Solve For X

[bungakertas]

Summary: Ray Palmer was good at math. Even when math was people. People were just…really complicated math. But that was okay, because he was good at math, so complicated equations didn't scare him. He was still working on figuring out the Unified Theory of Mick Rory, though.
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Ray Palmer, Mick Rory, Bart Allen, Martin Stein, Rip Hunter, Sara Lance, Jefferson "Jax" Jackson, Amaya Jiwe, Cisco Ramon, Leonard Snart, Barry Allen, Nate Heywood
Warnings/Tags: None.
Spoilers: Parts of Legends Of Tomorrow seasons 1 and 2. Season 3 is presumed not to exist. General Arrow!verse spoilers. The “Invasion!” storyline did not happen in this universe, though, the major result of which is that Mick doesn’t know Barry’s name. Minor references to DCAU things, like the Justice League.
Disclaimer: "The Flash," and the "Legends of Tomorrow," and all related characters and situations are the property of DC Comics, Warner Brothers, the CW, or some combination of those entities. No money changed hands and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Author’s Notes: THIS IS NOT AN EXPLICITLY ARROW-VERSE STORY! Do not assume that it is, you will be very confused. Ray Palmer is the Arrow-verse Palmer, but Impulse is more-or-less the comics version. And the dominant timeline for this series is the DCAU Timm/Dini-verse.
Series: The DC Stories

*~*~*

Some days, being a time traveler was great. Ray was never going to forget getting into a barfight with actual Nazis. Other days it was awful. Because Ray was also not going to forget months of sheer terror dodging dinosaurs.

Today, it was awful.

Gideon had reported—in her usual, disconcertingly gleeful-sounding method of delivering truly terrible news—that there was a problem on an alternate earth. “Problem” was code for “that Earth’s timeline has been so well and truly wrecked that the damage is starting to bleed into other timelines.” Of course, getting there was no problem. Turned out the Wave Rider was perfectly capable of traveling to alternate realities (“Astonishing!”), and so off they went, to save time. Or possibly break it again. This team was a bit of a crapshoot.

They were, of course, too late.

It was heartbreaking to see that Earth’s Barry Allen—that Earth’s whole Justice League, in fact—already prepared to acknowledge that their timeline couldn’t be saved. Ray’s own doppleganger had teamed up with Cisco’s and this world’s Lex Luthor (Creepy! Weird! Very, very wrong!) to try and save it, and had instead come up with incontrovertible evidence that their timeline had been fatally compromised and could not be restored. They had, instead, started looking for ways to ensure that when their timeline collapsed and everyone in it died, that it would only be their timeline that failed. Not that that stopped Wave Rider Stein and Ray from trying to prove them wrong anyway. Which they failed at. Because this world’s Justice League was right. Their Earth was toast.

Some days it was awful to be a time traveler.

Stein (from the Wave Rider) was deep in conference with Luthor (from the dying timeline) and Ray (also from the Wave Rider) on how they could limit the damage to one timeline only when Ray noticed Mick Rory disappear with the dying timeline’s Flash. And he didn’t reappear at all.

Ray went looking for him once they’d gotten to the part where Jax was installing a new part on the Wave Rider’s weapons’ array that would allow them to seal off the dying reality from all the others. And he found Rory with, of all the unlikely items, a living, human baby in his arms.

“What is that?” were, much to Ray’s horror, the first words out of his mouth. But why was Mick kidnapping kids? Really? Mick + kidnapping = NULL RESULT. It just did not happen.

“It’s a kumquat,” Mick snapped. “What does it look like?”

“Why are you stealing a kumquat?” Ray asked, busily filing that response away for future use. Because—kidnapping or not—damned if he was ever gonna let Mick live that down.

“Because Flash asked me to, the manipulative bastard,” Mick growled. “Batted those big, baby blues and spun me a story about his grandkid and… Listen, Haircut, if you even think about trying to leave this kid behind—”

Ray held up his hand, more than won over by Mick’s resigned attitude and the mere sight of Barry’s blue eyes in the tiny child’s face. “Obviously, we’re going to save him. I could make some sort of distraction so you could sneak our tiny friend onto the ship?”

Mick looked very relieved.

“Wait a second, did you say ‘grandkid?’” Ray asked, because this Flash hadn’t looked that old.

“Time travel,” Mick replied with a shrug, as if that explained everything. Which, to be fair, did cover a multitude of crazy things.

Ray’s diversion involved a very small amount of sabotage, which was tough to pull off with this reality’s Batman hanging around. There was a non-trivial possibility that Batman had figured out their whole plan and was helping them save the kid by pretending not to notice they were doing it, of course. But one way or the other, the plan went off without a hitch, the sabotage took long enough to fix that Mick was able to sneak the baby onto the Wave Rider, and the Legends flew safely back into the time stream and sealed off the dying reality from the rest of the universe.

Because they were cowardly cowards who had just run away and left a whole reality to die. Time travel was awful some days.

Sara and Rip were busy arguing over where to go next when Mick said, “Actually, we should probably go to the Vanishing Point next.”

Everyone but Ray stared at him like he’d grown a second head. Which was fair, because Mick very emphatically Did Not Talk About anything to do with the Time Masters, up to and especially including, the Vanishing Point. Ray knew that better than most people because Ray was the only friend Mick would admit to having. Which most people initially thought was weird, but Ray knew made perfect sense because he was good at math.

Which, if you weren’t actually Ray, was a statement that probably didn’t make a lot of sense.

So, Ray Palmer was good at math. Even when math was people. People were just…really complicated math. But that was okay, because he was good at math, so complicated equations didn't scare him. He just kept working on them until they were solved.

Like Captain Hunter. Though he was an easier math problem than Ray had initially thought.

[(A good man • love for his family) - family] / (Time Masters deliberately stopping him from doing good) = Rip Hunter: a good man who did not have much motivation to be good anymore.

Math. Easy.

(Okay, fine. It wasn’t real math. But Ray had been doing this since before he was in high school. It was too late to change the system now.)

Everyone on the Wave Rider had equations that resolved pretty neatly. Except for two baffling men who genuinely did not add up.

Leonard Snart. Mick Rory. What the hell, math? Because those two made no sense.

(Bad childhood + sense of responsibility for younger sibling) • (no respect for property rights + time) = Leonard Snart the thief.

Good math so far.

[(Bad childhood + sense of responsibility for younger sibling) • (no respect for property rights + time)] / (Barry Allen + Legends Team) = Leonard Snart…heroically saving time?

Why? The Barry Allen and Team Legend equations should not have acted on the Leonard Snart equation the way that they had. It made no sense. Rip Hunter was barely able to understand his own moral compass on a good day, Sara understood hers but was too comfortable in not always following it, and Stein—despite his best efforts—had been lucky to get to lunchtime without boring or offending Leonard or Mick (and Leonard had always taken insults towards Mick as though they were about him anyway). Kendra, although she'd never gotten on the two men's bad sides, had never really warmed to them, either. He and Jax had been the only two people on the ship who'd both been friendly with Leonard and not had a morally ambiguous background.

What had happened? It made sense that Leonard would want to save Mick, but he could've done that by just freezing the deadman switch into position. It might've meant regrowing another hand, but he wouldn't have died. Something had made him stay, at the Oculus, to make sure they broke the Time Master's power, and that variable… X. Still unsolved.

Mick's equation made more sense at first, but had slowly unraveled over time.

(Bad childhood + pyromania) • (poor impulse control) = Mick Rory the serial arsonist.

Eventually that evolved, though.

(Bad childhood + pyromania) • (poor impulse control) / Leonard Snart’s moderating influence = Mick Rory, Heat Wave.

Which was still fine. Right up until Snart had died.

That had been a terrible, terrible thing for a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons was the enormous impact it had on the Mick Rory equation.

(Bad childhood + pyromania) • (poor impulse control) / dead Leonard Snart = ERROR. Worse than error. Disaster, catastrophe, absolute chaos.

So Ray had tried, as best he could, to fill the void, to be Mick’s friend, to give him ways to grieve for Snart that wouldn’t make him feel weak for doing it. And he knew he would never totally cover that gap because he was a fundamentally different person from Leonard Snart in nearly every way imaginable. They were about the same height, but that was pretty much where the similarities had stopped. But he’d tried, dammit.

He'd known he was failing when he saw how much Mick was losing himself in the drinking. He realized how badly he’d failed when Snart from the Legion of Doom had appeared in front of them and Mick had been flabbergasted that everyone else could see him too. The only logical explanation was that Mick had been seeing Snart when the rest of them couldn’t see him and there was absolutely no way in which that was good or okay or reassuring at all.

It had hurt when Mick betrayed them to the Legion, but Ray couldn’t say he’d been surprised. Of course Mick had gone over to the other side. His equation was ERROR. That always ended badly.

Honestly, Ray was more surprised Mick came back. He was still surprised. He was confused. Because he couldn’t even construct an equation for Mick anymore, and he could always construct an equation for somebody.

(Bad childhood + pyromania) • X = Mick Rory, Legendary Heat Wave.

Like Snart’s equation, X stayed stubbornly unsolved.

However, despite Mick’s contrary refusal to just make sense dammit, Ray had managed to build a real friendship with him, and he was happy about that even if the math didn’t add up. Which meant that if Ray hadn’t known about the not-an-actual-kumquat baby, he would’ve been staring at Mick harder than anyone because he knew for a cold fact (Cold. Ha. Only not. Because it wasn’t funny.) that Mick hated the Vanishing Point more than anyone.

And because Ray was Mick’s friend, Ray knew Mick was gonna need some back-up now, with the rest of the team giving him these baleful looks. So he chimed in. “We really should go to the Vanishing Point.”

“Okay,” Jax said. “I’ll bite. Why would we go back to that disaster zone?”

Yeah. Nobody had any good memories of that place.

“Because Mick stole a kumquat,” Ray announced.

Mick glared. Ray grinned back, unrepentant. Never, ever letting him live that down.

“Is there an actual explanation forthcoming soon, or do we have a few moments to talk amongst ourselves?” Rip asked irritably.

“Because there’s a baby on the ship from the reality we just left,” Mick said.

And that set everyone yelling at them at once.

The dead timeline that they’d just sealed off from the rest of the universe had been bleeding the damage into other timelines. Anything taken from that timeline would, eventually, start to cause the same damage to the rest of time. This one kid could kill the whole universe no matter when they took him except for the Vanishing Point. But the Vanishing Point was outside of time, so it didn't matter which timeline the kid resonated with. He couldn't damage anything else there.

Ray held up his hands. “We can’t take him back now, we just sealed that reality off.”

“And we can’t kill him because that would be murder,” Mick added.

“You were fine with the idea of killing Per Degaton!” Stein protested.

“This kid isn’t Baby Hitler!” Mick snarled. “He’s the Flash’s grandkid!”

“Mr. Rory, I understand your desire to save this child, but he will destroy the universe by his very existence,” Rip said. “We just sealed off an entire timeline of babies to die. One more surely can’t be such a heavy weight to carry.”

“He’s just one kid. I just want to save one kid. If all those other kids died in that timeline and the universe didn’t care, then why would the universe care if this one kid doesn’t die? If it doesn’t matter if he dies, then it doesn’t matter if he lives.” Mick folded his arms in the ensuing silence, glared at everyone, and dared them to disagree with him.

Stein raised a brow. “Mr. Rory’s logic is quite compelling. I believe we should attempt to save the child.”

“Me too,” said Jax.

And that was that.

(Atom + Heat Wave + Firestorm) > (Steel + Vixen + White Canary + Rip Hunter). Even if things came down to a question of force.

So off they flew to the Vanishing Point with the not-actually-a-kumquat installed in the med bay. Rip, Stein, and Ray were all poking around various medical charts, and Sara—as the resident expert on babysitting—was trying to cheer up the child who was screaming for reasons none of them could determine by looking.

As soon as the squalling child reached the doorway, Gideon ran a scan. “The child is in distress due to severe malnourishment,” Gideon reported. “I will correct this.”

“Malnourishment?” Mick said. “He just ate before we left the other reality.”

“Apparently he has your appetite,” Sara replied, following at set of instructions Gideon had placed on a nearby screen to prepare a bottle for the child.

“I’m afraid this child’s metabolism would put Mr. Rory’s quite to shame,” Gideon replied. “He is using up the nutrients I have added much faster than he should be.”

Sara finished the bottle and flipped it expertly into the child’s mouth, who began to drain it at an alarming rate.

“Holy crap, that kid can eat,” Nate breathed from his place at the door.

“I’m gonna go fabricate us some more bottles,” Jax announced.

“Good idea,” Sara agreed, regarding the baby with alarm. Jax vanished down the hallway.

Ray noticed another problem. “Ah, Mick? How old is this kid?”

“Flash said it was born…a week ago,” Mick said, staring from beside Nate, and sounding puzzled. No doubt he was noticing the same issue.

“He looks…older than that,” Rip noted, now staring at the child.

Ray had to agree. Because he was not an expert on babies, but he’d swear this kid was at least a month old. He certainly had a pretty good head of red curls to go with his wide blue eyes.

“The child has a physical age of approximately 39 days,” Gideon announced helpfully.

Right. So. Older than a month.

“Are we just supposed to make up a name, or does he already have one?” asked Sara, looking up from the child, who was nearly three-quarters done with his bottle already.

“Uh, Bartholomew Henry Allen II, but Flash said they were planning on calling him Bart,” Mick announced.

“Well it looks like our friend, Mr. Allen, is aging at a rate greater than normal,” Stein said.

Sara nodded. “That explains the massive appetite. If he’s growing so much faster than normal, he’ll need a lot of calories, really fast, in order to keep up.”

“The child is a speedster. His natural speed interacted and the resonance he carries from the damaged timeline has been affected by his entry into this one and severely accelerated his growth. At the rate he is aging, he will be a physical adult in approximately four days,” Gideon informed them.

“Physical adult?” Ray pressed. Because Gideon had placed a slight stress on that word in that bizarrely cheerful I’m-telling-you-terrible-news tone she had.

“His mind will be capable of processing things at an adult level, but the human brain develops through experience. Without intervention, it will be impossible for him to gain enough experience to achieve several critical milestones,” Gideon replied.

“Like what?”

“Language, among other things,” Stein said, looking more than slightly alarmed. “If a child does not learn to speak some language or other before they are physically six years old or thereabouts, most humans lose the ability to develop linguistics entirely.”

Mick’s face fell. “You mean we rescued this kid for nothing?”

Rip shook his head. “The task before us may be difficult, Mr. Rory, but we haven’t failed yet.”

Ray tried not to be annoyed at how he was suddenly so in favor of saving a child he’d been entirely ready to murder less than twenty minutes ago. Rip really did barely understand his moral compass. His intentions were always for the Greater Good, but Ray could, without trying hard, think of a few dozen examples of that going badly wrong. Good intentions were never good enough.

Stein’s voice and accompanying frown pulled Ray’s attention back to the baby. “That does pose a new complication, though.”

Everyone looked over. “A speedster’s metabolism is ordinarily very high. The Flash from our world has a daily diet of roughly 10,000 calories in order to maintain a healthy weight.”

“I’m gonna set him on fire out of sheer jealousy,” Mick muttered.

“Unless there is a Big Belly Burger at the Vanishing Point, we may need to adjust our course to somewhere Gideon can gather sufficient raw materials to produce nutrients for this child,” Stein said.

“Which puts us back on the clock to fix him before we break the universe,” Ray sighed.

Legends + risk of destroying the universe = standard operational procedures.

“Mr. Rory, go to the bridge. Plot us a course out of the time stream to the nearest section of space that will allow us to gather some raw materials for the Wave Rider’s molecular storage,” Rip ordered.

Mick gave a nod and set off in the direction of the bridge.

“Okay, so slowing down his development is probably going to take more time to figure out, so we need to speed up his experiences,” Ray said.

“And how exactly do you propose we do that?” Sara demanded. “All of us run around making faces?”

“I was thinking more along the lines of virtual reality,” Ray said, “but ‘making faces’ is a good Plan B, definitely.”

Sara gave him a stern glare, but Ray was already ignoring her as he moved to a terminal to help Gideon set up the virtual reality. At the rate the kid was aging, they needed to set it up quick.

It took about an hour, and Jax later swore up and down that Ray had drunk coffee straight from the pot without realizing while he worked, but he managed to build a virtual reality construct to keep pace baby Bart’s mind and allow him to develop kind of normally. More or less. Sort of.

(Okay, he was not a psychologist. The bullet-pointed average developmental chart Gideon had provided was not a substitute for actually studying the field, and he was not entirely sanguine about how this was going to turn out. This was not the experiment in child-rearing he had ever envisioned himself conducting. Honestly, he’d just wanted to do the standard experiment most people referred to as “parenting.”)

By the time Ray finished building the VR, Stein and Rip had buried themselves in a long, drawn-out theoretical physics argument about how to sort out the kid’s temporal resonance so that he matched the reality they were in. Ray needed a palette cleanser after all the computer science, so he gave himself five minutes to take a break on the bridge, looking out the windows.

He was not sorry they’d given the Vanishing Point a miss, danger to the universe or not. They all had some pretty terrible memories about it. Losing Snart first. Dealing with the Legion of Doom second. And even now, the Vanishing Point was not always the safest place in the universe. Every former Time Master knew about it. So did all the Time Pirates. So, it was more than a little relieving to wander on to the bridge and see a ridiculously luminescent asteroid field out the windows.

Mick was sitting in a chair at the far front of the bridge staring at the giant rocks floating past them. Energy bolts were darting out from beneath the ship, tractoring some of the asteroids closer at regular intervals, so Ray was assuming Mick had set the system to some sort automatic response whenever molecular storage dipped below a certain level.

Mick looked up when Ray entered. "You pulled your head out of computer guts finally?"

Ray sighed as he folded himself into a chair near Mick. "I'm about to have to dive back in. Now that we've got him in the VR, we have to figure out how to slow down his aging."

"So he won't grow up an idiot, he'll just die in a coupla months. Super." He stared out the window. "Why'd I even bother? Rip was right. Billions of people died in that stupid timeline anyway, what difference does one kid make?"

Ray shook his head. "No, you were right. If doesn't matter if somebody dies, then it also doesn't matter if they live. There's no reason not to try and save this kid." And you really should never, ever take morality cues from Rip, Ray did not add.

Mick rolled his eyes. "I need a drink."

Ray responded to that with absolute silence and a ferocious glare. Mick held up his hands in surrender.

(After they'd stuck time back together, Ray had finally staged an intervention on terms Mick would accept about Mick's drinking. Mick being himself, those terms had been that Ray tied him to a chair and explained that he was allowed to have only one dangerous addiction. He could pick either pyromania or drinking but not both and there would be bodily harm involved if he lied or cheated. Mick had gone from never being sober to only being drunk on rare occasions overnight, and Ray checked in enough to make sure that stuck.)

"Mick, even if we can't save him, you're doing the right thing to make us try. If we give up on trying to help people, we may as well go home," Ray said.

"What's the point in being a hero if you can't save anybody?" Mick demanded.

Ray huffed out a laugh. "It isn't about whether you can save people. It's about not laying down and quitting when the bad guys show up."

Mick looked at him curiously.

Ray sighed. "It took me a long time to figure this out, but…you have to begin with the assumption that you can't save people. That you won't make a difference. That you're going to fail every time you try. Because sometimes, that's going to be the case. Then you decide to try to save people anyway. Because that way, even if the bad guys win or the universe ends or time destroys itself or whatever, then you know that you weren't part of it. You didn't help. You fought back. Not necessarily so you could be the hero. But so that you knew you weren't the villain."

Mick blinked. "That's pretty dark for you, Haircut."

Ray laughed. "Well, we do save the day a lot, and then I'm pleasantly surprised."

"The optimistic side of pessimism."

Ray smiled. "Anyway. You're not the villain, Heat Wave. Not this time. You did the right thing."

Mick blinked. "Now there's a set of words I don't hear very often."

The two sat in silence for a few more minutes before Ray went back to the med bay to apply what limited knowledge he had about medicine and biochemistry to trying to save their new speedster.

He turned out to be mostly an observer. He made no pretense of being at all informed about biochemistry, and Rip was the unquestioned expert on temporal physics, so Ray ended up being more of a sounding-board for the other two as he continued to dump calories into the boy who now held the physical appearance of a one-year-old child.

They argued back and forth overnight while Bart grew height, and—thanks to Gideon offering muscle stimulation—a lanky child’s frame. His hair darkened and straightened a bit to a wavy reddish-brown, and he looked physically ten years old by breakfast.

“This is a disaster,” Mick announced, when he poked his head in to check on their guest.

Stein was dozing in the corner while Ray checked over some math the older half of Firestorm had been arguing about with Rip. At Mick’s outburst, Ray looked up. “It’s…not great,” Ray agreed with a frown. “But he’s not a lost cause yet.”

“The kid missed a whole decade of growing up!” Mick snarled. He punched the doorframe. “Stupid Flash with his dumb sob stories.”

Ray nodded. “He does seem to have an oddly persuasive personality.”

“Snart never did tell me his name. I suppose I can figure it out from the kid, though. Bart Henry Allen II means there’s a Bart Henry Allen I out there somewhere, I guess,” Mick mused, looking at the overly skinny child.

Ray frowned and finally said, “Well, if you’re gonna do the detective work, I won’t spoil it for you.”

“Jerk,” Mick returned, with no heat in it. “Besides, there’s obviously two of them.”

Ray feigned stupidity and looked at the biobed in mock confusion.

“Two Flashes, you asshole,” Mick said, laughing.

“Oh, two Flashes!” Ray let his eyes go impossibly wide in false enlightenment.

“Never mind. Once we wake this kid up, I’ll just dangle him off a bridge until Flash tells me his name,” Mick shrugged.

“You have a shockingly lurid imagination, Mr. Rory,” a sleepy-voiced Stein said from the corner, from where he had obviously just woken up. “What would you even want with the Flash’s name?”

“Dunno. Steal all his running socks?” Mick mused.

Ray started to laugh helplessly. It wasn’t that the comment was that funny, but he was stressed and hyper-focused and unable to help himself. He bent back to the math he was trying to check over. “Don’t make me laugh.”

They dithered for a few more hours while Bart added a few more inches to his height (Gideon gave him a physical age of eleven now), but eventually they had to agree that Rip’s overly complicated and dangerous plan of exposing the boy to a specific sort radiation from the time drive to try and purge any temporal resonance was probably the best (only) plan they had.

And that meant it was time to wake him up.

As soon as they had done so, Ray realized he had forgotten an important fact about Bartholomew Henry Allen II. He was a speedster.

Obviously he had known. Gideon had made mention of the fact. They’d been shoving more calories than an ordinary human could process down the kid’s throat. He had a whole medical condition that wouldn’t even exist unless he were a speedster. But, somehow, Ray hadn’t actually recognized that fact in a real way. Bart Allen is a speedster = Bart Allen can run around the ship so fast we can’t catch him.

The instant they woke the kid up, he darted out the door in a burst of energy and lightning. Mick got a smug look on his face. “Yeah. They move quick.” Which reminded Ray pretty forcefully that Mick had staked his claim to fame, primarily, but helping Snart against the Flash.

When had he ended up with such a weird combination of friends?

“Well, he’s going to die equally quick if he does not return here,” Rip said, in a burst of frustration.

A shaggy head with unbelievably fluffy hair poked around the door. “WhatdoyoumeanI’mgoingtodiequick? WhereamI? Whydoeseverythinglooksoweird? Where’sGideon?”

Ray only understood about half of what Bart had just said, but thankfully, they had an AI on board. A high-pitched noise issued from where Gideon’s voice usually came. Bart answered it at the same speed and the two went back and forth for about five seconds.

For a speedster, that was probably a very protracted conversation.

Finally, Bart looked at Ray very intently, deliberately crossed his eyes at his nose (possibly trying to focus?), and spoke. “Where. Is. The. Time. Drive?” It was clear he was concentrating very hard on speaking as slowly as he could imagine a human speaking.

Rip led the way.

Bart made very heavy sighing noises the entire way there, obviously very bored with actually walking. Ray was torn between wanting to strangle him and being amazed at how well his VR program had worked. Bart Allen was talking! And his speed worked! And he could understand directions and very basic body language! And communicate his feelings! Just that much success was a miracle.

Bart heaved another deep sigh and the urge to strangle him came back. He turned to Mick. “I can rebuild the cold gun.”

“No more killers on the crew list. It’s a rule,” Mick shot back.

“Since when does this crew have rules?” Ray demanded.

Mick huffed out a quiet laugh.

Because Bart interrupted whoever was speaking every few seconds, explaining their plan and the risks took an excruciatingly long time, even for all the non-speedsters in the room. Eventually Mick just grabbed the front of the medical tunic that Stein must’ve remembered to stick onto the kid at some point and growled at him.

“This is really dangerous! It’ll probably kill you. But you’ll die for sure if we don’t do it, and we’ve got no other plans.”

“What do you mean ‘kill?’ What’s that?”

Or maybe they hadn’t succeeded in his education very well. Yikes.

Explaining what dying meant took another age and a half. Obviously, growing up inside a computer program had not done wonders for Bart’s understanding of the potential danger in reality. But eventually they managed to communicate most of what they intended and obtain consent as informed as possible. So, they made the adjustments, put Bart into the room with the time drive, crossed their fingers and hit the button.

The Time Drive flashed brilliantly bright. Bart Allen collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Mick was through the door to the engine room almost before Rip had cleared them to enter safely. He snatched the boy off the floor and started towards the med bay in a dead run, Ray close on his heels.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mick demanded as he burst into the med bay.

“Mr. Allen is non-responsive. His heart rate and brain activity are undetectable,” Gideon announced brightly.

“Stop sounding so damn happy and resuscitate him!” Mick snapped, laying the boy back down on the medical chair.

“Please step back from the biobed,” Gideon replied, not remotely perturbed by Mick’s displeasure.

For the next five minutes, the entire crew of the Wave Rider watched in helpless fascination as Gideon ran through various attempts to save Bart Allen. Finally, she announced, “I have attempted everything I can. He will either begin breathing on his own approximately thirty seconds, or he is dead.”

Ray seriously considered deleting Gideon for a moment. Thirty seconds passed.

At thirty-two seconds, Bart took a huge gulp of air and sat up so abruptly that he fell off the biobed and flat onto his face on the floor. Then he sprang up and blinked. “I feel weird,” he announced.

“Mr. Allen’s vitals have been returned to speedster normal,” Gideon announced. “He is also purged of his resonance with the alternate timeline.”

“We did it?” Stein said with a shocked look on his face.

“Congratulations, kid. You’re gonna live,” Mick informed Bart.

“I still don’t really understand what you mean by die,” Bart replied. “I’m really hungry, though? Is there food?”

“In the galley,” Rip said with a bewildered look.

Bart vanished in a rush of air. In another second, he was back and said, “Weird question: how do you eat?”

Ray felt the stress of the past days pressing down on him and before he realized what had happened, he was sitting on the floor against the wall of the med bay. He wasn’t sure what happened next, but he found out later that Sara took Bart to the galley to teach him how to eat and Mick had steered him and Rip into their rooms and loaded them into their beds. Because Mick ≠ nurturing, he didn’t bother to put blankets over them or remove their shoes (which had the result of Ray being half frozen with toes that were very pin-and-needley when he woke up). Apparently Jax had seen to Stein with a little more concern for the man’s welfare.

Over the course of the next few days, Sara had to stop Bart from vibrating through the outer hull on three separate occasions. Jax discovered him attempting to crawl inside the engine, and Stein completely lost his temper when he found Bart about to open up the coverings over the time drive to handle it with bare hands. The other shoe had officially dropped. Growing up in Ray’s VR had left Bart with no concept of danger or how things could actually hurt him. Rip set a course for Central City, to hand off care for their child speedster to STAR Labs. Ray, meanwhile, quietly built a new cold gun, so they could freeze Bart into stillness if they needed to. He didn’t tell anyone but Mick, and was surprised to when the man told him it was a good idea.

Bart was sullen and unhappy and the Legends were stressed and afraid for him by the time the Wave Rider touched down in Central City and Bart was introduced to this world’s Barry Allen with an explanation about his background and how he’d come to be eleven years old in less than a week. Cisco and Julian had started making some very excited sounds about running potential experiments, and Bart seemed overjoyed to have an entire city to run around in, so it looked like things were going to work out pretty well all the way around.

Which did not explain why Ray felt more than slightly unhappy about how neatly everything had come together and how quickly he was headed back to the ship. It was happening, however, whatever he felt about it. In fact, he was on the ramp of the Wave Rider to fly off to the next aberration when his phone rang.

It was Cisco.

“Hello?” Ray asked curiously.

“Hey, um…you guys are gonna want to come back to STAR Labs right now,” Cisco said. There was a very loud argument going on in the background.

“Listen, I know he’s a handful, but it’s not safe for him on the Wave Rider,” Ray replied.

“What? Oh, no, not to take Bart back. You lost him for good now. After today he’s definitely staying with us. It’s just…well, the short version is, apparently Snart wasn’t actually dead. And now he’s here. In STAR Labs. Alive. And kind of mad. Very much alive, though.”

“What?”

“Yeah, Bart did it. We’re still trying to get the story on how out of him, but, Snart and Barry are in the middle of a shouting match about when they talked in the Speed Force, and nobody is really following that part very well? So, everyone is confused right now, and we’re still not sure what happened, but it’s really Snart, he’s really alive, he’s really the one we all thought died at the Oculus, and he’s not sick, dying, irradiated, or some kind of weird hologram.”

Ray felt his feet freeze to the ground.

"Haircut, stop stalling," Mick growled, from where he stood next to the ramp.

"Also, I think Bart would appreciate some reassurance from faces he's already met that he really hasn't done anything wrong. Because he…figured out that Snart had been accidentally left for dead and then got him ice cream from somewhere—still not sure where—and started babbling about how he was sure we were all really sorry? And, like, he's not wrong, but…anyway. Snart. Alive. Please come back."

"We're on our way," Ray replied. He hung up the phone and looked at the rest of the Legends. "We need to go back to STAR Labs."

"We cannot resume guardianship for the young Mr. Allen," Rip said.

"No. We can't. But apparently the young Mr. Allen found Leonard. Alive. And he's at STAR Labs right now."

The reaction was much the same as when Mick had announced he'd rescued Bart in the first place.

The team (minus Nate and Amaya, who—never having met Snart—volunteered to stay behind and mind the ship) descended on STAR Labs in a confused state of hopeful half-panic, but to everyone's shock, Leonard Snart was indeed in the main laboratory, big as life, eating a bowl of ice cream and scowling at everyone except for Bart. Bart was sitting in the corner, looking unnaturally still.

Unsurprisingly, Mick was the first one to react, and he seized Len in a bruising hug and flat refused to let go for a long, long, long moment. In fact, Ray was willing to swear there might be an actual tear involved. Jax, Stein, and Sara all grabbed him next, in a many-armed mass of confusion and excited exclamations.

(To Ray’s never-ending shock, the ice cream ended up on a nearby desk, instead of all over the hug participants.)

By the time Leonard had extricated himself from that, Ray and Rip were standing beside him with grins on their faces.

"What? Aren't you two going to try and smother me to death?" Len said in his old, drawling, sarcastic voice.

Ray knew he was smiling like an idiot and didn't care. "You look like you're all hugged out to me," he replied. "But it is good to see you again, Leonard." He held out his hand and Len looked more than a little relieved not to have to endure another hug when he shook it.

"Indeed, Mr. Snart. Of all the miracles the universe has to offer, I was certain you were beyond them," Rip said, offering his own hand.

"You know me. I live to be contrary," Len replied, reclaiming his ice cream and digging back in.

"And I am gratified by that trait today more than ever," Rip agreed with a nod.

Ray knew he had a dirty look on his face, but he was more than a little angry with Rip. Good intentions, sure. But Rip had originally argued for just killing Bart outright. And if he’d had his way, Snart would still be stuck in the Speed Force. And while it was good to see he was happy to be proved wrong, Ray had the very strong impression that Rip had not and would not make the connection of him being wrong leading directly to Snart’s rescue. The fact that he was missing such an important lesson when it was literally standing in front of him being sarcastic was…irritating.

Rip, of course, was oblivious to Ray’s train of thought. Instead, he was looking over to where Bart was sitting in the corner. “What did happen with Mr. Allen?”

“He met me in the Speed Force and thought I was some kind of weird hallucination, so he left me there. Bastard,” Snart replied, glaring at Barry.

“The younger Mr. Allen,” Rip clarified. There was a deep pause and then he said, “Although, that is truly horrifying. The Flash actually spoke to you and left you there anyway thinking it wasn’t truly you?”

“To be fair, the Speed Force had my head pretty turned around. I may not have entirely made sense,” Snart sighed. “But the kid? He just knew. Right away. Knew something was off in the Speed Force, knew right where to find me, knew I didn’t belong there, knew how to pull me out. He’s been in the corner since we all started shouting, though. Honestly, if it weren’t for that I can see how terrified it makes him, I’d still be shouting.”

Sara—and Mick, of all people—immediately turned and strode over to the corner where Bart was sitting and sat down beside him. Ray watched her as she began quietly speaking to the boy. Mick waited quietly, but Ray had a feeling he was going to emphasize how grateful he was, in his own inimitable fashion.

“How’s your sister taking this?” Ray asked curiously.

“She doesn’t know yet,” Snart replied. “Cisco said she dropped off the radar when I flew off in a spaceship. Apparently they managed to get word to her that I was dead and that was the last anyone heard from her. Cisco called someone named Felicity and they’re doing something with their computers that’s supposed to make me feel reassured.”

Ray smiled. “Felicity is the best hacker in the world. If anyone can find your sister, it’s those two.”

“I’ll be grateful after they find her, not before,” Snart replied.

“I take it this means you won’t be returning to the Wave Rider,” Rip said.

“Not in this lifetime,” Snart agreed. “It was fun, Captain, but I think I’ve had enough of time travel. I’m not about to go flying off when Lisa’s here, thinking I’m dead.”

“No, of course not, Mr. Snart. We’ll see to it that your remaining things on the ship are returned to you,” Rip told him. He moved off to speak to Cisco and Caitlin about something.

“’Remaining’ things?”

Ray winced. “Well. Most of your stuff we just put in a box. But…the cold gun is a different story.”

Snart turned a dark glare on Ray. “What did you do to my gun?”

So Ray told him the story of trying to keep Mick from sinking into despair by initially being a very terrible replacement Captain Cold and how he’d ended up cannibalizing the cold gun to stop the White House from blowing up. Snart listened quietly, without interrupting and finally said, “What happened with Mick?”

Ray shook his head. “The rest of that story is…for another time. As far as the cold gun goes, though, I built another one. You can have it.”

Snart turned a narrow look on Ray. “Feeling guilty, Raymond?”

“No. But I don’t much feel like living in a universe where Captain Cold doesn’t have his cold gun,” Ray replied.

Snart narrowed his eyes at that, then shrugged. “I’ll accept that. I assume it comes with conditions?”

“No murder.”

“Acceptable.”

“So, the question becomes how to deal with the younger Mr. Allen,” Rip said.

“I think Barry is talking with Wally about taking him on as a sidekick,” Leonard said with a frown, watching as Barry had an intense conversation with a red-headed man that Ray didn’t know.

“You don’t look too hopeful on that score,” Ray said.

“I’ve only met Flash-the-Second a few times, but he doesn’t strike me as the responsible type,” Leonard said.

“Neither do you, but your sister turned out okay,” Ray suggested.

“My sister is a career criminal with a long string of abusive exes I’ve had to chase away. In what sense is that ‘okay?’”

Ray scowled. He had a point.

“Look, I’m not the responsible type, but the kid did just haul me out an alternate dimension. I’ll keep an eye on him and make sure he lands on his feet,” Leonard said. “I owe him.”

“I don’t think he understands the concept,” Ray sighed.

“Well, I do.”

And that was that.

Snart’s things, what people hadn’t claimed as remembrances, were all packed away in two boxes in the cargo bay. After adding back those that had been claimed as remembrances, it took all of five minutes to load the boxes into Stein’s car for the short drive back to STAR Labs. Ray’s phone kept buzzing with text messages from various people. Oliver hated being mayor and had a whole team of little ducklings now that he’d much rather spend his time training. Felicity had apparently had a terrible run-in with some less-than-entirely-above-board hackers and was possibly an international criminal now? He definitely needed more on that story. Also, apparently they weren’t engaged anymore and Oliver had accidentally killed her boyfriend? But they were still friends? What the hell was going on in Star City?

But Rip and Jax were making very satisfied noises about the state of the engine and Sara and Nate were tinkering with the Aberration alert. Mick was packed up and ready to leave, because with Snart alive, there was no way he was staying on the ship anymore. And Ray found himself standing in his quarters wondering, why, exactly he was absolutely not looking forward to leaving.

“I had expected to find you packed all ready, Raymond,” said a quiet voice from the door. Ray turned to find Stein standing there with a curious expression.

“I never said I was leaving,” Ray said.

“Raymond.”

Ray blinked. He looked at his room, where Kendra was gone. He thought about his first suit, in shreds in feudal Japan. He thought about watching Leonard kill Amaya. He thought about dinosaurs. He thought about time drift in the late 1950s. He thought about watching Mick turn on them. He thought about the inevitable destruction of his relationship with Kendra and how much that had hurt. He thought about how much he really did not trust Rip Hunter’s judgement. “Am I just doing this out of habit now? Why am I doing this anymore?”

Team Legends – The Atom = new normal. Huh.

Stein crossed over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Our travels demand a price from all of us, but I feel that yours has been uniquely high. If you wish to return to your life in the present, I assure you, we will all understand.”

Ray blinked.

“Haircut. What are you lollygagging for?” Mick demanded, poking his head in. “Snart still wants to know if you’re actually joining the gang or not. I told him you’d never go for it, but he’s holding out hope for you turning felon.”

“Did everybody know I was leaving but me?” Ray asked, trying to imagine himself as a criminal and feeling like he had sprained something in his brain.

“Captains Hunter and Lance will be surprised,” Stein replied. “Jefferson suspected, but I don’t believe he was certain.”

Ray shook his head. “It won’t take but a minute to pack.”

“Yeah, I know. You were halfway out the door already,” Mick said with a shake of his head as he wandered off.

“This will leave the Legends shorthanded, though,” Ray said as he started to pack the few things he hadn’t been keeping in his bag already.

“I assure you, Raymond, we will soldier on without you somehow,” Stein replied with a smile in his voice.

Ray grinned back. “I’m glad to hear it, but you’ve actually given me a bit of an idea.”

He pulled out his phone and dialed a number he didn’t often have occasion to call.

It was about a half-an-hour later that he and Mick were standing on the ground in that same empty lot they’d stood in ages ago when the Wave Rider first appeared. Today, they watched it fly away in the direction of Star City.

“So you found the team a replacement goldfish?” Mick asked.

“I wouldn’t call her a goldfish. At least not to her face. But…sort of?” Ray shrugged. “Thea’s been through a lot, and she sounded pretty happy at the idea of getting away. Oliver wasn’t thrilled about her leaving, but even he had to admit a change of scenery might be nice. And it’ll do her some good to do some good, but do it away from Star City.” He laughed. “Plus, the Legends could definitely use someone who has actual discipline.” Someone who will absolutely not bend with Rip’s all-too-flexible sense of right and wrong, Ray did not say.

“Whatever. I’ll buy you lunch while you panic about your resume,” Mick shrugged. But he looked more than slightly amused at Ray’s assessment of their team’s general rowdiness.

Ray looked at him. “You won’t buy me lunch. You’ll just laugh about me panicking over my resume.”

“You’re catching on, Haircut,” Mick said.

Ray went with him anyway.

Only, Mick didn’t laugh at his concern over the dreary state of his CV, or even tease him about calling it a CV. In fact, he seemed more than slightly distracted, and he flat refused to tell Ray whether or not he and Snart had any plans going forward. Finally Ray said, “Okay, so, I don’t want to know about the crime. But if I only hear from you because you make the news or the Joker murders you in some horrible territory war—”

“There is not a big enough score in the world to get me to tangle with the Joker,” Mick replied.

Mick + tiny amount of common sense = RELIEF.

“Good. Anyway. If the next time I hear from you is on the news, I will make sure every phone you buy for the rest of your life won’t let you set any ringtone but the Barney theme song,” Ray informed him.

Mick blinked. “You’re a tech billionaire. I’m a felon. You don’t want to be seen with me.”

“I don’t think you get to tell me what I want. And, felon or not, you also saved my life more than once, and that doesn’t not-count just because we’re not on the Wave Rider anymore.”

“I ditched you for evil Snart and the Legion,” Mick protested.

“You came back. Though if you pull something like that again, I will punch you again,” Ray answered.

Mick frowned. “I don’t have friends.”

“Now you do. Figure it out. Because I will make good on my Barney threat, don’t think that I won’t.” He scowled at the floor. “Besides. It wouldn’t make mathematical sense.”

Mick stared at him. “What? Math? What are you talking about?”

Ray stared at him in horror, unable to believe that had come out of his mouth. “Nothing. It’s dumb. Doesn’t matter.”

Mick gave him a very unimpressed look. “Now I know you need to explain. Let’s have it.”

Reluctantly, Ray explained. People. Math. How he made equations for people. Remembered all their little variables. And how Mick’s didn’t add up anymore.

“You’re an idiot,” Mick informed him as soon as Ray had finished.

“So you keep saying,” Ray sighed.

“X is you.”

“What?”

“Well, you and the Professor, but mostly you,” Mick explained. “Nobody goes straight, even the tiny amount I bothered to, without some kind of reason. Mostly I did it to piss you off. If I’d known it was working so well, I would’ve done it more.”

Ray scrutinized Mick, and he could see, just a little, that there was just a tiny hint of actual feeling behind the words. It was Mick Rory, and he would never wear his heart on his sleeve, so he would never say he’d been working on reforming because of the Power of Friendship.

But he kind of had just said that, a little bit, and that was good enough for Ray. So he decided to let his friend off the hook. “Then maybe I’ll change all your ringtones to the Barney song as revenge. But I’ll definitely do it if you drop off the map.”

“Fine, Haircut. Time travel made you a grumpy bastard. And you’re still an idiot.”

But he seemed much more relaxed, so Ray called that a win.

Heh. An actual win. That was nice.

THE END

*~*~*

Author's Notes: Congratulations! You are all victims of my latest experiment in finding a new tone for my writing. Mwa-hahaha! …Honestly, though, the tone here was tough to find. I’m not usually mathy, so I ended up just writing the first draft and then adding Ray’s wacky brain in the edits. However, on the upside, it’s easier to make sure not to drift outside the perspective character when you’ve given him such a quirky brain.

I actually spent some serious time working out the equations for various people and what the operators should be on the various parts and how they interact. Like is it “+ time” or is it “• time?” In the long run, I don’t think most people are going to read that closely, but since this is a question of “how can I break this character down into simple component parts, and make a case about how those parts interact?” it ended up being kind of a brain-twister.

Another roadblock on this was making sure that none of the scientists had a degree in General Science. Like, Stein knows some things about medicine from his work on Project FIRESTORM, but he’s not a proper doctor. Ray isn’t a doctor at all, he’s a computer scientist and engineer. Rip has some emergency medical training, and he’s from the future, but he’s ultimately a temporal scientist. So while Ray is not remotely useless in saving Bart, his field is not going to put him in the driver’s seat once he gets the VR built.

I am not entirely certain that the exact age humans stop being able to acquire language is actually six. I think it might be a little older. It would vary, to some degree, from person to person where they hit that cut-off, developmentally. However, the underlying principle is correct. The human brain is fundamentally inclined to learn language of some sort (need not be verbal, sign languages okay), and to do so very young. However, if some language of some kind is not learned before the window closes, the subject is usually unable to learn any language after that point. Which, as you can imagine, makes it very difficult for the subject to understand a lot of things. Every case study involving the language marker being missed has been a really, really sad story to learn about. So Bart is in a very real danger here.

I did major in psychology, BTW, and even without a master’s, I can promise Ray’s panic over Bart missing major developmental milestones is 100% justified. Humans really do learn from experiences, and while it’s a big thing to get over the language hurdle, Bart is missing about a million socialization cues. Which, of course, results in him becoming the very awkward dorky kid we all love to love, but… Yeah, all the quiet panic about Bart’s future mental health is very well-justified along with Ray’s ethical quandary. He’s very much in emergency-only, I-would-never-do-this-if-I-could-think-of-anything-else mode here.

I also had trouble ending this one, because two Big Things happen. One, Bart Allen gets brought to this series in a way that can resolve how he and quasi-sort-of-but-not-really-Arrow!verse Barry don’t have to be several generations removed from each other. Two, Captain Cold gets brought back, alive, with his Legends of Tomorrow characterization intact. And those are both big things. But Ray, who is the POV character, is adjacent to both these events, even though he’s involved. In fact, this story is really about how Ray and Mick are friends for realzies. So, even after the Big Things are over, Ray’s story didn’t stop, and I had to keep writing until I got him to a resolution.

My initial goal in writing this, honest to goodness, was just to peel Mick off the Wave Rider, get Thea onto it, and do Bart’s origin story. Ray Palmer and his weird brain being the stars of the thing came later.