled through time until I saw the inside of the old house. Before, it was like we were just visiting some places that hadn’t updated their security or décor in a while. The house was just like I remember it: Dad’s beer bottles all over the place, my toys covering the coffee table. I know Dad never let you leave your toys anywhere outside your room, but he wasn’t as bad back then. I had a corner of the living room all to myself; his poker parties never infringed on my space, keeping the ‘adult stuff’ separate from the ‘kid stuff’.

I was just going to go in and out, leaving the emerald in the basement where Dad was planning his heist. But my plan didn’t count on my 3-year-old self being thirsty and coming down for a glass of water in the middle of the night. I – he – thought I was a friend of Dad’s, and I went along with it. I gave him some advice, something I had to learn the hard way: to look out for himself, to not let anyone hurt him. I’m not sure how much 3-year-old-me understood, but I had to try.

Dad came in at that point. He must’ve been in the basement working on his plan and heard us talking. He pointed a gun at my head and told me to get away from his son. As much as I know he wasn’t an abusive bastard before prison, I think I forgot that he actually cared.

Once my kid self was upstairs in bed, I gave Dad the emerald and warned him about what would’ve happened if he’d gone through with the heist. I wanted to kill him again, to punish him for what he put us through. But you wouldn’t be born if I ended him in ’75. So I let him live.

And it was all for nothing; I checked with the ship’s AI, Gideon, when I got back (how have I not mentioned her yet?). Dad still got arrested for the theft, getting caught trying to fence the emerald to an undercover cop. I gave him a chance at avoiding prison and avoiding becoming a monster, and he still managed to fuck it up. Rip has said a couple times that ‘time wants to happen’. I think I just learned that the hard way. As much as I can’t stand Rip, he has proven that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to time-travel.

It’s just that… If I can’t even change one man’s fate, how the hell are we supposed to change the fate of the world? It’s just as well that I signed on for the stealing opportunities, because now I’m not sure how well the main mission is going to turn out.

Even then, the main mission made more progress today than my personal mission did. Seems the purpose of Rip and Sara’s trip to the bank was to try and find where Savage kept his finances. If he was crippled economically, then at least his plans would be slowed, and we’d get more time to kill him. Somehow that led to them being held captive by Savage and his followers. Gideon alerted us as we were on our way back (the Waverider was parked in Germany), so the three of us had to mount a rescue. Mick compared the scene to ‘Eyes Wide Shut’, but I personally was reminded of ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’. We got away with Carter’s body, and Rip slit Savage’s throat, but since he’s not Carter or Kendra, the bastard will be back.

Sara explained the whole ritual later. Savage absorbs the Hawks’ life forces when he kills them, which maintains his immortality, but his followers can gain another century or so if they drink their blood, which is why Savage still needed Carter. Most of his wealth comes from them; they worship him as a god, in exchange for supernatural longevity. Tempting as it would sound to live longer, I couldn’t make that trade, bowing down to a rotten bastard like Savage. He makes Dad look like a saint, which you know is saying something.

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Day 4: Tuesday, February 11^th, 1986

Dear Lisa,

We buried Carter and Dr. Boardman this morning. Stein and Palmer managed to pull the broken-off shards of the dagger out of Kendra, or something, and she recovered remarkably quickly after that. Let’s hear it for 22^nd-century medical tech. We’ll be making a time-jump to our next destination in a few minutes, now that she’s in good shape again, so I’m just taking the time to write this before we have to report to the bridge.

We landed in 1986 and got right to our first mission: busting into the goddamn Pentagon to retrieve a file that could lead us to Savage’s location. That’s definitely going on the list of my Top 10 Most Ambitious Heists. It turns out I was wrong earlier when I thought we didn’t have the resources to make fake IDs, because in addition our disguises, the ship was able to produce the credentials we needed to get through the doors. Too bad Gideon probably wouldn’t give us IDs for any side-jobs.

But one thing we couldn’t fabricate was a magnetic key card. My part in the plan worked perfectly; I lifted an officer’s card for Sara to use to get into a secure area (and nicked her wallet while I was at it). Sara and Kendra got the file just fine, and Mick distracted the soldiers and security techs excellently, but then something went wrong when Firestorm tried to divert the power. An alarm went off and the girls got stopped by security and had to fight their way free, and Kendra went psycho for whatever reason. We got what we wanted, but I can’t say we did it well.

After looking at the file, Rip calculated that we needed to head to Russia. In the middle of the Cold War (because that won’t be any trouble at all). Chronos caught up to us when we arrived and chased us down, but Rip pulled some crazy gambit that resulted in a Russian M.I.G. shooting him down and our ship crash-landing (we were all OK, by the way). The info we snatched from the Pentagon led us to some scientist lady named Valentina Vostok, who we figured might be connected to Savage. Palmer and I were tasked with getting information on her.

We knew she’d be at the theatre watching a ballet performance, so the plan was for Palmer to approach her and charm her, and get her to talk to him about her research, while I’d be left playing wingman. Can you believe it? Me, Palmer’s wingman? Ugh. As it stood, it didn’t happen that way. Valentina shut him down with just a few sentences. It was a thing of beauty, watching the Idiot Genius billionaire get turned down so easily. I bet it’s been a while since he’s gotten that reaction from a woman. So I stepped in, and within less than a minute she’d decided to skip the rest of the show and let me walk her home. I’m just that good, and the look on Palmer’s face was priceless! Valentina even gave me a goodnight kiss after inviting me up to her apartment. I’m going to be holding that over Palmer’s head for a long time.

I swiped Valentina’s security card for her workplace (plus her wallet) during the kiss, so we’ll be going in earlier in the morning tomorrow, and now that the planning’s done, I’m going to have to turn in early to stay sharp when it comes.

Day 5: Wednesday, February 12^th, 1986

Dear Lisa,

Rip is a rat bastard. Just in case I haven’t made that clear already.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

We started the infiltration of Valentina’s lab, with Stein using the key card I lifted off her to get in. He found out that Valentina was trying to recreate Firestorm, based simply on a picture someone took during the arms auction fight back in ’75. Rip sent Palmer and I to help him try and steal an important piece of equipment she’d need to do it (the fact that she had something that would actually work when all she had to go on was a photograph is disturbing), and that’s where it all went to shit.

Valentina showed up while we were in the middle of the job, and Palmer – the stupid, gullible, romantic fool – begged me to distract her to keep her from getting hurt. I should’ve simply let her walk into the thermal core’s containment unit and get fried by the radiation. Instead, the Russian bitch stuck a gun in my throat and made Palmer turn the deactivated core back on. If it weren’t for Stein’s powers, he would’ve been killed by all that radiation. Valentina was very interested in him after that.

Now I can get to why Rip’s a rat bastard. Mick came to back us up, but it wasn’t enough. We were surrounded, and even though Jax was in the Med Bay (the others got into another tussle with Chronos while Palmer and I were busy with Valentina), Rip could’ve sent the girls in, too. But he didn’t want to risk Savage’s people getting their hands on Kendra. I had no choice but to grab the core and run. Now Mick’s been captured by the Russians (Palmer and Stein, too). Rip had better come through with his promise to get them back. If he’s going to use us as his expendable pawns, he’s going to find himself on a team of one, soon enough.

Chapter Text

Day 6: Thursday, February 13^th, 1986

Dear Lisa,

We didn’t get that much done today, and Mick, Stein, and Palmer are still MIA. We spent a whole day just trying to figure out where our team was taken, and the whole time Rip worried and moaned about what might happen if Vostok and Savage find out that Stein’s not only an expert on Firestorm, but part of it. The rest of us kept having to remind him that Stein wasn’t the only teammate taken.

Wherever they are, we know it’s bad; Jax keeps getting a lot of fear and pain over his psychic connection with Stein, and the other two may be worse off. Stein is the valuable one to their captors; Mick and Palmer would just be used as collateral to ensure his cooperation.

Outside of planning, the ladies are barely speaking to Rip, just like me; he deliberately avoided sending either of them in with Mick to back us up. Things could have gone differently if we’d had two extra fighting hands on our side. Yes, Kendra’s not exactly… stable at the moment, but Sara, at least, would have been extremely valuable.

Rip isn’t even letting us get too involved in the planning, either. He mostly holes himself up in his “parlour” (this little area off the bridge that looks more like an older, wood-paneled study, compared to the sci-fi aesthetic the rest of the ship has going on), researching, so Kendra and Sara are sparring their frustrations out, Jax is tinkering with a few things under Gideon’s direction, and I’m continuing to case every inch of this ship. I’ve found a trapdoor in one of the halls that possibly comes out under the parlour floor – the bearing and tunnel length fits, but I couldn’t open the other door because I could hear some muttering and footsteps directly overhead – even more evidence that it leads to the parlour.

I hate this. Every second we delay is another second my partner’s possibly being tortured. Come tomorrow morning, if Rip doesn’t have something to offer us, I’m going to ignore him and do things my way, instead.

Day 7: Friday, February 14^th, 1986

Dear Lisa,

Well, we got Mick back. But Rip’s still a rat bastard.

We finally found out where they were all being kept: The Koshmar Gulag, ‘Koshmar’ meaning ‘Nightmare’. I’m pretty sure that all the Soviet gulags were nightmares, but the name tells me this one’s exceptionally bad.

I have to hand it to Sara. She had a great idea for getting in and out of the gulag our teammates were thrown in. She suggested going to the Bratva, the Russian mob, for help. We had to go to a sauna to talk to a ranking member of the Bratva called Yuri the Bear, and I just wanted to get it over with. Why the hell do people think it’s relaxing to sit and sweat their asses off in a hot, steamy room? I made Rip do all the work fighting Yuri and talking him into helping us, though Sara did what I assume was a beautiful job against his guys in the next room. Yuri got us a spot in a truck of black-market goods being delivered to the gulag, which got us past the gates. The plan was to locate Stein first, since Rip was obsessed with getting Firestorm out of Savage’s hands, then get Mick and Palmer, assuming they weren’t all being kept in the same spot.

Except it wasn’t that simple. Rip was so obsessed with the idea of a Soviet Firestorm that he showed Sara what would happen to her home if they succeeded, and told her to kill Stein if we couldn’t rescue him. He wasn’t even sending Jax and Kendra in, because he didn’t want Savage to get his hands on the only one who could kill him or the other half of Firestorm. He was refusing to use every resource he had, but was still preparing to have a teammate assassinated when his half-assed Plan A failed. You know I don’t turn on my crew, Lisa. I didn’t approve of this Plan B at all.

But Sara was going to go through with it. I’ve overheard her talking with Kendra yesterday about how she didn’t want to be a killer anymore, and that she was trying to be better. I guess that if anyone has the right to get sick of death, it’s someone who’s spent years killing and who’s been dead for a year. But here she was, about to take a huge step back, and kill a friend. And Rip has actually encouraged her to be better, but now here he is, pressuring her to do the exact opposite. He’s just using us as pawns, Lisa. I don’t think he really cares about what’s important to his crew, so long as he kills Savage and gets his wife and kid back. If he’s willing to sacrifice Stein’s life for the ‘greater good’, without even putting all the effort he can into avoiding that necessity, when will the rest of us become expendable?

The actual rescue, thankfully, went better than the plan itself (for once, something goes right!). We got all 3 of our people back, thanks in part to Jax and Kendra bullying Rip into letting them help. Kendra and Rip blew up all of Valentina’s files on her Firestorm project so that it can’t be used again. Valentina managed to fuse with Stein and become Soviet Firestorm herself, but Jax was able to separate them. And Sara didn’t kill Stein. I spent nearly the entire mission trying to talk her out of it, and finally got through to her. I had to remind her of her goal of not being a killer anymore. She thanked me after we got back to the Waverider, said that my words didn’t just save Stein’s life, but also her soul. It was weird. I don’t think anyone’s ever thanked me for helping them (aside from you, sis), and not just because I’m not the helping kind of guy. At least she didn’t try to hug me.

But I’m glad she doesn’t have to deal with the guilt of backsliding like that. It sounds like she’s really gone through some hell in her life. I did some research on the whole crew after joining, and found out that she’s the daughter of the Star City police captain. Do you remember the boat that sank 9 years ago, with the billionaire Robert Queen and his son on board? And how Oliver Queen turned out to be alive after 5 years? It turns out that Sara was on that boat as well, but her ‘death’ and survival didn’t make any headlines. Only news sources from Star/Starling City even mentioned her, because she was a local there. Mass-media really only cares if someone lives or dies if they’re rich and/or famous; neither Sara nor any of the boat’s crew members were ever mentioned by name. But Sara spent 6 years off the grid, and I guess that’s when she became an assassin. It’s strange, because sometimes she seems so normal, and you might forget that she’s seen so much awful shit in her life. I’m not even going to start on the whole ‘dead for a year’ thing, because I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like. There’s no way I’m going to ask her if she remembers the afterlife, or what it was like.

Mick, Palmer, and both halves of Firestorm are in the Med Bay getting checked out right now. Mick and Palmer were tortured to try and get Stein to talk, Stein was drugged and beat up a bit, and Jax hurt his leg while sprinting across the prison yard with a torn ACL (kid has guts). Once they’re done, I’m busting out the high-end black-market vodka I swiped from Yuri the Bear’s truck. We could all use a drink after these last couple of days.

Chapter Text

Still Day 7: Sunday, February 25^th, 2046

Dear Lisa,

I think I messed up big time with Mick. He isn’t speaking to me anymore, but what was I supposed to do? Leave him in the future that may or may not exist after we get back?

We were in the middle of toasting to our success in Russia when Chronos ambushed us. We were floating in this time-limbo place called the Temporal Zone, so we didn’t simply crash in the middle of the Russian wilderness in the 80s when one of his missiles hit us. The ship’s system was trashed, but Rip was able to determine when and where we were: Star City 2046. Sara and Palmer were devastated; this was their home, and everything was in ruins, and things were on fire, and at first the place seemed completely deserted. Then we got attacked by some kid in a Green Arrow suit who was definitely not the Green Arrow they knew. Rip wanted to fix the ship and just get us the hell out of there, but Sara and Palmer really wanted to know how their home got that way so they could prevent it when we got back to our own time. Sara had to bully her way onto the job when Rip took me and Mick to steal some necessary tech, because he didn’t want her coming along.

We got separated on the way there anyway. Some fighting broke out between GA Jr. and a street gang, and while Sara went to help him and Rip chased after her, Mick and I went to check out the looting possibilities at a nearby bank and got cornered by a different gang. Yes, somebody actually tried to rob us. Long story short, Mick killed the leader and took over the gang. We spent about an hour or so at their hangout, but I wanted to get out of there. It was… not my scene. I asked around; it seems some guy named Deathstroke came in and killed all the heroes and cops, so now criminals rule the streets. There’s one vigilante running around in the GA costume, but that’s it. Nothing that bodes well for any of Sara’s friends and family.

I didn’t like it. Yes, you’ve read that correctly. My favorite part of the criminal life is the thrill of the chase, the challenge. That’s why I’d rather keep the Flash alive. This world was just full of mindless thugs and chaos. I wanted out. But Mick was in love with the whole scene, with being the leader of that gang.

Then Deathstroke himself showed up, and placed a bounty on Rip and Sara’s heads for running with GA Jr. I wasn’t going to just stand by and let my team get hunted and killed by some two-bit thug. But Mick was going to. He decided he liked it there and that he didn’t care what happened to Rip and Sara. I had to bully him into helping me find them and fight off Deathstroke’s men.

That’s where I messed up. After we saved Rip and Sara, I knocked him on the head and dragged him onto the ship. Why? For starters, there’s no way I was leaving him behind, and no way I was staying. The mission isn’t over. And what will happen to this world when we go back and Palmer and Sara warn their friends about Deathstroke? Will the future change? If Mick were to stay, would he see the world change around him, or would he vanish along with it?

He’s furious with me. He agreed to help us save GA Jr, who’s apparently the son of one of Sara and Palmer’s friends (turns out most of their friends are dead, except for Oliver Queen – who is the actual Green Arrow! – and some chick who left the city when everyone else was killed), but he still isn’t pleased with how I got him to do it. He accused me of changing my priorities, that I’d rather save the world than be his partner. That’s bullshit. I want to stop Savage to make a point about killing my crew, and you can imagine the cred we’d get for offing a 4000- year-old immortal psycho. No other reason. But what was even crazier was that Mick also accused me of having a crush on Sara. Can you believe that? Just because I get along with one of the heroes doesn’t mean I have a thing for her!

Chapter Text

Day 8: Monday, February 26^th, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Mick’s still in a bad mood, not that I’m surprised. It takes more than a single day for him to cool off when he gets worked up like that. It doesn’t help that we’re not going anywhere anytime soon. After the ship was damaged, Gideon lost a lot of data we could have used to track down Savage for another attempt to kill him. Apparently, she’s supposed to get an update from the Time Masters when she reboots from damage like that, but since we’re on their Shit List, that isn’t happening. So, we’re just floating above the ground – still in 2046 – with nothing to do. Rip’s taken Dr. Boardman’s journal and is looking for clues, but who knows how long that will take?

I tried to get Mick involved in casing the ship some more, even offered to show him the tunnel I discovered two days ago, but he just gave me the finger and stalked out to break into that stash of high-end liquor that Rip thinks we don’t know about.

We all kind of drifted around the ship, looking for things to keep ourselves occupied. Jax spent a ton of time finishing the repairs from our not-so-gentle landing. The eggheads spent a lot of time holed up in a space they’ve claimed as their lab, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they were talking about more than science; Palmer woke us all up screaming last night, and Sara gave me the short version: the Deathstroke we faced yesterday was the second one she’s met, the first was his father, he’s the one responsible for that attack on Starling back in 2014, and Palmer’s fiancée was one of the casualties. So obviously, reliving that shit wasn’t good for him.

Sara and Kendra spent a good chunk of the day training, but Kendra drew the line on doing it all day – not that Sara needed that much convincing – so then they went their separate ways. I don’t know what Kendra got up to, but Sara came across me playing a game of solitaire after I got bored (casing the place alone when I know Mick’s available just isn’t the same), and somehow that turned into a game of gin. She’s pretty good, and she caught onto my… little tricks pretty damn quick. And I’m pretty sure she pulled a few sleight-of-hand card switches of her own. Color me impressed.

Day 9: Tuesday, February 27^th, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Still nothing new on the Vandal Savage front. According to Gideon, Rip hasn’t come out of his little parlour since we left Future Star City. Palmer and Stein conspired to force-feed him every so often, and now they want to set up a little “feed the Captain” team schedule. I refused out of principle – I don’t do nice – even if it’s just a matter of punching in a simple meal from the food replicator (yes, food replicator – it’s very sci-fi) and leaving it in the parlour. And I already lived through the bullshit of trying to make you eat your vegetables; I’m not taking the time to force a grown-ass man to eat three squares a day. I’ll leave that to Palmer’s puppy-dog eyes and Sara’s kickass skills.

Speaking of lunch, this afternoon I wandered into the galley to get myself something to eat, only to be greeted by this unearthly sound Kendra was making. Apparently, she and Sara were swapping stories of insufferable brats they’ve babysat in the past, and Birdie was trying to imitate some poor cat who took an unwanted dip in the pool thanks to its little owner. Since I let slip at yesterday’s card game that I basically raised you, Sara asked me for a story, but don’t worry; it was nothing too embarrassing. Well, not too embarrassing to you. Do you remember the time when Mick babysat you when you were 6, and he fell asleep, so you scribbled butterflies and unicorns and all that crap on his face with your Magic Markers? And I may or may not have bitched about your unhealthy addiction to the Backstreet Boys.

Anyway, Jax ended up sharing a story about some spoiled hellion at a football camp he once volunteered at, and then decided to drag Stein into it as a judge to choose which story was worse: your face-doodling, the football brat, the kid who can’t grasp the fact that cats hate water, or apparently a pair of twins that Sara had to deal with who “repainted their parents’ bedroom”. (I arrived too late for that story.)

Ironically, your shenanigans ended up ranked as the least damaging, despite the fact that – as far as we know – you’re the only one with a criminal record. Although, if Jax’s description is anything to go by, the little football demon may end up surpassing you.

Day 10: Wednesday, February 28^th, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Well, I’ve found something interesting to do besides case the ship and play cards with Sara – although the latter may still become a regular thing.

Sara decided that Kendra was coming pretty far along in her training, so she decided to shake things up by asking me to go up against Birdie so that she would have some practice fighting opponents bigger than her. She actually convinced Mick to go a few rounds since he was already in a fighting mood, although he got fed up and stormed off after an hour or so, which is where I came in.

Kendra has some subconscious memory of various fighting techniques she’s learned over the past 4000 years, so she’s picked up what Sara’s taught her pretty quickly. She’s also got one hell of a swing, although I was able to pin her about half the times her wings didn’t come out. When they did, she pinned me all but once – I was able to grab her water bottle and dash it in her face for a distraction. She was so indignant, especially when Sara just told her to expect the unexpected, she actually left some pretty bad bruises on me during our next bout (nothing Gideon couldn’t fix; don’t worry).

Sara told me a bit about her own training during this evening’s card game. She was rescued after surviving her second shipwreck, specifically by the daughter of the leader of the League of Assassins, who recruited her into the order. She stayed with them for 4 years, and even though members are supposed to reject their past, she chose her new League name from a gift her dad got her for her when she was 10. When Starling City was nearly destroyed by that earthquake in 2013, she went back home to check on her family, and reconnected with them, although she did return to the League for a few months before…

She stopped the story there, but if I had to guess, I’d say that’s when she died. I didn’t push her for more, especially since she possibly could’ve stabbed me for it.

Mick’s still pissed at me, although Jax recently found out that, since we’re in the future, we could theoretically watch TV shows from the future. Gideon put a stop to that, but she is letting Mick catch up on his football and NCIS. If that goes well, I’ll recommend she pull up any ninja or vampire movies he hasn’t seen before. With the ingestible translators, he should be able to watch and understand some of the foreign-language ones, as well. Maybe that will keep him occupied and cool his frustrations.

Day 11: Thursday, March 1^st, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Well, the training sessions have gotten a little bigger. Jax came up to Sara and said he wanted to learn a bit about fighting, just in case he got caught in a jam in which going Firestorm wasn’t an option. Sara started with him at first, but since Jax is starting pretty much at Square One, especially with how quickly Kendra’s progressing, she decided that instead of trying to teach two classes at once, she would rope me in once more. I kind of flashed back a little to teaching you how to throw a punch and break a hold, even if Mick did most of your training back when you were in high school while I was in prison. I still remember getting that letter about how you kicked that Blaine kid’s ass.

Anyway, Jax is actually a pretty good student. He’s willing to learn, and I also taught him a few things about shooting – he’s got the potential to be a pretty good shot, with a little more practice. We just didn’t have the space to do much shooting practice on the ship. Instead, we had Gideon fabricate some period weapons (old-fashioned flintlock pistols, and the like) and learned how to maintain and load and operate them. It could come in handy if we travel to a time period before the 20^th century.

While we were playing cards, as has become our routine as of late, Sara talked to me about that “second shipwreck” she mentioned yesterday. It seems that, after the Queen’s Gambit sank, she got pulled out of the water by the crew of a ship called the Amazo. She didn’t talk much about what happened on that boat, but they kept her for at least a year, and never let her contact home, so I doubt they made her stay there very pleasant. She’s a fellow survivor, that’s for sure, even if she leans more towards the heroic side of the scale.

I’ve been trying to think of what else to write, since this entry’s so short, but there honestly hasn’t been much happening, lately.

Day 12: Friday, March 2^nd, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Sara nearly took my head off today. Literally.

She and Kendra had just finished a round, and Kendra actually got the upper hand this time and kicked her across the room, and since Sara landed near me, I went to help her up. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor with her on top of me, with her knife coming at my throat. I only just managed to catch her wrist to stop her in time. Kendra and Jax had to pull her off me, and Kendra used her hawk-strength to pin her down until she calmed down.

Once Sara was herself again, she apologized and took off. Jax was pretty pissed at her, but Kendra insisted that it wasn’t Sara’s fault. Something to do with how she came back from the dead.

Sara came to me a few hours later, and explained it in more detail. About a year after she died, sister took her to this place where there was a pool of some kind of magic water that brings back the dead, but Sara didn’t come back whole. Her soul didn’t come back with her, and GA had to call in some exorcist or occult master or whatever that he met during his exile to put it back. And there’s an after-effect of being resurrected like that: she’s cursed with something she calls a ‘Bloodlust’, a desire to kill. The only cure is to kill the person who killed her, which she wouldn’t mind if that curse recognized that it was her friend’s father who was ultimately responsible. But it doesn't, and she refuses to kill her friend to be free of it.

If you do wind up reading this information, Lisa, don’t use it against her, and don’t even let her know that you know. If the two of you wind up becoming friends, just wait for her to tell you.

Day 13: Saturday, March 3^rd, 2046

Dear Lisa,

For the last couple of days, Palmer has been pestering us all about doing group bonding experiences. He’s occasionally convinced smaller groups to hang out and watch a movie together, but never anything involving the whole team. Today, however, he finally got his wish (mostly), and it wasn’t quite as painful as I thought it would be.

He was simply strolling down the hall when he noticed me and Sara playing cards, and got the idea to host a little poker tournament in the galley. Since I’m not one to shy away from a card game, I agreed to it, and even Mick showed up for a while! Stein put in a good showing despite the fact that he was clearly distracted; Palmer wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer and shut down some scientific research the Prof was working on. Jax did fairly well for a first timer, Kendra had a decent poker face but kept getting bad hands, and Sara – I’m positive she was cheating almost as much as I was, but I didn’t see actually see anything (sneaky assassin). Mick got irritated and left not long after, but at least he played a few hands. Palmer, despite being the one to set the whole thing up, has absolutely no poker face, and I didn’t even have to cheat to take his money.

The games kept going until one by one, everyone left to get some rest. It ended with just me, Sara, and a bottle of whiskey. And now I finally know how Sara died. She told me during our last card game tonight. Back in 2014, sometime after Deathstroke’s attack on Starling, some guy trying to evade the League drugged his own daughter – a friend of Sara’s – into shooting and killing her. Then he used this information to blackmail the girl’s half-brother into helping him, otherwise he’d tell the League, and they’d go after her for killing Sara. I told Sara about what Dad did to you with the micro-bomb, because I couldn’t help but think of the similarities. Turns out our father wasn’t the only one who would put his own kid’s life on the line to get his way.

Day 14: Sunday, March 4^th, 2046

Dear Lisa,

Mick is

Mick and I

Mick has betrayed us.

He betrayed this team, and he betrayed me, but I think know I betrayed him, too.

As you know, it’s been a long, long week. We’ve just been floating around in the Temporal Zone and waiting for Rip to come up with something. But while most of us were simply getting bored, Mick was getting restless. He still wouldn’t get over me knocking him out in Post-Apocalyptic Star City. When Mick gets like that, I usually give him space, but it’s hard to do when we’re both stuck on the same spaceship. He can’t even burn anything to take the edge off, again because of being stuck on a spaceship.

Then we got a diversion that I really wish we hadn’t. Rip got a distress signal from another Time Master Captain, and insisted on responding. He tried to rationalize it by pointing out that we could get an update for Gideon from the other ship, but the fact remained that it could have been a trap, and we all knew it.

Mick went with Rip, Stein, and Jax to check out the other ship when we got there, while the rest of us stayed on the Waverider. Maybe 10 minutes later, we got a call from the other ship. Turns out the distress signal wasn’t entirely bogus, because there was a goddamn time pirate on the other end of the call. He and his crew had captured that time ship’s captain and then our people, and he demanded that we surrender the Waverider. His mistake was letting Rip communicate with us. Our captain used a verbal trigger code that had Gideon flying us out of there, but one of the lasers from the other ship punched a small hole in the hull.

Sara and I went to try and fix it. I was able to seal the hole with ice from the Cold Gun, but that’s where things went wrong. We should have just stayed put, because the bulkhead doors finally kicked in while we were on the wrong side. We had to sit and wait for Palmer to fix the hole permanently from the outside in his suit, and it was freezing. I know I love the cold, but I’m talking about cold that absolutely would have killed us if Palmer had been any slower.

We got to talking – what else was there to do as we slowly froze to death? – and I asked her what dying was like. Not the afterlife, just dying. It wasn’t a topic I was going to broach in a card game, but it felt oddly appropriate, since I was on the way to experiencing it for myself. She said it was lonely. Not scary, but lonely. I told her the story of how Mick saved my life in Juvie. I haven’t told that story to anyone before, besides you, Lise. Can you really blame me for wanting to tell her something after she’s opened up to me about so much? I mean, I asked her about death, which has to be a sensitive topic for her. It’s only fair.

So anyway, Palmer fixed the hole before Sara and I froze to death, and we walked in on him and Kendra apparently having a moment (didn’t see that one coming), and for a minute it looked like things would be alright. Gideon told us that Mick had managed to escape the time pirates and was headed back to us on the Jump Ship, so we started making a bare-bones attack plan for getting the others back. Except I had this feeling in my gut that something was going to wrong. The same feeling I had during the Alexa job.

And I was right. Mick made a deal with the time pirates: he hands the ship and the team over, and the pirates send Mick and I home to Central City 2016. I guess Mick had had enough of the mission, and instead of helping us beat the time pirates and then getting Rip to drop him off, he betrayed us and was ready to sell out the whole team. He brought several pirates with him on the jump ship to take the Waverider.

This is where it got hard. I had to choose, Lisa. I had to choose between the team and Mick. At the start of the mission, it would be a no-brainer. But now… I think I’ve gotten attached. It’s ridiculous, I know, but what this team is doing is worthwhile, and there’s nobody else to do it. And I couldn’t hand Sara and the others over to be killed. My code is to never turn my back on my crew, to never abandon them.

Mick broke that code. So I made my choice, and helped Palmer and the girls fight off the pirates. I even had to shoot Mick when he nearly killed Sara. The Cold Gun was at its lowest setting, so it didn’t do anything more than knock him back, but I still shot my partner.

After it was all over, and our boarding party managed to retake the other time ship, we had to discuss what to do with Mick. You know how he is when he’s angry, Lisa: he gets dangerous. We couldn’t keep him in our brig long-term, and if we were to dump him back in 2016 and leave him alone there, he’d go after the people we care about: Stein’s wife, Jax’s mom, Sara’s sister and parents, and you. That’s right, Lise; I don’t think even you would’ve been safe, and you wouldn’t even see it coming because you trust him. So I made another choice. I knocked Mick out again, and had Rip take us to the middle of nowhere. I dragged him away from the ship and woke him up. I was going to kill him, because he would have been a danger to us otherwise.

But I couldn’t do it. Say I’m going soft, say it’s going to cause more problems later; I know that’s true. But I couldn’t kill Mick. I just knocked him on the head again and went back. I’ve had Gideon save the coordinates, both in time and place, so that when we’re done killing Savage and the mission is over, we can return maybe an hour later, after Mick’s blown off some steam, and take him with us back to 2016 where we can at least keep an eye on him. If worst comes to worst, we can ask Team Flash to hold him in their secret prison. But I don’t think he’s ever going to forgive me.

The thing is, Lisa, that when I got back, everyone assumed that I’d killed Mick. They were looking at me and judging me, and you’d think I’d be used to that by now, but maybe it’s because I didn’t actually do anything this time that it’s bothering me. I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.

Chapter Text

Day 15: Thursday, March 22^nd, 1958

Dear Lisa,

Well, if there was one tiny good thing to come out of yesterday’s mess, it’s the fact that the time captain we saved was so grateful to us for saving her, not only did she not arrest us, she gave us the software update Gideon needed. And that led us to where we are now.

We’re in Harmony Falls, Oregon, in the 1950s. It’s one of those quaint little towns where everyone knows everyone by first name, all pretty and wholesome and that kind of crap. You would either hate it or have a blast causing havoc here. The only thing wrong with the image would be the recent murders, looking like the work of a serial killer. Rip thinks Savage had something to do with it, and I’m 99% certain he’s right.

Rip split us all up to investigate. Stein took a position at the local insane asylum since one of the vics worked there and left the position empty, with Sara as his nurse/assistant. Everyone can tell she hates having to be subordinate to him, even if it’s only pretend. Palmer and Kendra, who apparently hooked up while I was out dealing with Mick and decided to announce it by getting caught making out in the halls this morning before we time-jumped, went undercover as a married couple and moved into another victim’s house. (Because a biracial couple in the 50s is going to attract absolutely no attention.) Three teens also went missing a few days before the first murder, so Jax was told to play ‘new kid in town’ and see if there was anything he could find out from the local high schoolers. (Because a black kid asking around about missing white boys in the 50s is going to go over so well.)

As for Rip and myself, we went to the local sheriff disguised as FBI agents to see what he had, and came up with nothing. It’s like he wasn’t even trying. At least the others had more luck. Sara discovered that Savage is working at the asylum under an alias – his picture’s right there on one of the walls – and Kendra and Palmer got an unexpected surprise when ‘Dr. Knox’ turned up on their doorstep and introduced himself as their neighbor. Kendra apparently always looks the same in each life (I’m not going to even bother to wonder about the science and genetics behind that), so he had to have recognized her right away, but she doesn’t think he knows her memories and powers have emerged yet. But they still got an invite to a party at his house, and Palmer discovered a locked room. Rip wants them to investigate that once Savage goes to work tomorrow, although they’ll have to get around his wife somehow.

That’s right: his wife. After all, what better way to blend in in this era than as a wholesome married couple? At least they didn’t have kids; that’s something I’d rather not think about, even though I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s sired a few over the past 4000 years. Kendra feels sorry for the lady, assuming she’s some poor, innocent woman who’s been duped into marrying Savage just for the sake of an image. She seems to have forgotten that Savage’s cult in ’75 was made up of men and woman, so for all we know, she could be a member and fully complicit in his plotting.

As for Jax’s part in the mission, he managed to get to talking with the girlfriend of one of the missing boys, and even got a date with her. I can’t say I’m impressed by her devotion; her boyfriend has only been missing 10 days, yet here she is, going out with someone else.

Aside from our visit to the sheriff, Rip and I haven’t done much. Mostly, we just sat around and heard reports from everyone else, and I had to put up with Jax sniping at me. Like everyone else, he thinks I really killed Mick yesterday, but he’s definitely the most outspoken about it. The whole day, he’s been making his feelings clear about me (supposedly) icing my best friend, and how he doesn’t trust me not to turn on the rest of the team. You’re probably thinking I should have set him straight, Lisa, but honestly? I deserve it, if not for the reasons he thinks. Part of me is glad that he feels that way. At least someone on this team is standing up for Mick, no matter what he did.

Day 16: Friday, March 21^st, 1958

Dear Lisa,

Well, I have to say, tonight sure made up for yesterday’s lack of activity.

This morning, Palmer and Kendra followed up on that locked room in Savage’s house. Palmer snuck in with his shrinking suit and stole the very same dagger we went after in ’75. I find it odd that it was in Savage’s possession here in 1958, and yet he had to buy it again in an auction in the 70’s. I mean, how did he lose it in between then and now? Regardless, this is a huge advantage.

Then things got messy. Two boys attacked Jax and the missing kid’s girlfriend at the lover’s lane, but then some bird-monster attacked all of them. The girl was injured and Jax tried to drive her to the ship so that Gideon could save her (as this is the fucking 50’s and a black kid showing up to the hospital with an injured white girl would end up in deep shit even if he had absolutely nothing to do with hurting her), but the sheriff stopped the car, kidnapped Jax, and just left the girl to die. (Turns out the bastard’s working for Savage, which explains the lack of investigation.) Rip and I found her in time, though, and she told us what happened. She recognized the bird-monster as her missing boyfriend, and Gideon and Stein figured the missing boys had been exposed to some mutagenic crap that turned them into those, and that they were actually responsible for the deaths.

We figured they were being held in a restricted ward of the asylum, since Savage was in charge of that wing, and so we came up with a plan: have Kendra approach and distract Savage at the hospital and hopefully kill him while the rest of us sneak in and get the boys and bring them back to the Waverider to cure them. But Savage figured it out, set the bird-kids loose in the hospital, and nearly killed Kendra. (Fortunately, Palmer blasted him out a window before the bastard could do any real damage.) To make things worse, Jax had also been subjected to the same experiments and had been turned into a bird-monster, too. Stein and I came across him while we were sneaking in through the basement, and he was completely out of his mind. He nearly killed the both of us.

I could have killed Jax. I had my gun trained on him, and in that state, he was a legitimate threat to my life and Stein’s. But I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t his fault, and the real Jax was still a member of the crew. I wasn’t going to let him die, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the one to kill him. Luckily, Sara came along at the right time and knocked him out. Later, when Gideon was curing the boys, Stein called my not pulling the trigger… heroic. Said that I’d saved his life and Jax’s. I didn’t know how to point out that it was because of me not doing anything that Jax was still alive. And I’m not getting my hopes up that Jax will stop harassing me about what happened with Mick.

So yeah, Stein’s cure worked on Jax, so he’s heading over to the asylum to give it to the other boys. Soon they’ll be back to normal and up and about, and the girl, Betty, has been healed. She was given a sedative that causes mild amnesia as a side-effect, so she won’t remember her time on the ship, and Rip and Sara took her home. I have no idea how they’re going to explain her trashed and bloodstained car, though.

Chapter Text

Day 18: Sunday, March 20^th, 1960

Dear Lisa,

Yesterday was, without a doubt, the worst day I’ve had since this clusterfuck of a mission started. Sorry if this is hard to read, but my right hand is still not back to working properly. I would have written it last night, but I could barely hold the pen, let alone write with it.

It started out alright. We were still in 1958, the day after my last entry. Jax was fully cured, and actually apologized for giving me a hard time before. Said that I was just looking after the team when I took care of Mick. I wasn’t sure how to tell him and the others that Mick is alive, not that I have to tell them now. They all know.

Palmer and the girls were still out, packing up and, in Sara’s case, saying goodbye to some nurse she got cozy with at the asylum. Then Chronos showed up. He was toting some new weapons from the Time Masters and blasted his way in, chasing the rest of us from the bridge and hijacking the Waverider, leaving three of our teammates stranded. Since it was too risky for Firestorm to merge on the ship, Rip sent Stein and Jax to escape on the Jump Ship while he and I tried to retake the bridge. We lasted maybe a couple minutes before we both got knocked out. When I woke up, I was handcuffed to a railing on what I soon learned was Chronos’s ship, and I had no idea where anyone else was.

That was when I got a look under Chronos’s helmet. It was Mick. The bounty hunter who’s been chasing us since Day 1 is and has always been an angry, even more homicidal Mick from the future. Apparently, I’m never going to come back for him, and I hate to imagine why. The Time Masters found him when he was nearly dead from starvation, and trained and brainwashed him into becoming their best bounty hunter. He said it took lifetimes. He wants to make me suffer for betraying him, and he made it very clear how: he’s planning to kidnap and kill you in front of me, and with time travel, he could do it more than once… (“Again, and again, and again.” Those were his exact words.) It scared me. Mick and I have had our rough patches, but even at the worst times, he never, ever even came close to threatening you. It’s like there’s nothing left of the Mick you and I knew. He even said he had become more obsessed with vengeance than with fire.

I know now that Jax and Stein decided to back us up and went to the bridge as Firestorm, but by the time they got there, Rip was out and Chronos had dragged me off and stolen the Jump Ship. He’d sabotaged the Waverider to crash-land in the time stream, but Gideon was able to get them to land in 1960, just a few days shy of two years later, which was as close as she could get to 1958 without landing further in the past. They found Palmer and Kendra living in Hub City, but Sara had given up hope of being rescued and gone back to the League of Assassins, and that was where Mick followed them to. He left me in his ship and went to go kill them all.

I couldn’t let that happen. So I got desperate. Thanks to the shoddy craftsmanship of the railing I was cuffed to, I was able to get to my Cold Gun, but freezing and breaking the railing wasn’t going to help me. So – and you’ll probably want to kill me for this – I froze my own hand instead, enough that I was able to smash it and get out of the cuffs. It hurt more than anything I’ve ever felt before, and I had to keep thinking of the team, and of what would happen to you if Mick wasn’t stopped, to keep myself from passing out. I still give adrenaline all the credit for my being able to run through the League’s headquarters and find the main room in time, but I didn’t save the team from Mick. I saved Mick from the team. They all did better than we’ve ever done when facing him before, and Firestorm was about to strike the deathblow when I yelled at them not to kill him.

Part of me still says I should’ve let them kill him. He’s more dangerous than he ever was before, Lisa. But if I sat let them kill Mick without knowing the whole story, they’d never forgive me.

When did that even become important to me?

So, after they found out Chronos was Mick, Sara knocked him out, and she and Rip stayed to talk to Ra’s al Ghul while the others took me and Mick back to the Waverider. Kendra practically had to carry me through the halls, because once the adrenaline was gone, the pain came back harder than ever. Stein and Jax found Chronos’s Mick’s ship after locking Mick up and got the Cold Gun back, though Jax apparently threw up when he found… well, the bits of my hand. I don’t blame him; just thinking about it makes me sick. And then the AI on the ship decided to fly it back into the Temporal Zone as some sort of security protocol, and they had to go Firestorm their way through the front window to avoid getting kidnapped by an empty time ship.

After Rip and Sara got back, our dear captain decided to try and rehabilitate Mick and bring him back to our side. I don’t see it going well at all. As much as I want the old Mick back, I don’t think it’s possible. He’s gone through lifetimes of conditioning by the Time Masters, and he’s spent lifetimes dreaming of killing us all. How in the hell are we supposed to just undo all of that? Mick’s gone to a dark place, and I don’t think we can ever bring him back from it.

On the plus side, Rip revealed something about 22^nd century medicine he hadn’t mentioned before: that it can regrow lost limbs. I got my right hand back, but it still hurts like a bitch, and I spent the rest of the night in the Med Bay. I kept dreaming about the worst ways Mick could kill you, Lisa, and in one, he tried to make me choose between you and Sara. I woke up before the choice was made.

What freaks me out even further is why that scares me more than the thought of having to choose between you and anyone else on the team, but Sara’s the one who accepted me and Mick on Day One, and she’s become (dare I say it) a pretty good friend. Even when I was still trying to process what had happened with Mick, I wondered about what she was going through. She spent almost two years back with the League of Assassins after wanting to stop being a killer; how is that going to affect her?

After that last dream, I decided to move to my own room, and bumped into her in the hallway. She couldn’t sleep, either. I accidentally let slip about the dream, although I said I’d had to choose between you and the whole team instead of just her. She told me about how this guy on Lian Yu had tried to make Oliver Queen choose between her and another girl, to decide who would live. He chose Sara, and she still blames herself for the death of the other woman. But she also told me that nobody on the team would blame me for doing what I needed to protect you.

One last thing, Sis: if Mick gets away from us, don’t trust him unless I personally tell you that you can.

Chapter Text

Still Day 18: Friday, November 3^rd, 2147

Dear Lisa,

We’ve landed in 2147 a time Rip always knew we could find Savage in, but deemed it too dangerous to go to, but after the 50’s were a bust, we didn’t have many other options. Not without running the risk of screwing up some pretty pivotal moments, such as the assassination that kicked off WWI. He knew Savage was connected to this evil dictator named Per Degaton who would take over the ‘Kasnian Conglomerate’ (a country that doesn’t exist yet in our time, and roughly covers Greece, Albania, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 2152, but it wasn’t until this trip that we learned that the future dictator was still only a kid, and that Vandal Savage was his tutor, and had more influence over the kid than his own father, the country’s current leader. Everyone was arguing about whether or not we should off the kid to stop him and Savage, but Rip and I seemed to be the only ones open to the idea. Believe me, I don’t like being on Rip’s side in any argument, but we do have a job to do. Everyone was so worked up about killing a kid, like being young means he’s innocent. I’ve seen kids like him in Juvie; they were worse than some adult criminals they have in Iron Heights. And this one was practically raised by VANDAL SAVAGE. How in the hell are we supposed to ignore that? And if his age is such a big issue, why can’t we just time-jump forward a bit, to when he’s older? Why not 2151? Or early 2152, right before he takes power?

But since everyone’s so worked up about killing a 14-year-old boy, we’ve decided that kidnapping him and taking him out of the timeline that way. Rip, Sara, and I are on ‘Team Kidnapping’, while Kendra, Jax, and the Nerd Twins (props to Sara for coming up with that nickname) will be researching to find out who built these homicidal robots that act as police in this era (something about the tech being stolen or modeled off Palmer’s work).

Day 19: Saturday, November 4^th, 2147

Dear Lisa,

Not much to report.

Today was mostly spent doing research on Per Degaton, which is a bit surprising, considering how quickly this team usually operates. Since we were planning a kidnapping, and that’s a little bit closer to my wheelhouse than our usual wheelhouse (it’s like a heist, except the target is a person who adds a whole new set of variables simply by not being an inanimate object), I badgered Rip into letting me take the lead in planning, and you know damn well that I prefer to take more than one measly day to plan everything out. The idiot was planning to do it literally on the same day. I get that he’s desperate to save his family, but this is one of those jobs where taking a couple extra days to plan will likely be the difference between success and failure.

Gideon managed to get her virtual hands on the Baby Hitler’s schedule, and after a lot of debating and arguing, we’ve determined that our best shot will be grabbing him while he’s on his way to gymnastics class. Yes, the future dictator is apparently a gymnast, as well. I don’t know if it’s a personal interest of his, or if gymnastics has become some sort of skill that world leaders are expected to have?

We’ll be scouting the target areas out tomorrow, and doing as much of a ‘dress rehearsal’ as we can without drawing suspicion. There’s only so much that looking at maps can do, especially since the brat’s protective detail has at least three different routes that they take to every destination, and we won’t know which one they’ll choose until they’re taking it.

Day 20: Sunday, November 5^th, 2147

Dear Lisa,

We’ve got everything planned out now. It was a long day, going through three different locations and three different iterations of our plan, with Sara also having to pick a spot in the city from which she can discreetly parkour to the best sniper’s nests she picked out today, as she’ll need to get to them in a hurry after we finally figure out which route Degaton’s taking.

Team Robocop has also (finally) managed to identify the company behind the A.T.O.M. Suit police robots, so they’ll be making their move tomorrow, as well. I’m disappointed it took them this long, really. I mean, how much time do they really need to f

Sara just left. I was in the middle of writing when I heard her running to the bathroom to throw up. I guess she had a particularly bad nightmare. She didn’t share much about it, but I was right that going back to the League would leave its mark on her. She now has more assassinations on her conscience that she didn’t have before, and I’m pretty sure this latest dream was about one of them.

We talked a bit – actually, she did most of the talking, and I listened – but I think I’ll leave what was said undocumented. I don’t think she even expected herself to be that candid with me. I still can’t believe she trusted me with something so personal. Usually, I would call someone a fool for being so open with someone like me.

She’s gone back to bed, now. Said she needed as much sleep as she could get before we enact our plan tomorrow.

Wish us luck, Lise.

Day 22: Tuesday, November 7^th, 2147

Dear Lisa,

Well, as of last night, we’ve managed to screw up another mission, but Mick is sort of back on our side. I just hope I’ll be able to see out of both eyes again soon.

It was pretty easy to nab the kid on his way to gymnastics class yesterday, even with his six heavily-armed escorts, but it wasn’t enough to change the timeline. Time wants to happen, after all. So, Rip took matters into his own hands by taking the kid on the Jump Ship and flying off. He also turned off the Jump Ship’s tracker so that we couldn’t follow him. Clearly, he wants to take out the little bastard without the rest of the team interfering.

I had other things on my mind, anyway. Once the kidnapping was over, Sara kept trying to talk to me about Mick, or more specifically to get me talking about Mick. She’d gotten it in her head that he and I needed to work things out. As if he hadn’t already made it clear where we stand. But she was right about one thing: I’ve been wondering what would’ve happened if I hadn’t marooned Mick, if I hadn’t left him vulnerable to the Time Masters. I screwed up in the worst way, there, and now we can’t go back and fetch pre-Chronos Mick now that we have this one on board, something about the timeline folding in on itself and doing absolutely nothing to solve the original problem. I dragged Mick onto this job; I could’ve just gone on my own instead of convincing him to come along with me. Maybe I couldn’t have seen this sort of shit coming, but in a way, this is my fault. Fucking 20-20 hindsight.

But Savage and the kid’s dad found us, and we had to fight off Tor Degaton’s men. It looked like the fight was starting to go our way when Palmer shut the enemy robots down, but then Savage got the jump on Sara and held her hostage. If anyone could get the jump on her, I guess it would have been the guy who’s had 4000+ years to work on his fighting skills. He wanted to trade her for Rip, but then Rip showed up with the kid. (I guess he didn’t have the guts to go through with killing him, though I’ll admit I don’t know if I could pull the trigger on a kid in-person, either.) He made his counter-offer: Per Degaton for Sara. Savage and the brat himself didn’t want to make that trade – Savage has that kid completely brainwashed – but Tor Degaton made the trade to save his son.

So, long story short, the kid slipped out of our grasp, and according to Gideon, Tor Degaton will die much sooner – tonight, actually – and Per Degaton will be named the new leader of his country on Wednesday with Vandal Savage as his guardian and representative until he’s actually an adult. We’ve actually sped up Savage’s world conquest instead of stopping it.

But that wasn’t my biggest concern last night. I decided that Sara was right: Mick and I needed to settle things. But you know us, Lis; we don’t get very far with words. So I offered him a deal: if he beat me in a fight, he could take the Jump Ship and go home. Mick has always been a better fighter than me, and his training with the Time Masters has put him almost at Sara’s level, possibly. I barely even landed one hit, and even hours later, I still feel like one giant bruise. He could have killed me, but he stopped at the last second before landing the deathblow. I don’t know why, and I’m not sure he does, either. But he told me and the team about a bigger threat.

There’s another group of Time Master bounty hunters called The Hunters (how imaginative) who’ll be coming after us now that they’ve probably figured out Mick failed. And they’ll try to kill him, too, for his failure. So now that we have a common enemy, he’s going to be working with us again. Jax, Palmer, and Stein are thrilled, Rip and Sara are glad to have him back but still rather cautious, and Kendra appears to be accepting it, but Chronos killed her son from a past life, remember? I wouldn’t put my money on her being alright with this.

As for myself, I still don’t know if I can trust him in the long run, though. He’s still mad at me for the decisions I made, and if there’s one thing that he picked up from the Time Masters, it’s patience. He could’ve gone after me right after becoming Chronos, but he took his time and made a name for himself before Rip had even formed this team. He could wait until the threat to his own life is over before going back to looking for revenge. So like I said before, don’t trust him unless I specifically tell you that you can.

Chapter Text

Still Day 22: Wednesday, April 12^th, 1871

Dear Lisa,

Of all the places I would’ve imagined Rip feeling at home, I’m ashamed to admit that I never would’ve picked the Wild West, despite some rather obvious hints.

Immediately after I finished writing my last entry, Sara came to talk to me. She had no reservations about telling me how stupid it was to walk into Mick’s cell and challenge him to a cage match after he threatened multiple times to kill me. She was furious with me for doing something so moronic, and I can’t blame her. It was moronic. I’m hoping I’m dead if you’re reading this, because you’ll probably be wanting to kill me yourself. I told her about what he threatened to do to you – that’s something I haven’t told anyone else. I’ve been protecting you since you were a baby, Lisa, and that’s never going to change. Mick/Chronos/whatever wanted to kill you to torment me, but I guess I was hoping that he’d leave you alone if I wasn’t there to see it. You’ve done nothing to him. But Sara also said something else: she told me that I didn’t have to be alone in protecting you, that she and the rest of the team would have my back. It’s weird; I’ve only ever had Mick helping me when it came to looking out for you, except Gramps when you were really little. But suddenly these heroes want to help. Not just Sara; I guess I haven’t always thought of her as one of the ‘heroes’, since Mick and I got along with her so well right from the start. The others kind of – more than kind of – looked down on us. But now she’s saying they’ll all help and stick by me to protect you if you ever need it… I guess this change came around a while ago, but now it’s really starting to hit me.

Anyway, back to what actually happened today. We landed in the 19^th-century American West, more specifically a town called Salvation in the Dakota Territory, to hide out from the Hunters since it’s located in some sort of temporal blind spot, according to Rip and Mick. Yes, you heard that right: Rip and Mick. Seems the Time Masters taught him more than just patience, which makes sense if he became some scary temporal bounty hunter with a badass reputation. He had to have known about all the practical details of time-travel that Rip’s familiar with, and navigation and crap. The point is, the only way the Hunters could find us here was to come here in person, so we could only wait and pray they would check the other ‘fragmentations’ before this one.

Palmer was ecstatic about going out and exploring the Wild West, like a total geek, so we all got dressed up in period-appropriate clothing and went to check the town out. Well, not all of us; Rip insisted on staying on the ship and sulking, so Mick promised to keep an eye on us to make sure we didn’t break the timeline (again). That’s right: Mick Rory, the Responsible Adult. It didn’t make sense to me, either, not even before he got into a drinking contest with Sara and lost by a landslide. To explain, we wandered into town, getting a lot of attention (seriously, everyone was staring at us), and found the saloon. We all kind of scattered once we got inside; Mick and Sara went to the bar and started the aforementioned drinking contest, while I wound up joining Stein at the card tables, though I didn’t play. He got into an argument with another player over how the asshole was mistreating the waitress, because Stein’s too much of a goddamn gentleman to let that slide even when it would be the smarter option, and I wound up having to shoot the bastard before he could shoot Stein. Too bad the bastard had lots of buddies in the saloon at the time. We were all kicking their asses in the inevitable brawl that followed (except for Mick, who was passed out at the bar, and I think Stein stayed out of the fight as much as possible, but I saw one of the waitresses pitching in to help), but then we got interrupted. Some scar-faced cowboy named Jonah Hex broke the fight up and then, once we left the saloon, asked us when we were from and demanded to see Rip.

It turns out that Rip spent a long time in the Wild West and became well-acquainted with Hex, enough for Hex to know Rip was a time-traveler. He explained to us that the man I killed was part of a big gang that’s been terrorizing the town for a while, so we’ve got to deal with them before we go anywhere now that they’re out for revenge. He took Palmer to the Sheriff so the Boy Scout could offer our help, and when they came back, Palmer had the Sheriff’s badge; the old man was apparently quitting and packing his bags when they came in and gave him the job without Palmer even realizing what was going on.

So, Sheriff Palmer will be getting us all up early in the morning, for when the gang leader, Jeb Stillwater, inevitably shows his face and demands retribution. I know I’d be if one of my crew got shot down. We’ve got our plan all laid out; hope it all goes well.

Day 23: Thursday, April 13^th, 1871

Dear Lisa,

Well, Hex was right; Jeb Stillwater rode into town with a bunch of his guys this morning, and Palmer stood up to them, introducing himself as Sheriff John Wayne. (Geek.) He would’ve gotten shot and killed pretty easily, but Jax and Mick were on the ground, and I was watching from a second-storey balcony and managed to shoot the gun right out of Stillwater’s hand and scare him off, for today.

Yes, I’m bragging, but who wouldn’t? That was a one-in-a-million shot! With a 19^th-century rifle!

Hex was adamant that the bastard would come back as soon as we were gone and raze the town to the ground. He referenced ‘Calvert’, which Rip refused to explain, but it only took a bit of poking around with Gideon for the rest of us to learn that it was a town that got destroyed by a similar gang in Oklahoma. We later found out that Rip had been in a position to save the town the last time he was in the Old West, but had left because his duties as a Time Master kept him from interfering and changing the timeline. Hex punched him when he found out Rip had known what would happen.

So, back to the Stillwater issue: we’ve decided to capture him, since Palmer’s being a big wuss about killing him now that he’s the big lawman in town. Stein bribed the bartender into giving us the location of Stillwater’s camp, so Palmer and Hex are taking me, Mick, and Jax there tonight. Stein wasn’t happy about Jax’s participation, especially since we’re on a ‘no-future-tech-or-powers’ restriction, which means no Firestorm, but Jax has progressed with his shooting skills that I deemed him ready to go. Especially since I’ve already worked with him on the use of older firearms, as well. I’d want Sara with us as well (Stein would only be useful if we weren’t on that restriction, same with Kendra), but I found out late last night that the girls took off after the bar brawl to follow some lead on one of Kendra’s past lives and possibly a clue to finding and killing Savage, and they still aren’t back. Plus, they’ve headed in the direction opposite Stillwater’s camp, so they’re further away than we are. They did bring their comms with them, so at least they’re being updated on the situation and vice-versa. They’ve made contact with the woman they were looking for, a Kate Something-Or-Other, and will be heading back to the Waverider at dawn. Hopefully, they’ll get some useful intel, so at least we’ll get some kind of benefit from this stop beyond a temporary hiding place.

Day 24: Friday, April 14^th, 1871

Dear Lisa,

You can’t have an old Western movie without a shootout, and apparently you can’t have a time-traveling visit to the Old West without one, either.

Mick agrees with me that Sara could be useful, and Hex was skeptical about us wanting to bring a woman along, but let’s just say his 19^th-century notions of women have been challenged since then.

We spent all night riding there, and the arrest (I still can’t believe I took part in an arrest without being the arrested) went down in the early morning, when most of the gang members were either asleep or just getting up. It almost went smoothly, which would have been a first for us. but then Jax was captured as we were riding away with Stillwater, and the outdated weapons we were restricted to using ran out of ammo, so we had to take off and leave him, using Stillwater as leverage so that the gang wouldn’t kill him. Stein wanted to trade Stillwater for Jax, and while that would put us back at Square One, as Palmer pointed out, it was the quickest way to get Jax back, so I voted for that. But then Hex came up with something that only a cowboy would: Pistols at High Noon – a duel to decide the fate of Jax and Salvation. Palmer volunteered first, but Rip overrode him and wound up being the one facing Stillwater on Main Street. I probably could’ve pulled it off, but it wasn’t like I was going to volunteer for potentially getting shot and killed.

Frankly, I thought it was a bad idea, but we went through with it, and thankfully Rip’s a much better shot than Stillwater. Scratch one outlaw gang leader, and Jax was returned to us.

Then things went tits up, because then the Hunters arrived. They proved to be ridiculously easy to beat in a matter of minutes, even though Mick and I didn’t have our guns. Rip brought his laser revolver and a spare for Hex, but didn’t bother with the Cold Gun or Heat Gun. I was stuck shooting my 19^th-century pistol from behind the corner of a building while Mick got up close and personal with one of the Hunters. Pretty much the entire town saw the fight, though, since they were all there watching the shootout. But Rip’s confident they’ll keep quiet since no one else would believe them if they talked. This isn’t 2016 Central City, where metahumans and superheroes are a regular thing.

There was one catch. One of the Hunters spent his last moments gloating about the next person the Time Masters will be sending after us. She’s called the Pilgrim, and her MO is to travel through time and kill her targets before they’re capable of defending themselves, and before they’ve even committed the crimes they’re being executed for. She’s coming after us, but not in the present. Rip’s working with Gideon to calculate when and where she’ll target each of us, and has basically told us to get some rest after this action-packed day we’ve had. As if we could sleep knowing a time-traveling assassin could erase us from existence at any moment.

Wish us luck, Sis.

Chapter Text

Day 25: The Refuge – Wherever/whenever the hell that is!

Dear Lisa,

I saw you today. Spoke to you. And you didn’t recognize me.

There’s a lot to explain.

The first thing you should know is that Mick and I are cool again. Neither of us had been sleeping well, and we wound up having your typical midnight chat in the kitchen. Except it was anything but typical. There was a lot of brutal honesty about our priorities and how they’ve changed. The point is, we actually talked things out this time, and I really do believe it’s fine, now. Except he kept bugging me about Sara. Looks like he still thinks I have a crush on her. I don’t know how I’m going to convince him otherwise.

We were able to find our younger selves and protect them from the Pilgrim. Well, not Rip’s and Kendra’s. Rip has affected too many events throughout time in his Time Master career that wiping him out of existence would probably cause a serious disaster, and Kendra reincarnates, so killing her is just pointless. First we found Mick in 1987, just a year after we met in Juvie. It was the night of the fire his parents were killed in. I guess she figured it would be the cleanest way to kill him: to leave the authorities thinking he’d run off and disappeared off the face of the earth. We stuck him in the cargo hold (Jax came up with the lie that we worked for ARGUS) and then went after a younger Sara. This time, the Pilgrim didn’t bother with subtlety whatsoever. She stormed into the Starling City Police Precinct in 2007, less than a month before Sara got onto the Queen’s Gambit, and started shooting the place up. Mick and our Sara were able to go in, fight her off, and take 19-year-old Sara back to the ship. Mick warned us about sticking her in with his 16-year-old self, but Mini-Sara proved that she could handle herself when she slapped him across the face for trying a pervy line. (Even grown-up Mick found it funny.)

But then we ran into trouble: the Pilgrim got wise and started cloaking her ship’s movement through time and space, and we couldn’t track her until she nearly killed Palmer in 2014. So Rip came up with a new plan: to take the rest of us as newborns so that the Pilgrim wouldn’t be able to get at us at any point in our personal timelines. My infant self was grabbed right out of the hospital, and Sara and Kendra wouldn’t stop cooing over him. Seriously. The reincarnated hawk-goddess and the ex-assassin were cooing and baby-talking to him/me like love-struck little girls.

This is why I destroyed all my baby pictures. I don’t think Sara’s going to let this one go.

Anyway, we got Baby Stein and Jax next, and then Rip took us someplace safe to keep the kids and babies until the threat is over – although how we’re going to deal with that is something we haven’t figured out yet. It’s called ‘The Refuge’, and it’s where the Time Masters put orphans they’ve rescued in different points in time until they’ve grown up, at which point they become Time Masters as well. It’s where Rip grew up. You’d think it’d be insane to leave our younger selves there, but Ms. Xavier, who runs the place and is apparently the closest thing Rip’s had to a mother, insists: “My true loyalty is to my children.” I just hope she meant the ones currently in her orphanage, and not their adult selves.

Mick had a talk with his younger self. You know he started the fire that killed his parents, that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, even if his father had been a bit of a bastard himself, but he just lost control of the flames. He still hates himself for it, so he hasn’t exactly been… gentle when dealing with his younger self. He hasn’t beaten himself up (literally), but he outright threatened his younger self if he hurt any of the kids while staying at the Refuge. I found out about this later (I was busy dealing with Jax, who possibly could’ve dropped Baby Me if I hadn’t intervened) but apparently Mini-Mick said Older Mick reminded him of his father. Mick wouldn’t talk to me about it, but I could tell it shook him up.

This is where you came in. We thought the problem would be at least partially fixed with our younger selves stashed away, but then the Pilgrim chose another tactic. She took the people we loved. You, Sara and Jax’s fathers, Stein’s wife, and Palmer’s fiancée Anna (the one who was killed in the Siege of Starling City back in 2014). She gave us an ultimatum: our loved ones for our younger selves. Rip then had the balls to make a counter-offer: his younger self for our loved ones.

The Pilgrim agreed to the trade, because if she were to get rid of Rip, then he’d never have formed our team to begin with. We weren’t going to let her get away with that, of course. We had a trap set up, centring all on Kid Rip stabbing her while she was distracted by the rest of us. She has this ability to freeze time around her, so she could hold us all off at once, but wouldn’t think to pay attention to the scrawny kid, let alone think he’d be good with a knife. (It was actually kind of disturbing how easily he was able to stab her.) We completely destroyed her once she was disabled.

Maybe some might consider reducing her to a pile of ash to be overkill, but this chick previously shrugged off bullets, Palmer’s lasers (hard light beams, whatever), Firestorm’s blasts, and falling from the top floor of the Palmer Tech building. We weren’t taking any chances.

After that, we found the Pilgrim’s ship and brought you all back to the Waverider. But you didn’t recognize me. Thanks to our team taking my younger self out of the timeline on the day I was born, it changed time so that I was never a part of your life. You had to grow up without me there to protect you from Dad, and killed him in self-defence when you were twelve. I promised that we would fix this, that we’d return my younger self to the timeline and set it back to the way it should be, but you told me that I couldn’t promise to succeed. So if I’ve failed, and this journal has somehow gotten to you anyway, at least this might help explain why. And I’m going to say it again: You’re the most important thing in my world. If something’s kept me from coming back to you, Sis, I promise you, I fought to the end.

On a lighter note, Mick had another talk with his teen self. He hasn’t said much about it, but he walked back onto the ship announcing that he’d pulled the kid’s head out of his ass. Nothing seems to have changed, so apparently it didn’t stick (Mini-Mick and Mini-Sara will probably have to take these little amnesia pills before we put them back, so that might be why). But the fact that he tried seems to have made him feel a bit better.

Back to the bad news: I’m not the only who’s been faced with the problem of someone forgetting my existence. Stein’s wife Clarissa couldn’t remember him, either. The old man was heartbroken. We need to wrap up this business with Savage, and fast, or the alterations we’ve made will become permanent. So we’re heading to 2166 tomorrow, to face Savage at the height of his power, which we’ve been avoiding because of how powerful he is in that time. The only reason we haven’t set off yet is because we’ve made nine jumps one after the other, and it’s taken a lot out of us. But we’ll be heading into seriously dangerous territory tomorrow.

Chapter Text

Day 27: Tuesday, March 25^th, 2166

Dear Lisa,

I met Savage’s daughter today – Or should I say yesterday? I just got back to the ship shortly after sunrise. It was a hell of a night.

We arrived in 2166 and were nearly shot down out of the sky by Savage’s forces, who were in the middle of taking London, which is the last city to fall to his army. To say we had a rough landing was an understatement, but it wasn’t the worst we’ve had – that came later that night. Rip took me, Sara, and Mick to attend a ‘We’ve almost conquered the world’ rally Savage was holding for his troops. We were supposed to try and grab him as he was leaving, but one of his lieutenants made us, and our attempt to grab him minutes later failed when more soldiers showed up. Rip was less than pleased – we arrived only three days before his wife and kid will be killed, so the whole ‘removed our younger selves from the timeline’ thing isn’t the only reason we’re on a tight deadline.

But one good thing that came out of the encounter was that Kendra spotted something she thought she could use to kill Savage: the female lieutenant who made us was wearing a bracelet that belonged to Kendra during her first life. She was wearing it the night Savage first killed her and Carter, so it was exposed to the same radiation they were, which means that, in theory, it is one of the objects that can be used by Kendra or Carter to kill Savage. And yes, I’m aware that a bracelet doesn’t exactly scream ‘murder weapon’, but Birdie eventually thought up a way to do it. But even before she figured it out, we already knew she needed to actually get her hands on the damn thing, so Mick and I snuck into Savage’s compound, with every intention of overpowering the lieutenant who’d been wearing it, taking the little trinket, and leaving.

But then something happened. She looked me in the eye and called me by name. This woman knew who I was, and I figured she probably knew a lot more about us and our team. So we knocked her on the head and brought her back to the Waverider with us. Rip was less than pleased with us, but once we explained our reasoning, and she calmly introduced herself as Vandal Savage’s daughter Cassandra, he became far more interested in her. I volunteered to interrogate her and convince her to help us. Why? Because I know what it’s like to grow up with a monster for a father, and I figured I could show her that her father is one, too. She didn’t believe me, of course. Savage used Per Degaton to throw the world into chaos, then killed him once the brat was no longer useful, making himself look like the tyrant-overthrowing hero to his followers, and it worked on Cassie. Her mother was killed by Per Degaton’s biological warfare agent, the Armageddon Virus, but she didn’t know that her father was actually the one behind it – he authorized the use of it to ‘thin the herd’ outside of Kasnia mere days after we left 2147. Cassie was firmly of the opinion that her father was the world’s only hope, and that the resistance fighters we’d met up with were ‘dangerous radicals’.

It was at that point, however, that trouble came, in the form of a 200-foot-tall ROBOT that walked up, shrugged off all our weapons’ fire, and tossed our ship like the World’s Biggest Frisbee. I suppose with all this time-travel crap, immortal people, reincarnated people with wings, and metahumans we’ve encountered, it was only a matter of time before giant robots came onto the scene. It explained how a nearby resistance camp had been completely demolished earlier last night; tents and people with a minimal number of weapons crushed to death. We were able to save a few dozen refugees from another camp by bringing them on board, but we couldn’t save everyone. Some of the fighters stayed behind, not knowing what they were dealing with. Fortunately for them, the people remote-operating robot were apparently more interested in us than them.

We were all scrambling to get everything done before it came back for Round 2; I kept talking to Cassandra, Palmer and Jax were working on a way to beat the robot, and Mick and Kendra were melting down the bracelet to coat the head of Carter’s old mace. (And that, Lisa, is how you turn a bracelet into a murder weapon.) Stein had to sit out of it all, though, because he’d been injured when we crashed. Sara spent the rest of the time taking care of the refugees, many of whom were also injured and all of whom were scared shitless, and Rip honestly spent a good chunk of it moping in his office.

I was, eventually, able to get through to Cassie. It wasn’t the crying, terrified refugees (most of them little kids) that moved her, but some footage Rip took of Savage back in 2147, proposing the use of the Armageddon Virus at a shareholder’s meeting. Knowing her father was responsible for the death of her mother, Cassie helped us sneak into Savage’s headquarters, and even helped us fight the guards off while Kendra personally took on Savage herself.

Birdie nearly killed the bastard, but then something went wrong, as per usual. One of Savage’s other lieutenants tried to stop her, but when she knocked off his helmet in their fight, she saw that it was another reincarnation of Carter. Savage had gotten to him in this life before he could remember his past lives and brainwashed him. The bastard told Kendra that he was the only one who could bring her Carter back, so she took him prisoner instead. Now he’s sitting pretty in the same cell we kept Cassie in, and Mick before her.

It’s stupid. What’s happened to Carter is fucked up, no two ways about it. But the whole point of this mission was to kill Savage. Carter joined this mission to kill Savage, and he gave his life trying. But now that we actually have Savage, no one seems to want to do it, except for myself, Rip, Mick, and Sara.

As for Cassie, I brought her to the leader of the London rebels. ‘Sharon’ was less than pleased to see Savage’s daughter/right-hand woman, but couldn’t deny that her information was too valuable to turn away. Cassie will be helping them dismantle the rest of Savage’s forces, which will be easier as long as their leader isn’t around. Stein said something to me in Salvation: “‘Like father, like son’ isn’t always inevitable.” I just hope Cassie can overcome her father’s legacy. I’d like to think I’ve overcome our father’s.

But last night was nothing short of action-packed. We arrived shortly after sundown, it’s now ten in the morning, and I only just got a chance to get some rest. After dropping Cassie off at the resistance camp around sunrise, I had to help find a missing young refugee, and she would barely leave my side after I found her. She reminded me a bit of you when you were little.

I’ll be getting some goddamn sleep now. Hopefully we’ll be able to get our shit together in the morning.

Chapter Text

Day 29: The Vanishing Point (Literally the End of Time)

Dear Lisa,

I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that, to use Mick’s words, I’ve pulled my head out of my ass regarding Sara. The bad news: we’ve just arrived at the Vanishing Point, home base of the Time Masters.

I’m going to start with the good news. We stayed in 2166 for about three more days, helping the rebels fight off Savage’s army (which has been somewhat falling apart without its leader) and rebuilding London, in addition to making repairs on the Waverider. We were so busy, I didn’t even have time to write anything for those days. Mick decided to keep pushing the idea that I have a thing for Sara, because he kept making stupid excuses to force the two of us to work together. Not that working with Sara was an inconvenience, but it was getting really annoying, how Mick stubbornly kept trying to prove a point. And I think he somehow got Kendra in on it, too, because she kept sending Sara my way just as often as Mick kept pushing me to spend time with Sara.

But then something happened. One of the rebels started hanging around Sara a lot, helping us out with repairs and stuff, which would’ve been great, except he was constantly flirting with Sara as he did so. It pissed me off, because she can do so much better than some big, blonde moron who has nothing going for him but his looks and his muscles. Thankfully, I found out later that he just wanted her help making his ex-girlfriend jealous, so it was all just a show they put on whenever she was around. Incredibly petty of him, but at least I know Sara wasn’t actually falling for that nonsense.

On the evening of the third day – March 27^th – the Science Squad found evidence that Savage’s giant robot came from even further into the future than 2166, so Rip decided to turn Savage in to the Time Masters as a time criminal. As if they would go: ‘Oh, okay, we’ll just send you and your team on your way and leave you alone, now. So sorry we tried to kill you and your loved ones.’ I doubt it. Something is very wrong. I’ve been getting that same feeling I got during the Alexa disaster. I told Mick, and he’s even less eager to go back to the Time Masters than the rest of us.

It only got worse when the ship basically broke down in the middle of the time stream because Rip ignored the damage we took from the robot attack and pushed her too hard. He sent Jax in to fix the time drive, but after succeeding, the kid was hit with a blast of temporal radiation that started aging him rapidly. By the time I got a look at him, he was about 63 years old, physically. It wouldn’t be too long before he died of old age. And Rip knew it would happen, but he sent Jax in there instead of taking care of it himself. He sent Jax – a 20-year-old kid with a widowed mother waiting for him at home – off on a suicide mission, knowing it would kill him. Just when I thought that rat bastard was finally starting to get over his habit of using us as expendable pawns, he did it again.

So Mick and I made up our minds. The Jump Ship has a single-use time drive that’s good for one time-jump. Rip has been saying that this mission was always voluntary, so we basically quit. We weren’t waiting for him to sacrifice us, next. I hoped Sara would come with us, but she doesn’t want to run away from the fight, not when she’s taken this so far. Even after she said Rip would sell us all out to save his family.

I wish she’d tried to come with us. I’m hoping we all come out of this alive, even if it’s a one-in-a-million chance, but especially Sara. She’s the first one who accepted me and Mick for what we are, and she’s already been through so much, but she’s still pushing on. She’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever met, and it would be a complete waste to throw her life away for someone who will sacrifice her for a plan that probably won’t even work. Mick’s seen the worst of what the Time Masters could do (at least I hope that’s the worst), and Rip wants to bring the team onto their turf, anyway. It’s a suicide mission, and frankly, the whole team deserves better than that. Even Palmer, and I don’t even like the guy.

For the record, I’m still on the ship, but not by choice. Stein apparently figured a trip through the time stream would cure Jax, and Mick and I would’ve been happy to take the kid with us if we could, but the old man forgot we were planning to bail and sent Jax back to 2016 without us. So the kid is probably safe; even if the Time Masters come after him, he’ll have the Flash backing him up, and maybe even Team Arrow. But the rest of us are stuck on course to the Vanishing Point, and we may not come back.

That was when I finally came to my senses. Mick told me about what the Time Masters would do to us, and I couldn’t help but worry about what would happen to Sara, even more than my own fate. Looking back at my older entries, I guess this has been happening for a while. Why the hell didn’t I figure it out, yet? If you’ve read this, Lise, you might’ve put the pieces together already, but I might as well officially put the words to paper:

I like Sara Lance. I might just even love her.

She’s been through so much in her life, and she hasn’t let it stop her from wanting to be better than she is. She’s the strongest person I know, and I guess I’ve admired her for a long time. And it’s been so long since I’ve been able to open up to anyone like I have with her. I talked to her about Mick, about what Dad did to us, and so many other things I’ve never shared with anyone else. It’s unfair, really, that I’m only figuring this out when we may only have a few hours left together.

Mick just laughed at me and said it took me long enough, and that I’d better ask her out soon or he’d lose a bet to Jax.

He left me alone to think about that, but I didn’t have much time to do any thinking. Vandal Savage escaped from the brig, and trashed the ship even further while we tried to re-capture him. Seems Palmer was dumb enough to pay him a couple visits, fall for the bastard’s taunts, and OPEN THE DOOR AND WALK INTO THE CELL! Mick’s still contemplating killing him for his stupidity, or at least beating some sense into him. Because naturally, the 4000-year-old immortal psychopath kicked his ass and got out, freed a still-brainwashed Carter, and knocked Gideon offline. Sara and Stein had to help Rip navigate and steer the ship while the rest of us tried to fight Savage and Carter. Mick and I got blasted into a wall and knocked out, and when we woke up, we learned that Rip came to back us up (and since Palmer was knocked out, too, it was just him and Kendra fighting), then Carter’s memories came back when Savage was about to kill Kendra. Our dead-and-reincarnated teammate apparently managed to get a few hits in on the bastard before getting stabbed, but Kendra managed to rally and knock Savage out and drag him back to his cell.

Sara also piloted the Waverider for the first time when Rip came to help us. Stein won’t stop singing her praises. And no, she hasn’t had any prior training. Color me impressed. And no, I’m not just saying it because I like her.

After that crazy fight, we kept going on and made it to the Vanishing Point. Rip has taken Savage to present him to the Time Council and have him put to justice for his crimes. I still feel like something is going to wrong – I seriously doubt they’re going to see reason – but there’s nothing I can do about it. So I got to thinking about my earlier epiphany. I can’t believe it took me this long to figure out how I felt about Sara. It’s like… if everyone has light and dark in them, we’ve both been in the dark for the longest time, but we bring out the light in each other. It’s been so long since I’ve known anyone I could trust like her. You’d like her, too. But I don’t know if we’re both coming back from the Vanishing Point once we get there. So I’m going to do something I’ve never done before.

I’m going to take the risk and just talk to her, to tell her how I feel. Maybe she’ll feel the same way, maybe she won’t. But I don’t have the time to craft a plan, and besides, my planning expertise lies in the area of criminal enterprises. All I can come up with is to go for a game of cards, like usual, and bring it up during the game.

Wish me luck, Lisa. I’m really going to need it, if not for talking to Sara, then for what comes after Rip’s plan.

Chapter Text

Day 29: Still at the Vanishing Point

Dear Lisa,

I had no idea so much could go so wrong in so little time. Sara and I were playing cards in her room, and I was getting ready to talk to her about me and her my f us, when I started getting that Alexa feeling again. Not that it ever really went away, but it came back worse than ever. The Time Masters’ soldiers were raiding the ship and taking our team prisoner. Luckily, Sara and I managed to evade them, and I led her to a hidden passage I found early on in the mission. We waited until the troopers had all left before coming out of hiding.

This is where I do something stupid. I’ve told you already that I had a feeling something really bad was going to happen. The Time Masters had captured the rest of the team, even a still-comatose Carter. We were in their territory, not ours. We didn’t know the layout, and there was only the two of us against who knows how many of them. I didn’t think we could win. And I was afraid of what would happen if we got caught – if they decided to do to us what they did to Mick, instead of just killing us. What they were probably doing to him again right that moment. So even though I have that code of never abandoning my crew, I decided to try and leave. In my mind, there was nothing Sara and I could do for them. Sara refused to leave, so I pulled the Cold Gun on her.

It was so stupid of me. Sara’s got a poker face almost as good as mine, but I could tell it hurt her, me holding her at gunpoint. Just minutes earlier, I was about to admit how much I liked her, and suddenly I was tearing down her trust, just like that.

But she knew I wouldn’t actually fire on her. And she was right. I was scared, dammit, and I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t hurt her. She just looked me in the eye, reminded me about how I talked her down in Russia, and challenged me to shoot her.

Our tense little standoff was interrupted by a phone, of all things, ringing. An old, early-model telephone that sat among the antiques Rip had scattered across his office. I’d seen it before, but I had no idea the damn thing was even functional. Gideon turned out to be on the other end, announcing that she was back online, and that she knew where the team was and that she had a plan to rescue them.

It involved sabotaging the other Time Ships in the hangar the Waverider had been towed into, flying out of the Vanishing Point, and then flying back in. The virus Gideon created, which Sara and I got into their computers by placing some future tech on the ships’ hulls, was supposed to just shut the ships down after they started up, but I added a bit of psychological warfare: if the virus worked, all the AIs affected by it started singing this Captain and Tennille song Mick put on at the bar we visited back in ’75, for old times’ sake. Once we returned, Sara and Gideon dropped me off at the closest entrance to the room the team was being held in, and kept most of the security occupied. I found the holding room, but found myself facing what I’d been worried about the most. Mick was back in his Chronos armor, and I thought they’d brainwashed him again. Thankfully, he turned out to be faking it, having beaten their attempts somehow, and instead killed the Time Master who ordered him to kill me.

We all got back onto the Waverider and got away, after Palmer managed to hack the silly tractor beam the Time Masters tried to use on us, and Rip was able to explain what happened.

It was worse than I expected. The Time Masters have been working with Vandal Savage all along. They let Rip make his little speech about how the bastard was a time criminal, then they set Savage free, tossed Rip in a cell, and sent their minions to grab the rest of us. Then they let Savage take a time ship back to 2166 and bring Kendra and Carter with him.

Then Rip hit us with the biggest whammy: the Time Masters have a device called the Oculus that basically allows them to manipulate time and anything in it. They’ve been controlling us from the start – the deaths of Rip’s wife and son were even ordered by them, as they’d just sent Savage off to do just that. Looking back over these past entries, I can see stupid errors in judgement and bad decisions that we shouldn’t have made: not finding a picture of ‘Sasha Mahnovski’ back in ’75, Rip not sending in Sara for backup in ’86… Mick’s betrayal was probably part of their plan, as it gave them one of their most feared bounty hunters. All of us (minus Jax) getting to the Vanishing Point was definitely their idea.

The only reason we were able to escape was because the Vanishing Point, in Rip’s words, ‘exists outside of time’. We are only immune as long as we remain in the Vanishing Point, so the only way to be completely free is to destroy it while we have the chance. So, we’re circling around to attack the Oculus’s location and do just that. It’s a crazy plan, but it’s literally our only option. If we try to leave the Vanishing Point while it’s still working, we’ll be under the Time Masters’ control again, and we may never get another chance.

We have maybe an hour of downtime (the Vanishing Point is huge) before we get there. I’m going to give talking to Sara a second try, not that I ever actually got around to a proper first try. I just hope pulling a gun on her hasn’t completely ruined my chances.

Day 30

Dear Lisa,

We haven’t met, but I’m sure by now you know plenty about me through what your brother has written here. Don’t worry; I haven’t read anything in detail. Whatever he wrote in confidence to you is none of my business. I just found this journal by accident, and I think you have the right to know what happened to him.

My name is Sara Lance.

When we arrived at the Oculus Wellspring, the Time Masters were waiting for us. Like your brot Snart Leonard said, they couldn’t control us at the Vanishing Point, but they must have predicted that we would go there after finding out about it, because what other option did we have? They had an ambush set up, but Jax returned in the Jump Ship and took a bunch of them out that way before re-merging with Stein. I can’t remember his explanation for how he got back to us. It isn’t really important. Rip took Ray and Mick inside the building while the rest of us held off the soldiers. When Rip came out alone, we knew something was wrong. He had a shrunken-down and unconscious Ray in his pocket, but said that Mick had chosen to stay behind.

You see, the Oculus had a failsafe. A piece of the machine that had to be manually held in place in order for the Oculus to blow. Ray later told us that he was planning to be the one to hold it down, but Mick decided to knock him on the head and take his place. Those two really have formed an odd friendship since Ray took a beating for Mick in the Russian prison. Mick told me he wanted to be the one to take the Time Masters out after everything they’ve done to him.

When your brother heard about this, he raced back into the Oculus building, and I followed him. I didn’t hear what the two of them said to each other, but I saw Leonard hitting Mick on the head with the Cold Gun and taking his place. He told me to get his partner out of there.

I didn’t want to leave him. He was the first person in a long time that made me feel normal human. When he came to me and talked about us ‘him and me’, I was still mad at him for pointing his Cold Gun at me, I wasn’t sure if he was being serious with me, and I was scared. I didn’t know what I felt about that, so I pushed him away. I thought I would have more time to think about it before giving him a proper answer.

I was an assassin for seven years, and my targets rarely saw death coming. I was dead for a year, and I never saw it coming. I should have known better than to assume I had time.

I finally figured out how I felt about him: I think I love him. I love him. And it took seeing him ready to die for me to figure it out.

I didn’t have enough time to tell him. I only had a few minutes to drag Mick out of there before the Oculus blew up, or all three of us would have been killed. So, I kissed Leonard goodbye. It was the only way I could even begin to show him how I felt, to apologize for how I talked to him.

The Oculus blew as Rip flew the ship away. The Time Masters’ base at the Vanishing Point was destroyed. They’ll never be able to control us or anyone else again. And they can’t help Vandal Savage anymore.

Your brother died a hero. He would probably gripe about being called that. But he was a hero. He sacrificed his life so that the people he cared about could live. And he deserves to be remembered for that, as the man who would do anything for the few closest to him.

We’re going to keep hunting Savage. We’re going to see this through for Leonard. I promise you, Lisa, his sacrifice won’t be in vain.

Chapter Text

Monday, May 30^th, 2016

Lisa stared at Lenny’s journal for at least an hour before she got up the courage to open it. It was black leather – real leather, because Lenny wouldn’t settle for anything but the best unless he had to – with a thin, braided rope looped around it and marking one page. Lisa didn’t open it to the page it marked, however, instead starting at the beginning. The sight of her brother’s neat handwriting – small enough that you had to squint in order to read it – caused an unexpected pang in her chest, but she kept reading.

The very first entry was dated October 17^th, 1975, and began with ‘Dear Lisa’, and an insistence that this wasn’t actually a letter to her, despite that. He just didn’t want to write ‘Dear Diary’ like some ten-year-old girl. If he were here, Lisa would have pointed out that he didn’t really need to start it with any sort of greeting. Lenny described how some lunatic knocked him and Mick out and somehow brought them all the way to Star City and pitched the idea of travelling through time and saving the world from some immortal lunatic named Vandal Savage. He explained his reasons for deciding to go, including the stealing opportunities that Mick had brought up when giving Lisa the heartbreaking news, but also admitting that the idea of doing better than he had been before had gotten to him. Lisa also noted that Lenny had slipped up; when mentioning the Flash, Lenny had written and then crossed out the letters ‘Bar’. So she guessed the Scarlet Speedster’s first or last name started with those letters.

He listed all the people he was travelling with: A couple hero friends of the Flash, a pair of reincarnated bird people who were apparently that Savage guy’s mortal enemies, and Sara. The woman Mick had brought with him to tell Lisa the news of Lenny’s death. Maybe it was because Mick had already said Lenny had had feelings for her, but Lisa thought it was already rather obvious as she read on – though she was not all that surprised when Lenny admitted to staring at the blonde’s ass.

He talked about ditching the ship once they arrived in the seventies and Sara and the ‘Rogues’ got benched, and how they got into a bar brawl and Sara took down six guys single-handedly before letting the boys join. Lisa glanced up at the short, petite blonde in question at that point, sitting in the front passenger seat of the truck and staring blankly out the window as they drove back to Central City. Of course Lenny would fall for a badass; damsels in distress could never hold his interest.

Lenny closed that entry with a short explanation about how they were going against the rules of the old bosses of the time-traveller, Hunter. Not that that would dismay a pair of career criminals. His closing comment about ‘flipping history off’ made her smile.

The second entry was about their second day in the seventies, in which they failed to kidnap Savage at an arms auction, Lenny stole a dagger from Savage himself – only for that to fail as the bastard got away – and one of the bird-people, a guy named Carter, was killed. Just as Mick had said before, Lenny took it as a personal offence when someone messed with his crew; if it happened after the job was over and they went their separate ways, he usually couldn’t care less, but when they were still working together… no, Lenny would never let Carter’s murder go unavenged.

Lisa couldn’t help but shed a few more tears as she read the last paragraph, in which Lenny wrote that after Carter died, he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to die, either. So from that point on, all these entries really were his letters to her from the grave. It both broke her heart and erased that small, wriggling doubt over reading her brother’s private journal.

The third entry actually did bring forth more tears; she caught Mick looking at her in the rear-view mirror, but he said nothing.

Lenny had tried to change their past. Had tried to save their father from turning into the monster that would be their waking nightmare, would put scars on their hearts, minds, and bodies, and would eventually force Lenny to kill him when he took one more step too far. And he had failed to change it. He quoted Hunter saying: ‘Time wants to happen’, and Lisa remembered Mick repeating it like a slogan just that morning. How many times had they been forced to face that reality? To try and change something only for it to find another way to happen?

The fourth entry was the first one to not be from 1975. They’d moved on to 1986, and Lenny went on about their clumsy infiltration of the Pentagon (damn, he must’ve been enjoying that until things started going wrong) and outdoing some guy named Palmer (the name did sound familiar, probably from something she’d heard in the news) in seducing a Russian scientist to get access to her workplace and her secret projects.

In the fifth, however, the aforementioned scientist turned out to be as mad as Dr. Frankenstein, and half the team was captured while stealing some tech from her lab, and Lenny had been pissed at Hunter for not sending in enough backup and forcing Lenny to abandon Mick and two others while retreating. Lenny was right. Rip Hunter really was a rat bastard.

Her impression of this Hunter guy was not helped at all by the next two entries, but her impression of Sara was.  Aside from the exciting story that was breaking Mick and the others out of a particularly nasty Soviet gulag, Lisa learned that Sara had been through a ton of shit, and that Hunter was willing to use his crew as pawns without taking into consideration what it might do to them. That he let his fear of the worst-case scenario sabotage his own Plan A and create a Plan B that would have probably torn the whole team apart if it went the way he planned it. Lenny went into a little bit of detail about how much Sara had already suffered, and what being forced to kill a teammate would have done to her. Lisa was absolutely that certain he’d already started falling for her by then, but it seemed that he hadn’t figured it out himself.

The eighth entry (still covering Day Seven, though) was the last one Lisa read before they arrived in Central and she put the journal away to read the rest later. It was… informative, to say the least. They went to a post-apocalyptic future Star City (although not quite far enough into the future for Lisa’s liking), Lenny learned who the Green Arrow was (Oliver Queen? Really?), and he and Mick got into a serious argument. It seemed Lenny had become more committed to the mission than Mick had – at least at that point – and had forced him to leave with the team instead of staying and causing chaos in the cop-free city. Although Lenny had a very good point: there were two people on that team, including Sara, who called that city home, and they would do whatever they could to prevent that bad future from happening, so what would have happened to Mick if he’d stayed there?

Lisa convinced Mick and Sara she was fine in the safe house alone as he went and picked up some food and Sara went to her mother’s place. She curled up on the (stolen) leather sofa and continued reading.

Entries Nine through Fourteen weren’t exactly action-packed, but nonetheless informative, at least when it came to Sara, although there was a little tidbit about that Palmer guy having lost his fiancée in the Siege of Starling City, as people called it. It seemed that the blonde had really opened up over their many games of cards as they had nothing else to do. Lisa smirked as Lenny’s tale of sharing babysitting-related horror stories, of all things, brought up a vague memory of a very colourful teenaged Mick. Number Thirteen, however, did not make her smile; Sara had tried to kill Lenny! Sure, it was some sort of side-effect of her resurrection that she couldn’t control, but Lisa’s brother was only alive because two of their teammates, Kendra and Jax, had been there to pull the crazy bitch off. And yet, at the end of that entry, Lenny had asked Lisa not to hold it against her. Mick was right; Lenny had already been absolutely gone on her. Just like he’d been gone on Alexa. Lisa had to admit that Sara’s story, assuming it was the truth (Alexa had lied about her history, after all), was traumatic as hell, and that surviving it all was really impressive, but Lisa wasn’t going to trust someone with her only family so easily. Lenny had been hurt badly by trusting Alexa so strongly, and now he was dead after trusting this woman who was proven to be dangerously violent under the wrong conditions. Lisa only hoped that the two things weren’t connected.

She had a hard time reading the fifteenth entry; Lenny’s hands must have been shaking, which only proved how upset he’d been when Mick had betrayed the team. Obviously, they got over that, or Sara wouldn’t have been with him and vouched for him… unless she was a traitor, too. Unless she really wasn’t to be trusted. Lisa pushed on, determined to know what had happened.

Lisa could almost imagine how hard it must have been for Lenny to choose between Mick and the team. He’d definitely gotten attached to them, between teaching that Jax kid how to fight or trading funny stories about her with the others – Lisa made a mental note to ask Sara if he’d spilled about any of her more embarrassing childhood moments. And she agreed that Mick had broken Lenny’s code first by selling the team out. But they’d known each other for almost thirty years. Part of her was angry that Lenny would throw that away for some people he’d only known a couple of weeks. But it sounded like Mick turning on the team had hurt Lenny personally. As far as Lenny was concerned, Mick had betrayed him first.

The following two entries were a bit of a breather. For Lisa, anyway. They went to the 1950s and dealt with Savage turning people into scary bird monsters, and on top of that, Jax and the other woman on the team, Kendra, had to deal with people in the 50s being racist bastards. Lenny also took note that Jax, who thought Lenny had killed Mick for his betrayal, was still fighting in Mick’s corner. Lenny had been glad that someone else had given a shit about Mick, regardless of whatever it was that pushed him over the edge, and to be honest, Lisa was, too.

She only got a bit into the fourth paragraph of Lenny’s next entry before putting the journal down in shock and grabbing her Gold Gun, keeping it right next to her so that she’d have it on hand when Mick came back. According to Lenny, Mick had been ‘rescued’ from where Lenny had left him by the Time Masters and turned into one of their bounty hunters. He’d attacked them in 1975 and killed Kendra and Carter’s son from a past life (although she did find some minimal humour when she flipped back to re-read that entry and noted that Mick had hit his future self with a car), he’d shot down their ship and caused them to crash in Future Star City, which had led to his original fight with Lenny that led to him being left behind and becoming ‘Chronos’ in the first place, and he’d hijacked the ship and kidnapped Lenny. Then he’d threatened to kill Lisa over and over just to make Lenny suffer. Lenny had been right when explaining his reasons for leaving Mick in the middle of nowhere instead of their own place and time – until reading this, Lisa would have trusted Mick not to hurt her, and never would have seen it coming.

It chilled her to the bone to read what Lenny had had to do to escape: freezing and shattering his own hand, leaving himself crippled for life had it not been for magic future technology. And he hadn’t known at the time that he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life with only one hand. He’d been desperate enough to risk that fate.

A part of her relaxed when Mick was captured instead of killed, and the team wanted to reform him. Because it offered Lisa a glimmer of hope that maybe she would be safe the next time Mick walked into the safe house. But Lenny was skeptical about undoing ‘lifetimes’ of conditioning, and warned her to not trust his old partner until he personally told her it was safe. She hoped that assurance was somewhere in this journal, because unless Mick and Sara were lying about him being dead, Lenny would never be able to give it to her in person.

Lenny told her about a dream he had where he was forced to choose between her and Sara. If he couldn’t see what that meant – that Sara had become so important to him that he’d actually hesitate to make that choice – then he really was a fool, blind to his own feelings. He even took a short detour through his worries about Mick to worry how being stuck in the League of Assassins for an extra two years would affect her, and how, when she found out about the dream, she’d said she’d support him choosing Lisa over the team.

The next four entries described their trip to the twenty-second century, and the whole debate over killing a kid before he grew up to become as bad as Hitler. With Savage as a tutor and role model, what else could that brat grow up to be? But more importantly, Lenny and Mick apparently decided to settle their issues in what was essentially a cage match, and while Mick chose to not kill Lenny despite completely kicking his ass, it wasn’t just because of their old friendship or anything like that. Mick had known that someone else would be coming after the team, and would try to kill him, too, so he’d rejoined them for the sake of strength in numbers. It could explain why Sara was with him, but Lisa wasn’t one hundred percent sure yet.

But the third of those four entries ended on an interesting note: Sara had had a nightmare, and had gone to Lisa’s brother and apparently spilled some very personal thoughts and feelings to her. Lisa shared Lenny’s surprise that anyone would trust him on that level.

Mick came back just as she starting the entry about Sara tearing Lenny a new one for the whole cage match thing and the team hiding out in the Old West. She immediately dropped the journal and raised the Gold Gun, pointing it right at him. Mick stopped in his tracks, but didn’t look surprised in the slightest. “Guess you got to the bit about Chronos, huh?”

“How do I know I can trust you?” Lisa growled, “How do I know you’re not still the bounty hunter that wanted to kill me just to hurt Lenny?” And God, the threat itself hurt, the idea that he’d even talk about hurting the same girl he used to babysit when she was really little and Lenny had to pull a late shift to keep the roof over their heads and CPS from taking her away. The girl he’d taught how to beat up the asshole who’d cheated on her in high school.

Mick actually flinched at that. “Just keep reading,” he said sadly, “We made up, I swear.”

Right. He’d said that Lenny had died saving his life. “If you’re lying…” she threatened, “I will kill you.”

Mick didn’t argue, just set the bags of food down on a table and went into a back room, leaving her alone. Lisa repositioned herself so that she’d be able to see him the instant he came back out, and continued reading.

It seemed it wasn’t just Lenny getting attached to his new team; according to what Sara had told him, the others would have rallied behind Lenny and Lisa if they’d had to. It helped that Lenny personally saved the lives of two teammates single-handedly while in the Old West, while they seemed to have pulled off their own version of that Western movie from the sixties… what was it called? Oh yeah, ‘The Magnificent Seven’. (She was pretty sure she’d heard rumours about a remake coming up.)

Lenny’s twenty-sixth entry scared her for completely different reasons. Thankfully, Lenny did assure her at the beginning that he was trusting Mick again, but then he and the team had had to deal with an assassin trying to kill them in the past, by essentially kidnapping their past selves as she was trying to kill them. Lisa wasn’t surprised that a 16-year-old Mick had tried making a move on a teenaged version of Sara, and she found herself wondering if the blonde had taken a picture of Baby Lenny, because she hadn’t seen any, herself.

But what really disturbed her was learning that this assassin, the Pilgrim (what kind of name was that?) had kidnapped her when she couldn’t get Baby Lenny. Lisa didn’t remember anything like that. Lenny said that because they’d taken his newborn self out of the timeline, time had been altered so that she’d grown up with no big brother to protect her, that she hadn’t recognised him at all. Lisa could only assume that Baby Lenny had been put back since then.

The next entry was about another trip to the future, this one to right before Savage conquered the world and killed Hunter’s family. Lenny had met Savage’s daughter, found some sort of parallel between the immortal bastard and Lewis Snart when it came to parenting, and used it to turn her to their side. Considering that Savage had apparently been alive for four thousand years, Lisa wondered what his other children had been like – and why they’d even existed, if he was so obsessed with Kendra. She also admitted to snorting when Lenny had brought up the two-hundred-foot-tall robot, and how he didn’t really seem to be as surprised as a person with a normal life should be.

Lisa found herself fully agreeing with Lenny about Kendra’s decision to keep Savage alive to save a reincarnated, brainwashed Carter: it was stupid. She should just kill him, come back to 2016, and then work on killing him in an earlier time so that the brainwashing bit never happened. And Savage could have been lying about being the only one who knew how to save Carter! Maybe they could have found another way!

She really was starting to lose faith in Lenny’s teammates, as by the next entry, he explained that most of them had stuck with Kendra, and those on Lenny’s side of the argument (Mick and Sara) couldn’t actually do anything about it. And Hunter’s Plan B – turn Savage over to his old bosses and expect them to act reasonably after trying to kill the team so many times – was just ludicrous. She was genuinely worried about Lenny being stuck on the ship on the way to the ‘Vanishing Point’, but she knew Mick and Sara had gotten back. But somehow, Lisa just knew that that place was where Lenny had died.

On the plus side, Lenny had finally figured out that he had the hots for Sara. It was really about time. And she wondered if he got up the guts to ask her out before he died.

She soon got her answer. Lenny’s final entry described how the Time Masters were Savage’s allies, the same ones Mick had described, just not by name. Lisa wanted to smack him upside the head for pulling the Cold Gun on the girl he liked. She couldn’t believe her genius-in-his-own-right brother had done something so stupid. The entry ended with him planning to confess his feelings to Sara before they went to blow up the Time Masters’ time-controlling machine.

And that was probably the last thing Lenny ever wrote, because the last entry in the journal wasn’t in his handwriting. It was Sara’s.

She’d written it before killing Savage, before accompanying Mick to give Lisa the bad news. She told Lisa about how Mick had tried to kill all the Time Masters at the cost of his own life (if had been that bad, then Lisa felt she might be able to forgive him for what he’d done as Chronos), but Lenny had taken his place. She told Lisa about how, before that whole battle, Lenny had come to her and basically confessed, about how she’d pushed him away because she was still (understandably) mad about him pulling the Cold Gun on her, and about how she’d kissed him right before he’d died in an attempt to tell him that yes, she had loved him back.

Lisa had had to put the journal away after finishing, and laid back, fighting off a fresh batch of tears. Sara called Lenny a hero. Apparently, the whole team was calling him that.

But he’d been Lisa’s hero first, for as long as she could remember.

Thursday, June 2^nd, 2016

Mick had told her that the Waverider crew was meeting up with Team Flash at Saints and Sinners to honour Lenny’s memory. It would have been his 44^th birthday, after all. And while her first instinct was to wallow in grief on her dead brother’s birthday, she let Mick talk her into going. She found herself wondering what Lenny would think as she threw herself into Cisco’s arms when she spotted him there. Lenny’s team knew him well by now, but Cisco was the only one she’d told about what Lenny had meant to her.

After the initial toast after the arrival of Sara and a tall, handsome, dark-haired guy (soon identified as Ray Palmer, the Annoying Shrinking Idiot Genius Billionaire Geek), Lisa pulled Sara aside. “He really did love you,” she said, blurting it out because she didn’t know how to beat around the bush about this. Or maybe she just didn’t have the energy to do so.

Sara looked at her with surprise. “What?”

“Lenny. I read his journal, like you and Mick asked. It took him until you guys were already on your way to the Vanishing Point to figure it out, but I’m his sister; I know how to read between the lines.”

The blonde resurrected ex-assassin who’d stolen Lenny’s heart looked down sadly. “I hurt him,” she whispered, “I pushed him away, and I’ll never be able to take it back. You must hate me for that.”

“His last entry was before you had that conversation,” Lisa admitted, “But I think he knew you wanted to. He had nothing but respect for you.” She sniffed. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch to you, earlier.”

“Don’t be. You’d just gotten some of the worst news in your life.”

Something about her tone reminded Lisa of something else she’d learned from Mick. “Mick said you lost your sister, recently, so… I guess you’d get it better than anyone else here.”

Sara continued staring at her almost-empty drink. She’d ordered the strongest stuff the bar had to offer, Lisa recalled, and she wasn’t even tipsy. “Laurel was the one who brought me back from the dead, and the one who encouraged me to go on this mission. I wouldn’t have met Leonard if not for her. I would’ve died alongside her, too.”

Lisa nodded. Mick had said that much as well.

“I just wish Rip had dropped us off before the big fight once we killed Savage. I wanted to be the one to kill Darhk.”

“Darhk? Damien Darhk? Lenny mentioned him in the journal. An arms auction in the seventies?”

Sara gave a shaky half-laugh. “Yeah. My sister’s killer was within touching distance, and I still couldn’t kill him. Not that I knew at the time what he was going to do to her, but…”

She trailed off. Lisa looked over her shoulder and watched the rest of their group talking and bonding over their shared loss – losses, possibly, as she was sure Palmer, at least, had known Laurel as well. All these people were missing Lenny, even some of the people he’d threatened and hurt. For so long, it had just been her, Lenny, and Mick. But in the past five months, the number of people who cared about him and would miss him when he was gone had increased from two to twelve, although Lisa felt that saying so on the parts of Team Flash (aside from that young-looking guy named Barry who had to be the Flash himself) was a little generous.

Lenny had always been careful about who he let into his life, not wanting to get hurt. But these people he had let in had chosen to back him up when he was in trouble, to rally around him when he was hurt. They had cared enough to look past the cold front he always put up.

Lisa didn’t know most of them all that well, but if they were important to Lenny, then they deserved a chance from her as well.

THE END