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#with leo snart its scary
walkingnightmare · 3 years
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this is now just purely a lokius and leo snart blog
no i will elaborate
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robininthelabyrinth · 6 years
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Fic: The Beginning of Wisdom - Chapter 4 (Ao3 link)
Fandom: Flash, Legends of Tomorrow Pairing: Leonard Snart (Len) & Leonard Snart (Leo), Len Snart/Mick Rory, Leo Snart/Mick Rory, Len Snart/Mick Rory/Leo Snart, Leo Snart/Ray Terrill, Len Snart/Barry Allen
Summary: In which Leonard Snart is twins.
(the life and times and loves of Len and Leo Snart)
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The moment Len saw the squat grey building, filled with angry teenagers and indifferent adults, he knew that this was not going to go well for him.
His fingers twitched.
He tried to stop what he knew was coming, reaching for the breathing techniques that Leo had found for him, the visualization, whatever he could, but it was unstoppable: his anxiety was ramping up, and with the anxiety came the sickness, and with the sickness came theft.
And with theft came anger and pain.
It was less than three hours later that one of the other boys noticed Len filching something out of his pocket – Len wasn’t even sure what it was, since the point was to take rather than to have – and turned on him.
The boy's face twisted up in rage (Len's father's rage writ in miniature but no less gruesome for it) and he moved to strike. Len backed off immediately, hands raised in apology, mouthing pointless words of disclaimer, but it did him no good.
By himself, the boy would have been no threat: Len knew well enough how to fight, and even to fight dirty enough to drive away most men twice his size.
But the boy was not alone.
Five of his friends, formed into a little gang by ruthlessness and a desire to partake of power they could not obtain alone, joined in, and against five of them – all older and stronger than Len, even if he hadn't been half-starved from sharing every meal meant for one boy between two – even Len's finest twists and tricks could not stand.
They beat him down, forced him down with their fists and their kicks, and once they had him down they did not stop but continued, savagery unleashed, and Len covered his head with his arms as best as he could, wondering if Leo would ever forgive him if Len died within a day of leaving Leo's side.
He wondered, sick in his stomach, if Leo would be twisted by his death, the way Len had been by being forced to kill.
He did not wonder if help would come.
Help never came.
He saw one of the boys pull out a short stubby blade, a too-sharp razor.
He thought of Leo.
He thought of Lisa.
He thought –
He thought that this would be the end of him.
It wasn’t.
Another boy barreled into the fray, unexpected and unimaginable, roaring like a motorcycle without a muffler, his fists swinging wildly, and the other boys scattered before him. The new boy was tall and broad-shouldered and muscular, even as a teenager; there were burns littering his hands and forearms; and it was clear that the other boys were terrified of him.
Len looked up at him from where he was curled up on the ground.
The boy looked down at him.
Len waited for a price to be demanded.
Nothing was forthcoming.
The boy's face flattened into indifference, instead, and he began to turn to leave.
“This won’t mean that I’ll like you, you know,” Len said to him. He’d promised Leo he’d protect his heart (no new friends) so he couldn’t go on and lose it to the first person that wasn’t Leo who’d ever done something nice for him without wanting anything in exchange.
The boy who’d saved him snorted and walked away without a word.
Len might have even been able to keep to that promise, if he'd had some luck – except he never really did have any luck.
“You were originally supposed to be rooming with Anthony,” the teacher in charge of assigning him into a room told Len when she picked him up from the nurse’s office. He'd gotten some pills and plaster, and that was all; it didn't really help much, but he appreciated it regardless. “That’s going to be an issue.”
“Why?”
“He was one of the ones you got into a fight with earlier.”
Len stared at her. That wasn’t an issue. That was a death sentence.
"Don't worry," the teacher assured Len. "We've moved your room so you won’t be with him."
Len picked up his small bag and mutely followed the teacher to his new room. He was still sore and tender, limping a little, but no blood had been spilt and so it wasn't considered too serious a fight.
Perhaps that was why there was no mention of any other measures to be taken to keep this from happening again beyond the shifted rooms.
Len was seriously starting to worry that he wouldn't make it through the three months he was sentenced without breaking his promise to Leo about not dying in here.
"This room," the teacher said, stopping.
Len looked inside.
The boy who had saved him looked back.
Len abruptly realized that this was going to be a bigger problem than he had originally anticipated.
He resolved to hold out as long as he could.
He managed three days.
He’d never slept without Leo before, not really. They’d never had the money for trips or anything, and even if they had they wouldn’t have gone. The few times he’d been away from home overnight on a job he hadn’t slept out of sheer paranoia. Even when he’d taken a nap in the middle of the day, Leo usually came and curled up with him first to help get him under.
He didn’t know how to fall asleep without Leo.
So he didn’t.
He lay there, staring at the ceiling, all evening long.
The next day he was exhausted: the only benefit being that he was also too exhausted to steal anything and start any new fights that he would most assuredly lose.
The day after that was worse.
The night on the third day, an hour or so after Len settled in for his nightly ceiling-watching routine, dull in its unending horror, his roommate – who had otherwise been avoiding him at lunch and dinner and in their classes – finally spoke.
“You look like you’re about to collapse.”
“Fuck you too,” Len replied muzzily. It had been his go-to response all day, regardless of what the other side said. He couldn’t really hear them all that well anyway.
“Why don’t you just go to sleep already?”
“Can’t,” Len admitted.
“Is there anything you can do about it?”
“Maybe. You won’t like it, though.”
“At this point, I’d rather you do whatever the hell you need to do to go to sleep than risk you attacking me in a sleep-deprived psychotic break,” Len’s roommate said dryly. “I know you’re new, but it – uh - it ain’t all that unusual for people to do stuff like that, in here. Just to relax enough to sleep, y’know. We’re all teenage boys here. I don’t mind.”
“You – don’t?”
“Nope. Go ahead. I won’t say nothing. I won’t judge and I won’t say nothing about it tomorrow, either. I promise.”
“Okay,” Len said, because at this point he didn’t really feel like he had much choice. He was either going to have to trust his roommate or he was going to die of exhaustion. “Thanks.”
“No probl – what are you doing?!”
Len had climbed down off of his top bunk and was in the process of climbing into his roommate’s bed. He paused and glared sleepily at his roommate, who was gaping at him.
“You said you wouldn’t say nothing,” Len said accusingly. Sadly, with his current state of exhaustion, accusing mostly came off as sulky.
“I ain’t helping you out with it or nothing,” his roommate said. His eyes were very large and mostly white around the edges, like he was scared or something. Len didn’t know why – he was much smaller and weaker than the other boy, not scary at all – but he was too tired to really think it through.
“You don’t gotta do nothing,” Len promised him, slinging a leg and an arm over before ducking his head and putting it on his roommate’s shoulder.
It was weird, doing this with someone who wasn’t Leo – and besides, Len usually preferred to be the one being curled up to, not the one doing the curling up – but it wasn’t exactly a bad sort of weird, and anyway it did the trick: he was out within seconds.
The next morning, he woke up warm and happy and nestled in his roommate’s arms.
He yawned and got up, which woke said roommate up.
“Thanks,” Len said again. He knew they’d agreed not to talk about it in the morning, but he felt lots better, so he figured it was worth saying at least once.
His roommate blinked at him. “…you don’t sleep alone at home,” he said.
It sounded a bit like a question.
“No,” Len said. “I’ve got a brother.”
“Okay,” his roommate said, suddenly relaxing. “Okay. Right. That wasn’t what I thought you were going to do, you know.”
“You didn’t?” Len asked, surprised. “What did you think I’d do?”
Nothing else had even occurred to him.
His roommate arched his eyebrows at him and made a very familiar up-and-down gesture.
It took Len less than a second to identify it, and then another put the pieces together.
He turned bright red and started spluttering.
Well, yes, he could see how someone would – to try to fall asleep – okay, maybe - and then with the bed-sharing thing…
Oh, lord.
His roommate started laughing.
“My name’s Mick,” he said when he got control of himself again. “Mick Rory. I’ll keep an eye on you from now on.”
“You don’t gotta do that,” Len protested, because Mick really didn’t. “Why would you do that?”
“Because you’re funny,” Mick said, his grin going crooked and almost sad. “And because I used to have to share my bed with my brother, too.”
Len wouldn’t understand the reason for the expression on Mick’s face for a while yet, but it didn’t matter: Mick had saved him, and curled up with him, and didn’t mock him for it, and he had a brother, too.
Len found himself smiling back at Mick.
His chest hurt, but in a good sort of way.
(Leo was going to kill him.)
Leo was, in fact, going to kill him.
Len finally managed to get a call to the right number by the end of the week – he hadn’t let Leo tell him which friend he would be staying with out of fear that their father would remember that he had two Leonards instead of one and might try to beat the information out of Len on their way to the juvie – and Leo figured it out within ten minutes.
“You found someone,” he said coldly, glaring at the phone. He knew he shouldn’t have allowed Len out by himself: less than a week, and already two crises, one physical and the other emotional.
One averted, the other ongoing.
“My roommate, Mick,” Len admitted. Some secrets could not be kept, and should not be kept, and certainly not from his brother. He wanted Leo to like Mick. “I like him.”
“Of course you do,” Leo said with a groan. He was going to hate this ‘Mick’ person, he just knew it. In fact, he hated him already. How dare he take advantage of Len’s loneliness? “You like people far too easily.”
“I don’t like anyone!” Len exclaimed, indignant. “You’re the one who’s friendly!”
“Friendly, sure,” Leo said. He didn’t need to say anything more to make it clear: for all of Leo’s smiles and friendliness, he was far more likely to hold other people at arm’s length than Len, to treat them as friends without ever truly caring about them. Even though Len was the one who disdained people, the one who enforced his father’s rule regarding people who tried to leave a job before it was done, his heart bled for them even as he did.
Len conceded the point.
Leo waited in silence.
“You’ll like him,” Len said at last.
Leo snorted.
“I want you to like him,” Len amended.
“What does he do?” Leo asked.
“I don’t like him because he can do things,” Len said, rolling his eyes. “I just – like him. That’s how you’re supposed to make friends, isn’t that what you’re always saying? No reason, just because?”
“Friends, yes,” Leo said patiently. Len had never understood this particular nuance: perhaps he was right in suggesting that Leo should consider being a psychologist. “But you don’t have friends. Not you. You have me and you have Lisa.”
And Dad and the long-gone Marie, though that went unsaid. They had begun fighting about their father, before Len had been sent away; Len thinking that Leo seemed far too angry regarding their father, Leo enraged that Len could not bring himself to hate the man who hurt them both.
Len scowled into the phone. If Leo thought that reminding Len of how rarely his affections were granted would be enough to convince him to drop this, then he was severely mistaken. “And now I have Mick, too.”
Leo scowled into the phone, a perfect mirror to Len far away. It was worse than he’d thought; this ‘Mick’ person had burrowed past Len’s defenses and made his way into Len’s heart, the soft parts deep inside, and there would be no removing him now except perhaps by ensuring his absence.
And even then, Len would always miss him, just as he still missed the long-gone Marie.
Still, better to miss them and think of them fondly then to let them break Len’s heart or use it to abuse him.
“Stay wary,” Leo warned. “He’ll only hurt you, in the end.”
Len licked his lips. He wanted Leo to understand, but he didn’t know if he could: the strange way Mick made him feel. The way his belly grew warm, and his heart grew light, and even his hands grew calm because he didn’t have to worry about anything when Mick was by his side. “He wants to protect me,” he finally said.
He realized as soon as he said it that it was a mistake.
Leo’s eyes narrowed and he glared at the phone. “I protect you.”
“In here –” Len started, but it was too late.
“Do you want me to find a way to get in there?” Leo asked. His voice was friendly and calm and nice. He was unimaginably pissed off.
“No,” Len said. “I didn’t mean – you know I didn’t mean –”
Leo softened, but only a little. “I know,” he agreed. His brother would never pick anyone over him.
“I can’t do this alone,” Len said, as close as he could come to saying ‘I miss you’ without admitting emotion. Their father despised emotion even more than he despised admitting weakness; Len could state the facts and describe the effects of his failure, but he could not convey what he truly meant. Not anymore. Not without being eaten alive from the inside by his own terror, crawling up from his belly to choke the words away.
Another reason for Leo to hate their father.
“If you want,” Len said after a long few moments of silence. He did not want to make the offer he knew he had to make: to give up Mick, so soon after he had found him. To give up not just what he offered, safety and protection and company, but to give up the man himself: gruff and violent, but also kind and lonely. He did not want to make this offer; he felt as though his heart were being ripped in half at the thought of it. But this was Leo. This was the other half of himself. He could not lose the bond between them; nothing was worth the bond between them. They’d agreed. “If it’s important to you, I can –”
“No,” Leo said, interrupting as quickly as he could. He’d heard that pain in Len’s voice before, usually when he could only protect either Leo or Lisa and not both. Len clearly missed home more than he had let on, or else juvie was worse than he was admitting, and the thought of life without Mick’s protection was terrifying him. Leo hated that terror and pain more than he hated the pains of his own jealousy; if it meant he had to share Len for a little while longer, so be it. “No. You keep your Mick, if it helps you.”
There were three months to go, Leo thought to himself. Mick would get in deep, yes, but Len still offered to give him up after mere moments. Surely there would be time to extract him before he did any permanent damage to Len. Leo would never permit that to happen, if he could.
Len breathed a sigh of relief. He would not have to give up Mick, and he had three months to find a way to make Mick acceptable to Leo; that was not nothing.
Three months passed, a blur of phone calls and daily routines. There was good and there was bad, more fights and more loneliness and not enough calls, but also the experience for the first time of eating a full meal meant for one boy alone, meals that they both cheerfully scarfed it all down, no matter how unappetizing, to the amazement of those around them.
And then it ended.
Len returned home. His first meeting was with his father: it went well, insofar as it ever did, meaning that he neither needed to kill anyone nor did he require medical assistance after, his father assuming that his time in juvie would have helped to make Len more obedient to his wishes.
His second meeting was with Lisa, who ran out to embrace him.
His third meeting was with his brother.
They were in each other’s arms at once.
“I missed you,” Leo said, saying what Len could not.
“I – ditto,” Len said.
There was peace between them until dinnertime, when Len was sketching out some story to Lisa about his time at ‘camp’, as they had agreed to refer to it, and Leo said, very pleasantly, “Do you know, that's the fifth time you've mentioned Mick?”
Len fell silent.
“That’s because he’s Lenny’s friend,” Lisa objected, looking between them with a frown. “A real friend, not like your buddies from school. And that means he’s your friend, too, right?”
Leo looked at Len. Len looked at Leo.
“It doesn’t matter,” Leo said after a moment. “He’s very far away, now.”
“Yes,” Len said, his hands curling in his lap. “See, Lise, he’s got three more months left of ‘camp’ before he gets out.”
“Oh,” she said, but she was looking between them suspiciously, aware that there was something more to it than that. “Okay?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Len said, and Leo nodded. Lisa hated it, the rare times they argued, and whenever possible they kept from doing it before her.
Once she was in bed, however…
“You know when he’s coming out,” Leo said flatly.
Len turns to him. “More than that,” he said, his head held high and shoulders squared. “I intend to be there to pick him up.”
“Pick him up and take him – where? He can’t come here.”
“Of course not here. He’ll get an apartment in the city; he’s got some savings. And he’ll get a job –”
“An illegal one, I’m sure,” Leo sneered.
“I hadn’t realized that’d become such a problem,” Len snapped, his face gone pale. “Since that’s my plan, too.”
Leo realized his misstep. “You know I didn’t mean –”
“He’s going to work with me,” Len said in a sudden rush, the words flowing out of his mouth faster than he could stop them. “He’s going to watch my back and be my partner.”
Leo went still.
Len stared at him.
“I thought I was your partner,” Leo said. His back was straight now, too; his hands clenched into fists. This Mick had infiltrated far deeper than he’d feared. “I thought that was me. Is three months enough to change that?”
“You’re going to go straight, Leonard,” Len said. “I’m going to keep crooked. We’re gonna walk separate paths. Is it so wrong for me not to want to walk mine alone?”
“You’re never going to be alone,” Leo said fiercely. He should have realized: his brother was always one for flexible plans that could be changed, a contrast to Leo’s desire for an orderly progression that would remain unchanged. So strange, then, that Len liked math, with its neat lines and solid rules, and Leo the more subjective sciences, but perhaps it was only them liking something that reminded them of each other. “Never, Leonard. We’re always going to be two.”
“Two, yes, but not two together. You’ll have Lisa on your road,” Len said, reaching out and taking Leo’s hand. “And I’ll have Mick. I ain’t asking you to like him right off the bat. Just – give him a chance.”
Leo stared at his brother.
“I want this,” Len said, feeling guilty. He always asked for so much from Leo: his friendship, his love, his tolerance. His brother, who knew what a thief he was, who let him take the missions with their father, who agreed to take the steps towards a totally different type of life, a life he didn't even know if he wanted, and all of that for him. His brother, who was him. “I want this, this chance. Let me show you that he’s worth it.”
Leo nodded helplessly. His foolish brother, his brother who always sought to protect Leo from everything he could, almost never asked for anything for himself – this, and Leo’s goodness, were the only requests Leo could recall that were not in fact attempts to take the pain of others upon himself.
He could no more deny this request than to deny Len himself.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll give him a chance, Leonard.”
“Thank you, Leonard.”
“But if I don’t approve –”
“I know,” Len said. “If you hate him...” He fell silent and bowed his head.
If it came to that, he would make the choice he had to.
He would give Mick up.
“Good,” Leo said with satisfaction. At least he was still first in Len’s heart. At least he was still best.
At least he would have one last chance to save Len from his own stupid heart.
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