Rogues, Inc.

[bungakertas]

Rating: PG-13
Warning(s) : theft, armed robbery, minor violence, minor swearing
Pairing(s) : none
Tags: alternate universe – canon fusion, alternate universe – canon divergence, alternate universe – they don’t die, casefic
Disclaimer: All copyrighted characters, situations, settings, and events belong to DC Comics, Warner Brothers, the CW, or some combination thereof (I think that’s everybody). No money has changed hands, and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Summary: Being hauled out of the Speed Force and thrust back into the world was the best. Reuniting with his sister was even better (although it did involve a slight amount of being punched in the face). Captain Cold was ready to take on the world again. …Except for the tiny problem where he didn't want to be a bad guy anymore, but he didn't know how to be anything else.
Spoilers: Whole episode spoilers for Batman: the Animated Series episode “The Terrible Trio.” Bits and mentions of significant Arrow!verse events involving Leonard Snart, Mick Rory, Lisa Snart, and Hartley Rathaway. Most of the other spoilers are for events in this series. Erm…I guess if you didn’t know Bart was Impulse or something?
Continuity: Canon compliance for Arrow!verse ends at Legends season 2, Arrow season 5, The Flash season 3. Supergirl is totally disregarded (she exists in this series, but not as the Arrow!verse version). Otherwise, this is my own AU that is more Dini-verse than anything else, but isn’t 100% in continuity with any existing canons for anything.
Author's Notes: Written for NaNoWriMo 2017. (Didn’t win. Too short, and didn’t finish on time. But that’s where this got started.)

I am an American, writing about American characters (with the exception of a brief cameo by Julian Albert). I have tried to make a note of cultural references that may be a little more obscure at the end, but if something befuddles you, drop me a comment or whatever and I’ll happily add a note in the author’s comments when I get a moment.
Series: The DC Stories

*~*~*

Leonard Snart actually stumbled backwards, with an aching jaw and a vague sense of being impressed. His sister had quite the right hook. Which she was following with a left. Dammit.

Ouch.

He caught the next punch with his hand and raised a brow at her. “Lisa. I’m glad to see you, too.”

She glared at him. “They told me you were dead!”

“Be fair, Lisa. I was stuck in the Speed Force. I did seem pretty convincingly dead," Len said.

Lisa had two hands to punch with, and Len was only holding the one. Her blow from the other side landed absolutely square in the middle of his chest, knocking the breath out of him. "That. Is. Not. Better!" she shouted.

"It's sweet you were worried—"

"Don't you dare turn this into a joke! You were dead, Lenny! For a year."

Len just couldn't say anything to that. It was true. How was he supposed to apologize for that? Hell, he barely remembered how to apologize for anything. He'd held a gun to Sara's head. One of his own teammates. He'd left Mick for the Time Bastards to abuse and hollow out and remake to their liking. Plus whatever things he'd done for Eobard Thawne that Mick absolutely, steadfastly, flatly refused to discuss. All those things were actually his fault, and he hadn’t apologized for those. What the hell was he supposed to say to this?

Maybe he should ask Bart Allen to put him back in the Speed Force. He couldn't think of a single human being who was a greater waste of space than himself.

Lisa's eyes looked even more blue than normal. Len stared in disbelief. She made a noise of frustration and embarrassment and was gone in a whirl of blonde curls and expensive perfume.

Hunh.

Dad… well. Dad would have been proud. No healthy emotional balance for the Snart siblings. Sarcasm with outbursts of actual violence were the way to go. Len rubbed his aching jaw and mentally cursed Rip Hunter and Martin Stein—hell, Joe West and Henry Allen, too, while he was in the neighborhood—for ever showing him what it looked like when a man actually cared for the younger people he was responsible for. If he'd never seen it close up, he'd never have known what he'd missed.

Mick came out of the kitchen, munching on some chips he'd found somewhere that looked horrifyingly stale. "How'd she take it?" Mick asked.

"Like a champ," Len replied, glaring at his friend.

Mick tossed him a bag that turned out to have ice in it. "She'll come around. She wouldn't be so upset with you now if she hadn't missed you."

Len frowned, remembering that Mick's first reaction had been to hug him. Mick Rory. Hugged him. On purpose. He held the ice up to his jaw and sighed. "If she'd missed me any more, she'd've put me in the hospital."

Mick made a face. "She didn't break your nose. If she'd been really pissed, she would've."

Len just sighed. "Raymond sent you another text."

"Haircut just wanted to know how you liked your new gun," Mick said.

Len glanced over to the coffee table of their…"borrowed" house where his brand new cold gun lay.

He could say without any hesitation, he liked this one better than the old one. Cisco's gun had been built with one goal: stop The Flash if he gets out of hand. Raymond had built the new cold gun to freeze Bart Allen, but he must've had Len in mind when he was building it because it was a true work of art. Instead of just on/off, this gun had variable temperature settings (granted, they ranged from "Arctic" to "absolute zero," but even so), a biometric safety, and a dispersion adjuster to tighten or widen the beam. And he'd done away with the firing pin mechanism.

(Mick had said that when Raymond found out that Cisco had built the original cold gun with a firing pin, he had apparently started flat-out ranting about what a pointless system that was for a ray gun, how it made no sense, totally inappropriate… Apparently there had been mechanical engineering involved. Len was sorry to have missed that.)

Raymond had also, helpfully, written a User Manual that he had joked was just for fun, since no one ever read them. Len had devoured it. He'd memorized every schematic. Stupid Eagle Scout was even good at writing technical manuals.

Not to mention that Raymond's spin on a cold gun just looked cooler. It was still big and clunky compared to, say, a .45, but it was lighter weight than the original cold gun, and there was less kick-back. (Despite not working remotely similarly to a combustion-projectile weapon, like a standard handgun, the “beam” of the cold gun did produce a pretty strong amount of forward force, which also generated kick-back. It had taken Len a while to get the hang of how to use it with only one hand.) The casing was a gorgeous matte black, and the soft blue lights on the grip doubled as a gauge on battery power.

Cisco might have invented the cold gun, but there was no denying Raymond had perfected it.

“We should find somewhere to live,” Len finally said.

“We should find something to do,” Mick agreed.

“You good at anything?” Len asked.

“Setting stuff on fire. You?”

“Stealing.”

Mick was quiet for a moment. “We’re gonna go to prison again.”

“Looks that way.”

They did try. They got jobs. Which were awful and boring because nobody wanted to hire a couple of ex-cons (who were apparently not actually currently wanted for anything or fugitives from prison somehow and Len wasn’t sure who to mail a gift card to for that). They got an apartment. It was leaky, freezing cold (which Len did not mind in small doses, but this was outside even his range of tolerance), and Len was reasonably certain their upstairs neighbor was a hooker who brought her work home with her.

They were both more miserable than they’d ever been in their lives. Including prison.

“How do normal people do this?” Mick hissed one evening two weeks later when he burned himself on their hot plate trying to cook… Well, whatever it was he was trying to cook had possibly been food-like at some point or another.

“You’re asking me?” Len sighed, looking over the ruined mess that was their dinner and sighing. Why were they even doing this? They were never going to make it work going straight. Neither of them had any legitimate job skills. This was insane.

He was interrupted from his morose thoughts by the door banging open. Lisa barged in and was well inside their minuscule apartment before halting and wrinkling her nose. “What did you burn this time?”

“I don’t even remember what it’s called,” Mick said with a sigh.

“You can’t go on like this. You’ll lose your contacts,” she said.

Len thought back on his old contacts for weapons, booze, jobs, sex… He didn’t really miss any of those people. They’d certainly never been friends. They never would’ve apologized for insulting him like Jax had. Or risked a mission to save his life like Raymond had. Or come to help him and his sister like Barry had…

This had all been so much easier when he’d only had one friend in the world. Now he knew what it was like when other people treated him like a human being and it made the lack of it so much harder to take.

“Those people were idiots anyway,” Mick grumbled, echoing his thoughts.

“What is the matter with the two of you? What did they do to you on that ship?” Lisa demanded suddenly.

Len looked to Mick, trying to think of a way to explain it and got just as helpless an expression as he had in return. Two of the world’s greatest thieves and they were busted.

Lisa rolled her eyes. “Whatever. I found us a job. It’ll go smoother if I have some extra hands.”

Len and Mick exchanged another glance and Mick shrugged. They were just spinning their wheels anyway and all of them knew it.

In the back of Len's mind, an alarm started to go off. Lisa had never been the one to pick the jobs. She had never been the one to make the plans. She was always perfectly content to follow Len's lead, but she'd never been the one to push for this gig or that one.

"We already have a job," Mick told her.

"You work in a factory making tires for minimum wage," Lisa replied. "Two of Central City's supervillains. In a factory. Making tires."

Len glowered, but the trouble was, she was right. Their jobs were stupid and he hated them. Besides, if Lisa's heist wasn't going to work, they could always get others. It wasn't like there was any shortage of jobs with high turnover that would take two idiots with more muscle mass than sense. They'd all suck, but at least he and Mick could look themselves in the mirror. A little.

Lisa had picked out a shop with a pretty basic layout. Big open space in the main area, lots of ways in and out, and no cameras at all. The safe was laughably old. Basic combination lock only. They were going to rob this place and it wouldn't even be hard.

Or, at least, they were going to right up until he and Mick got out the next night to actually look at the target.

It was an auto-body shop. Looked like they did a pretty good business, but Len had never seen that sign anywhere else. So it was a small business. Just the one. Probably some little mom and pop shop, dammit, and they were just going to swoop in and ruin them.

Jax would never forgive him.

"I'm not helping you with this one," Mick declared.

"Won't need your help for a job I don't pull," Len returned.

Mick huffed sarcastically. "Lisa was right. What the hell is wrong with us? I never used to care if somebody needed the money I stole. Stupid Haircut and his pansy-ass pollyanna crap."

"Lisa still needs the money," Len said.

"Noticed that too, did you?" Mick said.

"She talks to you sometimes. Has she said anything about why?"

"Why wouldn’t she tell you? Still hasn't come around?"

"She…" Len looked away. He was trying on this, too, dammit. He tried to call. Or text. And Lisa was always busy, or getting her nails done, or having her hair dyed, or shopping, or on a date, or any one of a thousand other excuses he knew were all lies because he knew his sister and she was still mad at him. She was either mad at him for having been dead, or she was mad at him for not being dead anymore, or she was mad at him for both.

Or maybe, the snide little voice in his head that sounded vaguely like Lewis Snart, she was mad because he hadn't shielded her from Dad. Or any one of those ex- boyfriends of hers that he hadn't realized were hitting her until she'd come in with bruises and bad excuses. Or maybe she was mad because he had always gotten angry at her then chased them away instead of just chasing them away. Or maybe she was mad because of all of those things. Or maybe she was mad because she'd never really loved him or even liked him and all their lives she'd only played along out of habit.

"No."

"She will."

"No, I think she's finally realized she needs to ditch the dead weight," Len said.

Mick gave him a confused look but what he said out loud was, "If we aren't hitting this dump, what are we gonna do? Lisa's expecting us to help her with the score."

Len frowned thoughtfully. He and Mick had been ready to just go ahead with the job if casing the place worked out the way they'd wanted it. They had all the gear they'd need in two backpacks. Maybe they could still pull something off. He grabbed his cell (a hilariously outdated flip- phone, but it was all he could afford on his current paycheck) and called Lisa.

"Hey! You've absolutely missed the golden and divine Lisa Snart! Say something after the beep!" her voicemail chirped.

"Sis, change of plans. Meet us back at my apartment," Len said, after the beep. He flipped the phone closed.

"Calling an audible, Snart?"

"Making it up as we went along worked well enough on the Wave Rider."

"Right up until Savage took over the world or we broke time," Mick replied with a careless shrug.

Len rolled his eyes. "No code names tonight. And just normal guns. We're going old school."

"How old school?"

"How many Big Belly Burgers are there in Central City?" Len asked. Because a long time ago, the two of them had kicked around the idea of knocking over as many fast food joints as they could in a single night. Back before they had grown up and realized how insane it would be to pull something like that off. But they were old enough, and skilled enough, now that they might just manage it.

Mick laughed, a light in his eyes saying he remembered that old, dumb idea they’d had. "Dunno. But there's an app to find that out."

Len looked at his phone and scowled. It was good enough to make an receive calls and texts, but that was about it. Apps were a little beyond it. "There was Cricket store a few blocks over. Very closed."

"There's a solid chance the Flash might come looking for us to see who it is that's robbing a bunch of fast food joints all in one night," Mick said.

"Big Belly Burger has an armored truck that makes cash pick-ups in the morning," Len replied. “They never keep a lot of cash on hand, so it’s going to look like a small-time job until we’re pretty well in. Flash doesn’t show up for petty crime unless it happens right in front of him.”

"You've got this heist planned already," Mick observed.

"Was gonna be our next job before Rip Hunter recruited us to his team of idiots."

Len hadn’t gone for the balaclavas and black clothes for a while now, but for one job, he had to admit, they had their uses. Both he and Mick had graduated from those a long time ago, so the cops wouldn't think that they'd switch to an old style now. (Though, to be fair, the sweatshirts they were wearing were actually a boring, blank, dark green.) They were big, scary super-criminals. Had their own signature weapons and everything. So no one was going to expect them to pull a string of low-level jobs all in one night.

At least, that's what he was hoping. Crime wasn't exactly a low-risk lifestyle.

Sure enough, the Cricket was closed and utterly, totally deserted. Mick picked the lock on the door and the two of them went inside to absolutely no alarms at all. And a weird chalky smell that reminded Len of the tile floors back in Iron Heights.

"Good old government grout," Mick said.

"Just like old times," Len agreed. "Alarm system's fake."

"Good for us." Mick skipped past most of the displays and opened up a drawer behind the register. "Found a demo phone."

Len hit a button on the register and the drawer opened. Cash tray gone, of course, but a lot of places kept handy information beneath it that didn't get locked away at night. And, just like he’d expected, there was a one- page paper of store policies and procedures and another that was nothing but various log- in credentials. He glanced over at the phone Mick was holding to see it was an iPhone, and then scanned the page to find their iPhone log- in.

"Okay, their Apple ID is… crk7824 at icloud. Passcode is 007824." All the log- in credentials were variations on 7824, so Len figured it was probably the store id number.

"Cool. Okay, BigBellyBurger App coming our way. We've got… twelve within city limits. All open now. Oh! And they've got onion fries! Too bad."

"You love onion fries," Len said.

"Who the hell steals food on a job? "

"Better the cops be on the lookout for a pair of amateurs," Len shrugged.

Len could actually see how Mick's mask shifted as his friend grinned. "We should'a pulled these nonsense jobs more often. This is kind of fun."

They took the store's phone and left the store.

As soon as they made the parking lot, Mick gasped like all his Christmases had come at once. He pointed, and Len looked over to see what all the fuss was about.

The Cricket store was in a more-or-less run-down shopping center, and—by all appearances—the only shop doing decent business in the place was a Krispy Kreme which was, at the moment, just as closed as the Cricket. And parked unassumingly outside of the store was a delivery truck.

"We gotta do this in the truck," Mick said.

Len pretended to be annoyed, but he knew Mick could see right through it. "If only the Eagle Scout could see us now."

"He'd try to talk us out of it," Mick said with a laugh.

"I haven't hotwired anything in a while," Len admitted.

"That's what I'm for," Mick said.

Delivery trucks were good for a few things. They didn't have doors, so getting in and out was pretty easy. They were uniform, so even if the cops worked out that the guys they were chasing were using a Whatever, Inc. delivery truck, they still had to pin down which one. And even the ones with the more distinctive labels— like Krispy Kreme— were the sort of thing the eye just skated over. Furniture. Blended into the background.

And they were usually driven by some minimum wage idiot, so they tended to have minimal bells and whistles, which made them easier to hotwire. Mick had their getaway van up and running in only a few seconds.

Len watched their borrowed phone as they drove towards the first target.

"Okay, so… we're gonna have to scare these people pretty badly," Len said as they drove.

"Won't be so bad if we do it quickly," Mick replied.

The sick part of it was that Len knew he was right. This plan had always—even when they were dumb kids dreaming it up—relied on speed and overconfidence. Go in, scare the employees, leave, on to the next target. So long as they didn't hesitate, it would work. Even the Flash probably wouldn't catch on to them, and they both knew how quick he moved.

That was always the trick to evading the LEOs. Crooks acted, cops reacted. So you make your plan, execute your plan, get ready to roll with it if your plan went off the rails, and be willing run the second things looked like they were getting more complicated than you could keep up with.

He really had given Barry the four rules to committing the perfect crime. He'd misquoted them because you never told the costumed do-gooders all your tricks, obviously, but he hadn't been kidding.

"Scared or not, though, we leave them with nothing but a good story to tell their family the next day," Len said.

"Obviously," Mick agreed, pulling into the parking lot.

"Basic in-and-out," Len said. "Nothing fancy here."

"Won't need it. It's last shift. All these kids want to go home. They won't fight us for this stuff," Mick agreed.

He parked the van and the two of them waited quietly until some hapless kid came out the back door to throw the trash away.

And, sure enough, along came an idiot kid in no time at all. A red-headed, freckle-faced boy who couldn't be older than nineteen. Len shoved down his guilt and reminded himself to focus. In-and-out. Nothing fancy.

The two of them were out of the truck and on the kid in no time flat. Len seized the kid by the scruff of his jacket and laid his gun carelessly aside the boy's temple. "Door," he demanded. Minimal talking, so their voices would be hard to identify.

The boy opened the door for them and the two entered through the back. The cook at the grill screamed, but mostly, the employees just fell silent and stared in shock.

Scaring people wasn't like most everybody thought it was. People didn't react predictably. Some people panicked. Some people froze. Some people tried to stand up to you. But nearly everyone needed a moment or two to process what they saw and react to it. They would see two men with masks and guns coming into the kitchen from the back and that's when the film and TV conditioning would kick in and people would get scared and try to respond. But before that happened, there would be that golden moment of opportunity—usually a second or so—where people looked around to find the source of the unusual additions to their environment, then realized they were in a situation that could kill them, then decided and try to implement a response.

A second or so, in a hostile encounter, a virtual eternity. Which was why Mick had his gun pointed straight at the supervisor's nose before anyone had even thought to move. "Cash. All of it. And an order of onion fries."

The supervisor just nodded to the crew, and they had their order filled in ten seconds. The two took the kid with them as far as the back door, then Len shoved him into the arms of a nearby coworker before they ducked out the door and bolted for the truck.

They were in and out in less than a minute.

The next store was a drive of only five minutes. They ran exactly the same operation and it took the same amount of time. After four stores they swapped the doughnut truck for a UPS van, but the next four heists went just as smooth. As they turned to the last four, they knew the cops might be on to the delivery truck thing, so they boosted the first over-sized, six-wheeled pick-up truck that they came across.

(Len vividly remembered a night on the Wave Rider where Sara and Kendra had both had a couple extra glasses of wine and agreed with too many giggles that men who drove the over-sized trucks were automatically assumed to be compensating for something else. Len had dismissed it as a drunk ramble until both women had confirmed it the next day.)

They hit the very last store just as the supervisor was getting a phone call from corporate headquarters telling them to shut down, lock up, and send everyone home. Thanks to the late night and the lack of traffic, it had only taken about an hour and a half for them to hit every Big Belly Burger in Central City.

They finished up about two blocks away from the city library, which Len knew for a cold fact not to have any cameras, so they parked the truck in the lot there and left the cell phone they'd stolen from the Cricket store in the glove compartment. They stripped off the masks and the sweatshirts and shoved them into their backpacks. They gave the haul a quick once- over in case any surprises had been slipped into the money, but it was pretty rare to find trackers or ink packages in a cash register.

It was about 1:00 AM, so city buses were still running for another hour. The two of them walked a good eight blocks before catching one at a stop near a bar. They arrived back at their apartment before two-thirty and both crawled into bed.

The radio news the next morning was about nothing but the Big Belly Burger Burglaries, that had puzzled police, frustrated Flashes, and stymied STAR Labs. In fact, the entire news segment was packed with puns and awash with alliteration to the point that even Len's lips were twitching by the time they put on some more music.

"We should double-check the total they reported," Len observed. "In case they’re misquoting it on purpose."

"So that only the real thieves will know the correct answer?" Mick replied with a smile. “That’d be sneaky of them.”

They counted up their take, and Len was pretty happy to report the total to Lisa, who actually answered her phone this time. She didn't sound happy. She did say she was coming over.

He was beginning to be less confused by Lisa and more annoyed with her. He had never expected her to take his return with pure happiness and no reaction at all, but to give him nothing but anger and freeze him out was…

Well, she was stealing his act and he was not at all happy about it.

He had apologized for leaving her, for dying, for not telling her about the Wave Rider. He hadn't done a very good job, but he had tried. For her. Because she was his sister and he wanted her to understand him.

None of it mattered. She blew it all off, ignored it. Which wasn't like her at all.

There were a few constants about Lisa Snart. She never went out without make- up, she could strangle a man without mussing her manicure, and she thought her big brother hung the moon.

(Len had always tried not to lean on that last one too hard. She couldn't help looking up to him. Mom had never cared what happened so long as she got her pretty little trinkets to show off to all the other Real Housewives of Iron Heights. Which Lewis made sure she always had. Lisa had, to Mom, been a human-shaped trinket with beautiful hair. Len was twelve years older than his sister, and had always intervened on her behalf when Dad had gotten out of hand. To a girl under the thumb of a narcissistic mother and the threat of a violent father, his teenage brushes with the law and clumsy attempts to keep her from the worst of the abuse must've looked exciting and heroic. She'd been absolutely doomed to look up to him and he'd always tried not to take advantage of that. His one saving grace.)

They'd fought before because that was what people did with their siblings, but she'd never, ever been so sharp with him. It struck against all the conditioning they'd both learned growing up in the Snart household. They were a team because they absolutely had to be. And sure, Len had heard stories of people growing up and overcoming abusive parents, but that was not the kind of happy future he and Lisa could hope for. They were stuck with their damage, and straying from these patterns meant something was badly wrong.

So, if Lisa was coming over, still upset with him after weeks of his being back and in easy contact, he had a feeling she was going to blow in like a hurricane.

His sister did not disappoint.

She was absolutely furious. "You two idiots are the Big Belly Burger Burglars?" she demanded when Len told them about their take.

Mick blinked. "How did you say that so perfectly so fast?"

"Never mind the tongue twister," she snapped. "I had a job! One I had to pull off alone! What were you thinking?" She was moving the next instant, fist flying towards Len's face. Again.

Len caught her arm. He was absolutely done letting her punch him in the face.

"We were thinking that you needed money. For reasons you have neglected to explain at all," he said. "And I think it's high time you explain to us what those reasons are."

Lisa scowled and turned to the door, but Mick had anticipated her and was already between her and their door.

"You robbed that mechanic's place?" Mick said quietly.

"So what?" she snarled.

"It's a small business. What if they can't recover?" Mick asked.

"Who cares? People get robbed all the time! One of my friends had her identity stolen a couple of weeks ago! What difference does it make if I'm the one doing the stealing this time?"

Len hated himself. His words. From his sister's mouth.

"And besides. What if I can't recover?" she demanded.

"Recover from what?" Len asked quietly.

There was a long pause where Lisa said nothing. Finally, she turned to him and there were tears in her eyes. A long time ago, Len had learned to distinguish between her fake tears and her real ones. And these were one- hundred per cent genuine. She was really crying. She was really upset.

"Lisa, what have you done?" he said.

"Len. I think I'm in some real trouble this time. I don't think I can get out of it."

And with that pronouncement, she was suddenly hugging him and crying like she could barely breathe.

Len and Mick bundled her onto the couch and waited quietly until she could speak again.

"Tell us what's going on. We can't fix it if we don't know how bad it is," Mick finally said.

Lisa nodded, sniffed, and said, "That friend of mine? Who had her identity stolen? She knows I’m not… Well, I don’t think she knows everything, but she’s figured out I’m not one of the good kids. Anyway, she is one of the good kids and I felt bad for what happened, and I was still mad at you for everything so…I took a job. I'd never heard of the guy before, but he was offering a lot of money for it. A few hundred grand. Said the take was worth it. And I…need some time to think. I was going to take the money, give some to her to cover what she’d lost, and leave the country."

"What did he want? The guy that hired you."

"A file. Just one file from a secure server. He had the whole plan, too. Claimed he just didn't have the actual chops to pull it off. But he had floor plans, layouts, the whole works. It was easy to figure a way in," she said.

Len managed to hold in his groan, but it was close. Anyone with that much access was probably an insider, and that was rarely a good sign. "Where was the file?" he asked.

"In the server room of some company called VelociVar Tech. I didn't really care, I just wanted the money. The hardest part of the job was actually finding the right file on the server. I got in, I got the file, I got out," Lisa told them.

Len exchanged a puzzled look with Mick. This didn't sound like a problem yet.

"When did it go south?" Mick asked.

"When I went to give the file to the buyer," Lisa said. "He never showed up to the meet."

Len felt his blood run cold. That was a very, very, very bad sign. If someone commissioned you to steal something they never bothered to actually pick up, it was nearly always you being set up. If the people setting you up were pragmatic or psychotic enough, you wouldn't just be set up, you'd end up dead and set up. This was bad. This was very, very, very bad.

"I almost dumped the file, but I realized it was my only bargaining chip, so I still have it," Lisa confessed. "But I don't want to bargain, I just want to disappear. I want to get out of Central City and just… disappear."

"Cops onto you yet?" Mick asked quietly.

"Not yet. Soon. They're putting the pieces together. Your speedy friend doesn't seem interested, though," Lisa said. "None of the Speedsters do. They're too busy chasing down idiots knocking over fast food joints."

"They have good onion fries," Mick protested.

"Anyway, I need money. To disappear. That's why… Why it's better if you're mad at me, Len. If I'm nothing but a bitch to you and then I'm just gone… It'll be easier. You and Mick can go straight like you want to," she said.

Len felt his blood run cold again, for an entirely different reason. He seized Lisa's arm, probably way too tight. "Listen, Trainwreck, you are an absolute disaster of a sister," Len told her, "but you are my disaster of a sister and that's the end of it. I don't care what kind of mess you're in."

For once, the mental images of Ray and the Professor in Len's mind did absolutely nothing but nod approvingly. And he could see Lisa relax just a fraction and he knew, at least this time, he’d absolutely gotten it right.

He let go of her arm, hoping he hadn't left bruises. That was their father's bag.

"What's the file of?" Mick asked.

"Damned if I know," Lisa said. "It's just a bunch of numbers. It doesn't make sense to me at all."

Despite their hilariously minuscule income, Mick had actually managed to hang on to Raymond as a friend, so both of them had top- of- the- line laptops and a very fast internet set- up. Mick's computer was on the coffee table (or, at least, the cardboard box affair that they were pretending counted as a coffee table) and they plugged in the thumb drive with Lisa's file and opened it up.

Sure enough, the file was pure text, not very big bytes- wise, and contained nothing but a long, long, long list of strings of numbers. Each number was exactly twenty- three digits long. There was no encryption or passwording. The numbers were the content, and there was no attempt made to protect them.

Unfortunately, there was also no attempt made to explain them.

"This is not worth five bucks, let alone a few hundred grand," Mick said irritably.

"It's worth setting me up with the police, though," Lisa said.

"Was the set-up for you specifically, or would any old thief have done?" Len heard himself ask.

Lisa looked thoughtful before saying, "I wasn't the only one he offered the job to. He had a few other people offering to do it. But…he seemed really interested in me. Like he was hoping I’d be the one to take him up."

Mick furrowed. "He wanted you, but didn’t want to look like he did?"

"Yeah." She looked down. "Damn I'm dumb. It's every red flag you ever told me to look for ever! How could I not see that?"

"Because you were distracted over Len?" Mick offered in that dismissive-sounding tone he always used to say difficult things.

"I know! I should’ve been more careful."

Len shook his head. "I know you don't think much of the Legends, Lisa. But between them and the Flash, I've realized that the only people who can never be taken off-guard or hurt are the people who have absolutely nothing to lose at all. Which means they have nothing in their lives they really want to keep. I don't want to be like those people, and neither do you."

Lisa blinked. "So, what? I should just embrace my weaknesses?"

"Yes," Mick replied with a shrug. "Anyway, that's not about your little problem. Come on. Less talking, more planning."

"Planning is talking," Lisa protested.

"Whatever."

Len sighed and pulled out his phone. It was time for him to make a phone call he really, really did not want to make.

To his dismay, the number connected quickly enough.

"Ye-hello. Go for STAR Labs," announced Cisco's cheerful voice.

"I have a question for you," Len said.

"Not an uncommon event, but who is this?" Cisco asked.

Len blinked. He'd always been told he had a distinctive voice, but apparently sometimes that didn't help.

"Snart. The cold one."

"Oh. What do you want?" All traces of enthusiasm were gone from Cisco, replaced with an absolutely flat, disinterested tone. Very carefully neutral.

Len decided to just dive right in. "My sister found a file with nothing but strings of numbers in it. We're not quite sure what they are. You're better with math, we were wondering if STAR Labs could take a look."

"Maybe, but we're kind of busy right now. Did you hear about the Big Belly Burger Burglaries?"

Len did not laugh, but it was close. "It was on the radio."

"Barry's pretty upset. Brand new bad guys in town just in time for the wedding, and they barely left behind any clues. The best description anybody had was 'tall and probably white.'"

Len glanced over the coffee table that held their take from the night before, and Mick who was still munching on onion fries. "Pretty vague. But best of luck to you.”

Cisco made an oddly torn sound and finally said, “Send me what you’ve got and I’ll tell you what we can come up with.”

Len looked around thoughtfully and finally said, “How about I just bring it to you in person?”

“Okay, but no promises.”

Lisa had, thankfully, not sold his bike off while he was stuck in the Speed Force, and she insisted on coming along. Mick wanted to take another stab at cooking something (there was a lot of grumbling about how “if an idiot dork like Haircut can make edible food in the Stone Age, it can’t be that hard” that Len did not follow up on), so he elected to stay behind.

Len had not been back in STAR Labs since Bart Allen had hauled him out of the Speed Force. He wasn’t completely sure what his welcome would be like.

The Cortex was more-or-less as he remembered it. A scowling British person with yellow hair was saying something rude about the city police, but Len didn’t recognize him so he ignored everything he said. Barry’s suit was in its case on the wall and Cisco and Caitlin were squabbling about something at a nearby computer.

Maybe this was how they always operated.

"—They stole everything, Caitlin! The first two they hit, their getaway was a Krispy Kreme van! Nothing tracks back to whoever these guys actually are!"

Caitlin started giggling.

"I don't think we're supposed to giggle about the bad guys," the British Person announced.

"Can you imagine a couple of robbers getting away in a doughnut truck?" Caitlin replied, still giggling.

Lisa shot her eyes to Len, though she kept the movement small. Len responded with a tiny jerk of his chin that would only pass for a nod if he'd actually explained to you that was what that movement meant. The truth was that he agreed with the British Person. Nobody had been hurt, but they'd really scared a couple of the kids they'd had for hostages last night and that bothered him a lot more than it used to.

"It isn't funny!" Barry's angry voice snapped. "Guys this brazen are bound to act out again until they get what they want and they won't care about who gets hurt along the way! We focus up until we catch them!"

"Makes me feel good when you take charge like that," Len broke in, deliberately drawing attention away from the conversation about his and Mick's supposed short-comings.

"Snart?" Barry blurted in surprise. "Ssss," he said, belatedly adding the plural when he caught sight of Lisa.

"Everybody stay calm," Lisa announced, holding her hands wide.

"No robbery jokes today," Barry snapped.

"Our favorite kind," Len said, "but we'll try to exercise restraint."

"No offense, Snart, 'cause you really came through for me that time with ARGUS but… why are you here?" Barry demanded.

"That's my fault," Cisco said, holding his hand up.

The whole room turned to stare at him in shock.

Snart could hardly blame them. He knew Cisco's feelings about him were mixed on a good day.

"He said Lisa found a confusing numbers thing! You know me and puzzles," Cisco defended.

"A girl could almost think you liked her," Lisa purred, stepping towards him.

Cisco actually blushed.

Len rolled his eyes—in unison with Caitlin, amusingly enough. "She just does that. It's like a reflex."

"So does he. You should've seen the time he tried to pick-up an interdimensional bounty hunter who was trying to murder Wells." She cut herself off looking conflicted.

Len blinked in confusion and finally said, "Sometimes I think the Speed Force made more sense."

Still, with the preliminaries out of the way, they were able to get the drive plugged in and the file opened and all the resident geniuses on deck to look at it. Which the British Person (whose name was Julian Albert, Len was finally informed) helpfully pulled up on a large screen.

"Twenty-three digits each," Cisco said. "What's that about? Why twenty-three? It's a prime number. Weird length to pick."

"There are twenty-three chromosomes in human sex cells, maybe the numbers are supposed to be paired? But I don't see how these could correspond to any human genetic coding sequences," Caitlin mused.

"Leading digits of three through six, that's weird," Barry agreed, apparently sucked into the puzzle just like the rest of his team. "Why not start at one? Or zero?"

"They're not in sequential order, either," Cisco said. "Just…stacks of numbers." He turned to look at Lisa with narrowed eyes. "This is really a thing? Not just some weird prank the two of you are pulling?"

"I swear, it's a real thing," Lisa answered. "Would I lie to my first real friend?"

"Repeatedly and without hesitation," Cisco answered without skipping a beat.

It was tiny. Almost invisible, but Len caught the flinch. The tiny little drop in Lisa's smile that told him Cisco's casual distrust had scored an actual hit. That this time, just a little bit, she'd cared if someone saw her at her best, and she was upset they knew her too well to trust it.

And the worst part was, they deserved it. He had walked in on them chatting about their investigation into robberies that he had committed.

"Well, I'm not lying about this," Lisa said.

It was an old stand-by for the three of them. Him, Lisa, and Mick. Sure, they lied. And they cheated and stole and scammed and all the good stuff, but for any kind of partnership to work, you had to be able to trust people at some point. So if any of them ever said they weren't lying—not "I'm telling the truth" but "I'm not lying"—they weren't. Game over. That was when the lies counted. That was when it was real.

Nobody else in the room knew this, and Cisco did not seem remotely convinced. But he didn't press them. He just turned back to the numbers with a scowl. "Well. If Caitlin's right and they have to be paired, it'll take us a while to figure out which ones go with which. Mind if we work on this for a while?"

"You…probably don't want to actually be caught with this file—or any copies of it—on you," Lisa admitted slowly.

"Glider, what have you done?" Cisco demanded.

"Doesn't matter. Bad stuff. I'm nothing but bad news. Just… don't get mixed up in it, okay? You can't have the thumb drive, and you shouldn't make any copies of that file." She sounded perfectly casual, but there was a tiny little edge to her voice that no one who didn't know her very well would notice.

…Which apparently put Cisco in the running for "people who knew Lisa Snart very well." Because he was looking at her with less suspicion and more sympathy now.

"Lisa, you're not… I mean, okay, you kind of are, but… Even if you are bad news, that doesn't mean we won't help you."

She shook her head. "Trust me…" There was a long pause where she thought something out. Probably something along the lines of "you don't want to get dragged down with me." And the pause stretched because there's no way to say that that doesn't make you sound pathetic, like you're secretly asking for help, or like you're suicidal. Finally, she said, "If we need your help, we'll ask for it. We just did, didn't we?"

Everyone frowned and exchanged a series of uneasy glances. Probably trying to gauge their natural, buttinski impulses to give aid and comfort to any passing waif who batted their eyes pathetically against the fact that Captain Cold and the Golden Glider had honestly, no-fooling just come to them for help so they obviously didn’t need convincing to do it.

"I guess you did," Barry finally said.

"So, if we need you, we'll call," Lisa said.

They took the thumb drive, and nobody made any copies, and they left STAR Labs.

Unfortunately, neither Len nor Mick could possibly begin to make heads or tails of how to match up the numbers with sex chromosomes without some serious brains, so Mick put in a call to Raymond, who flat-out started laughing when Mick floated that theory.

"I suppose it could be, but I am not the guy to call for that," Raymond's face said from the video-call on Mick's screen. "I could maybe get in touch with Stein and see what he thinks, but… Well, it's hard to call them when there's no way to be sure when or where they'll be next."

"We're not dragging the Professor into this nonsense," Mick growled.

"Email me a copy and I'll take a look. I'm pretty good with numbers."

"No copies!" Lisa snapped. "Honestly, you do-gooders. Your criminal friends call you up asking about strange number sequences and nobody's first impulse is to back away carefully and be looking for a weapon?"

"Hey, is that Lisa?" Raymond asked, totally ignoring her comment in favor of focusing on her. "Hold the screen up!"

Mick obligingly pointed his phone at Lisa, and Len could see Raymond grinning wildly and waving. "Hi! I'm Ray Palmer! Your brother has told me almost nothing at all about you, but everything he did say was really nice, and he never says nice things about anybody!"

Lisa shot Len an amused grin. "You actually spent a year on a ship with this guy?"

Len rolled his eyes. "He blew a mission once to keep me from getting shot by a Russian chick."

"All part of my evil plot to make you feel guilty for leaving me in the cold the night before while you made out with her," Raymond replied.

"I don't do 'guilty,'" Len returned, which was about as blatant a lie as he'd ever told in his life based on his behavior lately. (Though he didn't feel especially guilty over being a thousand times better at charming Vostok than Raymond had been.)

"You keep telling yourself that, Snart," Raymond replied, totally unrepentant. "So… bad guy stuff, then?"

"Bad guy stuff," Lisa agreed.

"Look. I appreciate you trying to keep me safe, but I am a grown up. I have PhDs and everything. Totally own-decision capable."

"No." Lisa's voice was flat and uncompromising.

"Okay, well…maybe I can look at them over the phone?"

It took some weird maneuvering of both the phone and the computer screen, but eventually Raymond was able to see a portion of the file Lisa had recovered.

"There's not really any obvious patterns from what I can see, though they do seem to have their own rhythms, I think," Raymond said.

"Rhythms?" Len asked.

"It's a… I'm weird about math," Ray said. “It's hard to explain. But there is a pattern to these numbers. I just can't quite pin down what it is. First digits from 3 to 6?"

"Barry noticed that, too," Len said.

"Yeah, he's good with details," Raymond agreed.

"But you don't know what they are?" Mick cut in, apparently tired of the waffling around.

"Totally stumped. Doesn't look like the shorthand for any equations, they're not mathematically significant—at least, not obviously—and they don't fit into any numerical sequences I can think of," Raymond said with a shrug.

"Sequences?" Mick asked.

"Oh, Fibonacci would be the most obvious, I guess," Raymond shrugged. "Zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and on and on. Each new number in the series is the sum of the previous two. Very common mathematical sequence. Shows up a lot in nature, too. But there are tons of mathematical sequences out there. Fibonacci's just one example. It's possible these numbers are in some kind of sequence, but at twenty-three digit strings, it'd take a while to figure out just what the pattern is."

"So we've got nothing," Lisa sighed.

"Not necessarily," Raymond replied.

"So what would you suggest?" Len demanded.

"Stop thinking like crooks and start thinking like crimefighters," Raymond replied.

"I may barf," Lisa said.

"If what's in the file can't tell you anything at the moment, look at other information. Where did you get it? Why it was there? Why did those people have it? And why was it valuable to them?"

Len frowned, trying to figure out when they had told Ray all of that information.

"Look, obviously this file was valuable to somebody or else it wouldn't have all of you calling me with number puzzles," Raymond observed, apparently having deduced the explanation for the silence and surprised looks. "And clearly you got it from somewhere, because if you three were going to prank me, it would only be you two—" and here he pointed to Mick and Len "—because she doesn't even know me, and numbers aren't your style."

Mick frowned. "I sometimes forget how smart you are under all the idiot."

"I miss you, too, Buddy. Now stop whining. Where'd you get the numbers?"

"Storage auction," Lisa replied tightly.

"Fine, don't tell me. I'll console myself with cookies and ice cream. But you know. Track it backwards from there."

Mick hung up the call.

"Track what backwards?" Lisa sighed.

"The file's origin. Whoever created it knows what it's for. Maybe we can find out and go put the fear of God into them," Len said.

"Where'd you say you stole it from?" Mick asked curiously.

"Some little start-up. Called themselves VelociVar Tech."

Mick started googling. About twenty minutes later, Len joined in on his own computer. An hour after that, a very irritated Lisa pulled a tablet from her purse and set in on some internet searching of her own. The sun passed, the light faded from the room, and still no one in it was any closer to discovering the origins of VelociVar Tech.

It was about midnight before Len finally gave up on actually getting any useful answers online. None of them had made any kind of headway identifying who VelociVar answered to. They were all worn out and grumpy, but they'd proved VelociVar was definitely somebody's shell company.

They all found various places to crash around the apartment, but things were no better when they woke up the next morning.

“I’m really screwed aren’t I?” Lisa sighed as Len made them grilled cheese. It had always calmed her down when they were kids. “The kinds of people with shell companies aren’t the kinds of people who’ll forget me if I skip the country.”

“Probably not,” Len agreed.

Her face fell. “I’m so sorry. I was trying to… keep you out of my trouble.”

Len frowned as he put their sandwiches onto plates. He wanted to say something that would be nice. Something that would remind her that of course he didn’t care. And all that he could get out was, “When have I ever run from trouble?”

She smiled, but it was clear that her heart wasn’t in it.

“Lisa,” he said, and she looked up. Len set down her plate with a sandwich on it in front of her. “I was stuck in a crazy dimension for a year before some speedster hauled me out and gave me ice cream. Helping my baby sis out of a jam is… almost relaxing.”

“I punched you,” she sighed.

“You were upset.”

She looked down. “Dad used to get upset.”

“You’re not Dad.”

“Don’t make excuses for me, Lenny. I was mad, so I hit you.”

He frowned. It was accurate enough, but he didn’t…mind. He could hear Jax in his head saying, “That’s sort of messed up, you know?” Maybe he should be upset. He didn’t want to be upset, though. But he did, for whatever bizarre reason he couldn’t even explain to himself, want to try and live up to all these expectations everyone had for him. To be better. So…

“Just…yell at me, next time, then,” he said.

She looked at him. “You planning on dying again?”

“I didn’t really plan on it the first time,” he said.

Lisa apparently decided to be satisfied with this answer because she started munching on her grilled cheese with a thoughtful expression. “So, what am I gonna do, then?”

“We are going to take the Eagle Scout, Raymond’s, advice—”

“He was a Boy Scout? Figures.”

“—and look at this like crime fighters. As bad a taste as that is.”

“I didn’t think he’d say anything useful,” Mick grumbled from the doorway as he entered. “He’s irritating when he’s right.”

“You could just…not call?” Lisa suggested.

“He’ll fix it so my phone only plays the Barney theme song if I do that,” Mick said. “The asshole blackmailed me into being his friend.”

“He learned something,” Len replied, unable to stop a smile. “So, what do we know?”

“Asshole hired Lisa to steal something so he could set her up,” Mick said.

“And we’ve got a set of numbers that are pretty valuable to somebody, but none of that really covers the main question. Why the hell do all this in the first place?" Len mused. "Hire somebody to steal something so you can frame them, and then don't aim the cops straight at them? It's psychotic."

"Unless the cops are just being…quiet about what they know," Lisa observed.

There was a long moment of uncomfortable silence.

"Something for the to-do list," Len said.

"How exactly do you plan on getting the cops to tell you about their investigation? Walk into the station and ask?" Lisa asked, looking over her grilled cheese in the most irritating way known to man, daring him to have an answer. Len had forgotten how annoying younger siblings could be, but it was rapidly coming back into focus.

"Actually, I was thinking about asking Team Flash. They were perfectly willing to tell us about their investigation into the Big Belly Burger Burglars," Len replied, gratified by her annoyed look that he actually did have a response.

"Now you're saying it perfectly fast," Mick said, rolling his eyes.

"The Snart Snark," Lisa said.

Mick huffed. "You're going to tell me about your trip to STAR Labs, then you're going to tell me about the guy you contacted and where you met him. Were they really telling you about their investigation?"

Len snagged his helmet as he left.

"Yeah, it's not the Kennedy Assasination Cover-Up in there, by a long stretch. We walked in, and they could not be discussing things louder, I swear…" Lisa's voice faded to muffled mumbling when he closed the door, vanishing as he headed down the stairs.

It wasn't hard to think of a pretext for his visit. In fact, he had two that even had the benefit of not being entirely made of lies.

STAR Labs wasn't deserted when he entered, but it wasn't exactly hugely active. In fact, as he made his way to the main lab, he realized there wasn't so much as a door that required a badge anywhere in the building. The whole building was amazingly high-tech and equally amazingly low-security. He was surprised he hadn't noticed before, but he had been pretty distracted every time he visited up to now.

Were they genuinely relying entirely on the the-Flashes-work-here thing as their whole security system?

He sighed. Maybe he and Mick should give them the scare they needed to beef up the security system. Because, two Flashes and a whatever-Bart-was-calling-himself not withstanding, there was no way these guys could keep millions of dollars of technology safe on the honor system alone.

He entered the Cortex to find…no one there at all.

He was tempted to just go poking through the lab computers, but that seemed too obvious. He wasn't sure what file system they had for various cases, for one thing, and for another, the one security feature the lab did have was cameras. If he showed up and went poking around at the computers on camera, suspicious. If he showed up, talked to someone, they poked around on the computers, and then he did too? Much less suspicious. Almost entirely not suspicious at all.

"What is going on?" demanded a voice. Len looked over to see a bleary-eyed, red-headed… boy. There was no way this kid wasn't still in college. As a Freshman, probably.

"You people should really do something about your security," Len commented idly, running his hand along a nearby countertop. "Anyone at all might wander in."

The red- head stared at him. "Leonard Snart? …Wait. Captain Cold?!?" There was a whoosh and then the red-head was standing a few inches front of him in a combat crouch. "What do you want?"

"Relax," Len said. "My days of trying to freeze the speedsters are behind me. I came to talk to one of your bosses."

"I'm a… Tell me what you want!"

Len rolled his eyes. "Do you know who Ray Palmer is?"

"The Atom? Palmer Technologies? Sure. Everyone does."

"Well, I told him I'd ask for two things for him, and here I am. You up to that, Freckles?"

The red-head glared at him. "My name is Wally West."

"Congratulations. Now. My friend is trying to build a time beacon with built- in two- way communication," Len informed West.

The boy stared at him. Then he started to laugh. "It'd be easier to dig a hole in the ocean and swim to the moon. I'll run it by Cisco, but there's no way that could work."

"Raymond wasn't hopeful, but he's trying anyway," Len said with a shrug.

"Raym— You actually know Ray Palmer? He lets you call him Raymond?"

"Nobody ‘lets’ me do anything. And what did you think I meant by 'my friend?'"

"Sarcasm?"

Len blinked, thought that one over, and then said. "Fair. Wrong, but fair. Next item of business. How's Bart Allen?"

It was not an entirely idle question, and he wasn’t just asking it for Raymond’s sake. He’d cornered Mick about Bart’s origins and found out that it was Mick’s fault—aided and abetted by Raymond, of course—that the kid was even alive at all. And one of the first things Bart had done was to rescue him from the Speed Force.

Len was more than willing to admit, he hadn’t exactly been showing to advantage that day. The Speed Force was a terrible place. Len had hated every single square inch of the place. If you could even argue that a place like that had inches. Concrete measurements were a little too…logical to suit a place like that. Initially Len had tried to make sense of his new surroundings, create some kind of a map in his head. He’d been pretty close to crazy when he finally gave up and just accepted that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t make any sense. There was no direction, or up, or down, or anything but wherever the Speed Force wanted him to go. Thankfully, the Speed Force had apparently wanted him not to starve, but on the whole… He preferred prison. At least the rooms didn’t randomly shift around.

So the day Bart had retrieved him, he was confused and angry and defensive. And he wouldn’t have even believed he had left the Speed Force at all except for the fact that he didn’t recognize the tiny speedster who’d been standing in front of him. The Speed Force had never showed him anyone he didn’t know instantly by sight. (He’d seen his father a lot.)

For the first time in over a year, he’d been looking at a new face and he knew it was real and he knew he was out and he was just confused. And Bart had picked up on it, because the kid was damn intuitive, and the next thing he knew, he had a bowl of ice cream in his hands—with sprinkles, of all the ridiculous things—and started babbling his way through an apology about how nobody knew there was anything wrong with the Speed Force and he knew they would’ve all come to rescue him if anyone had known he was stuck and it was really awful he’d been stuck there and was he okay…

Len had stayed quiet, and he’d probably looked pretty unhappy with what Bart was saying but he had mostly felt relief. He hadn’t been left behind. Not on purpose. It was just a mistake. And that sucked, but it wasn’t a lot better than some of the things he’d started to think while he’d been out of the world. So he’d listened to the kid give his little speech and eaten his ice cream and not interrupted.

He couldn’t admit to any of this, of course. He had a reputation to maintain. He’d promised Raymond he’d keep track of the kid because he owed him. But it wasn’t just for Ray. He didn’t want to lose track of the kid that had rescued him. Honestly, he kind of liked Bart.

And, he was a little pissed off at the look that crossed the college boy’s face. Frustrated and a little angry.

“Who even knows how that kid is.”

Len recalled this child’s name. Wally West. That redhead who was supposedly going to mentor Bart. He’d had a feeling this idiot wouldn’t fare well.

“Well, from what I hear, you’re supposed to.” Len folded his arms, glared, and dared West to challenge him.

Instead, West zoomed over to one of the computer terminals and did something to it.

“There. All records involving Bartholomew Henry Allen II. Knock yourself out,” West snapped.

He strode from the room with a dark expression on his face.

Len blinked. Unfettered access was…not what he’d planned on getting, but he’d take it. He sat down and leisurely scrolled through information about Bart, and he was right. The kid’s partnership with not-Barry-Flash was definitely on the rocks. Bart was still struggling with recklessness and West’s responses were harsh. Len didn’t figure they’d be partners for much longer.

He’d need to figure out how, or if, he should do anything about that. Maybe he shouldn’t. He’d told Ray he’d keep an eye on the kid, but any fool could tell he was not the kind of person to be trusted with children.

He turned his attention to active cases. The Big Belly Burger Burglaries were, of course, the most recently active. Apparently the police and STAR Labs teams were pretty frustrated that the thieves hadn’t struck again. They had abandoned the idea that he and Mick had been lucky criminal newbies and hit on the theory that they were actually experienced criminals who’d done it for a laugh. Which was way too close to the truth for comfort, and Len made a mental note to give Mick and Lisa a head’s up on making sure to keep that secret.

Then he found a file on a data theft at a company called VelociVar Tech.

Lisa had good sense. She’d learned from watching Len and Mick, and she knew the best way to get away with a crime was to just not tell anyone about it. Ever. If the cops didn’t get lucky with physical evidence or video cameras, they had to find a witness or somebody who knew something. If nobody knew anything, or if the people who did kept their mouths shut, that was the end of the line and eventually the cops would move on.

There was video surveillance of the break-in, but Lisa had worn a mask that covered her whole face, gloves, the whole nine. She hadn’t brought anything but the thumb drive, and she hadn’t taken anything but the single file.

Apparently, sometimes, you did break in to a candy store and steal only one gumball.

And she’d be in the clear, if not for the fact that the cops had retrieved a hair from the station she’d accessed. A long, honey- blonde, curly hair that clearly did not belong to the office’s usual resident. Luckily they hadn’t been able to retrieve any DNA from it (for reasons Len didn’t entirely follow, but he wasn’t really that concerned with the hows so much as he was the bottom line), but there were only so many female thieves with long, curly, blonde hair in Central City.

It was circumstantial, but it was good. They’d sent someone to Lisa’s apartment already.

Len closed the police files and left the ones about Bart displayed on the workstation. He got up and headed for the door.

Cisco walked in, tired and clutching a cup of coffee and literally walked straight into him.

Cisco, looked up, blinking in confusion. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Might wanna put up a sign or something,” Len replied, stepping to the side and moving towards the door again.

Cisco’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t steal anything, did you?”

“No.” He kept moving.

“You’d say that if you stole something, wouldn’t you?”

“No.” The sarcasm was reflexive, unthinking. He needed to get out of here. Lisa needed to know not to go home.

Cisco glared after him. Then he called out, “I needed to talk to you anyway!”

Len froze mid-step and then turned. After a few breaths of silence, he said, “You have the floor.”

“I know someone who may be able to help you with your number puzzle,” Cisco said. “He’s… Well. You might get along with him better, too.”

“Interesting thing to say.”

“Ever heard of Hartley Rathaway?”

“Why would I have?”

“What about the Pied Piper?”

Len froze. Of course he’d heard of the Pied Piper. Everyone had. Len had been on a break at the time, but even so, he had gotten the news of a new specialty criminal in Central City. Apparently Piper liked to use sound-related weapons, and he had some kind of hate-on for STAR Labs. (What a shock.) Though, for originality’s sake, he didn’t directly target the Flash any more than he did STAR Labs in general.

“What’s a sound guy going to do with this?” Len said, turning to go.

“He’s good with patterns. Patterns and math. He’s a total dick and you’ll want to punch him in the face, but he actually is smart.” Cisco handed him a piece of paper with a phone number scrawled across it.

“He won’t mind you giving me his number?”

“Don’t care. He’s a dick. But you should text him first. He’s deaf.”

Len blinked. Then he shrugged. “Thanks.”

He took the number and left, pulling out his phone as soon as he left the building.

Mick answered on the first ring. “What the hell, Snart? Why didn’t you warn us?”

“I just found out. Please tell me you didn’t go to Lisa’s place,” Len said, mounting his bike and kicking up the stand.

“We started to. Got passed by a car on the way and turned.”

“The owners are going to be pissed,” Lisa said in the background.

Len snorted. He should’ve known Lisa hadn’t actually stooped to paying rent. “You’re both okay?”

“Yeah. And clear of the cop circus. What do they have?”

“Nothing solid, but a good set of circumstantials. Height, weight, build, and some of her hair.”

“Tell me they don’t have DNA,” Lisa said, sounding horrified.

“No, we got lucky there. No DNA. Just a good reason to start hunting for blonde, female thieves in Central City,” he sighed.

“Time to go red, I think,” Lisa muttered.

“Don’t you dare,” Mick said. “Don’t you do anything that makes it seem like you’re worried.”

There was a long pause and finally she said. “All right. So, what do we do?”

Len was quiet for a long time. “Do you think the cops have made our apartment yet?”

“Not yet. They’re too busy staking out this place,” Mick said.

“Okay. We go back to our place, grab whatever we need and…we’ll regroup at that old hideout we had just before we signed on to the Wave Rider. Remember the place?”

“Yeah.”

They didn’t take much. They didn’t own much. Len left a few hundred bucks and a note for the landlord on the not-really-a-coffee-table and the three of them beat a hasty retreat to the warehouse district on the riverfront.

They were fortunate enough that no one had moved into their old digs in their absence. The ratty old couch was there, and if the building was cold, it was no colder than the apartment they’d just abandoned. Len didn’t bother taking off his parka, though.

Mick stared gloomily out of one of the windows, watching boats go by on the river. “So much for going straight.”

“You’d never have made it anyway,” Lisa said in a comforting tone. “We were never cut out to be normal people.”

Mick cast a dark look at Len who couldn’t think of a reply. He didn’t want her to be right. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t.

Len sighed. “We’ll worry about what we were cut out for later.”

Lisa rolled her eyes.

He continued as if his sister was not looking at him like a crazy person. “For now, we need to get the cops to stop focusing on Lisa. Cisco gave me the name of a guy he claims might be able to help us with our weird number issue.”

“Might?” Mick challenged

“How many people are we going to bring in on this? STAR Labs isn’t exactly known for their discretion,” Lisa echoed.

“And now that the cops suspect Lisa for the VelociVar job, sooner or later, they’re gonna connect the dots of us walking in with a weird string of numbers,” Mick echoed. “For a bunch of idiots, they’re not entirely dumb.”

“We did leave all our old phones at the apartment,” Len said with a shrug. “They shouldn’t find us right away.”

“Still, you got that lead about this Rathaway guy from Cisco. As soon as they start putting things together, they’re gonna know who we called,” Mick observed.

“Sounds like we’re on the clock, then,” Len said.

Lisa groaned. “You two are remarkably casual about me going to prison.”

“Iron Heights isn't exactly hard to get out of,” Len said with a shrug.

“Besides, you should've seen when we broke time. There were dinosaurs,” Mick agreed. “We can handle a breakout.”

“One day I’m going to get you two drunk enough to actually tell me what the hell happened on that ship,” Lisa groused.

Len stepped out and made a quick trip to the store to grab them all some burner phones. He activated one of them and sent a quick text to Rathaway identifying himself and asking for a meet. Rathaway texted back almost immediately and suggested Saints and Sinners. Len texted back once more to give Rathaway the head’s up that there were three of them, so he wouldn’t feel ganged- up on.

Saints and Sinners was the worst dive in Central City, familiar with just about every creep and low- life in town and absolutely not the place Len would’ve expected a man with the name of “Hartley Rathaway” to feel comfortable in. This impression was only reinforced when Rathaway himself materialized at their table. He was wearing a collared shirt—with the collar at just the perfect amount of starch—and a sweater-vest. And a leather satchel, good grief. This guy should be in some upscale place with little fruity drinks.

“So what is it that brings Captain Cold to asking for my services?” Rathaway asked.

“Curiosity,” Len replied. Which was as true a response as any. “We have a puzzle we can’t solve.”

“Puzzles are good. What is it?” Rathaway took a seat and waved his request for a beer to a very annoyed-looking waitress. Lisa handed over the thumb drive and Rathaway retrieved a tablet from his bag and plugged the drive in. When the waitress brought his beer over, he gave her a polite thank you.

“Where did you get these?” Rathaway asked.

“I don’t think we’re that friendly yet,” Lisa said.

“No, we wouldn’t be with you running around with these. And you don’t know what they are? Really? They’re not exactly hard to read,” Rathaway said.

“Wait, you do?” Lisa demanded. “Just like that? Cisco said you were good with patterns, but that was faster than we expected.”

“Patterns? Oh, well, I suppose that helps, but this is just a case of recognizing the structure. These are credit cards.”

“Card numbers are only sixteen digits long,” Len replied, disappointed. And after Cisco had given him such a good build- up, too.

“Card numbers, sure, this is the whole card. Sixteen for the number, four for expiration date, three for CVC. Except for AmEx, which is fifteen for number, four expiration, four CVC, so the digits even out. These are definitely cards.”

Len blinked.

“How did you tell so fast?” Lisa asked.

“Easy. American Express cards always start with the number three, four for Visa, five for Mastercard, and six-zero-one-one for Discover. It’s the Discovers that really give it away. Six-zero-one-one every time.” He showed them the screen and, sure enough, the mysterious digits followed exactly the pattern he described.

“How can we be sure?” Mick challenged.

“Well, we can always just buy something from Amazon,” Rathaway shrugged. He started to open up his web browser.

“What are you doing?” Lisa snarled.

“Don’t you dare!” Len said

“Stop.” Mick was quiet, but firm.

Rathaway looked up with a frown. “So they are hot, then. Why on earth did you swipe so few?”

“Few?” Lisa looked offended. “Do you know how hard it was to get those?”

“So you went through all that work and effort and only stole ten thousand or so cards? You can get a good million with almost the same effort, if you do the right hacking. And you didn’t even know what you had? You got a bunch of hot cards that you didn’t know were cards and you just sat on them? Either your reputation was very exaggerated, or you have a hell of a story to tell me,” Rathaway said. He laid his tablet down and sat slightly back, ceding them the floor.

“I still don’t know that we’re that friendly,” Lisa said.

Rathaway shook his head. “I've been seen in public with you now. Nobody here is a friend to any of us. We're gonna need to be at least a little friendly." At the blank looks he received, he sighed. "I tell you what, you guys tell me the story, and I’ll waive my consultation fee.”

They exchanged a glance and finally Lisa told him the story. The more of the story Rathaway heard, the deeper his frown got. "You did the VelociVar job? Holy smokes, everyone’s talking about you. They got you on tape and you still just got away with it. And now you really are in serious trouble, aren't you? I could strangle Cisco."

"I may help," Len agreed. "What a mess."

"Don't tell me you boys are trying to think of a way out of this without hurting anybody," Lisa said with a frown.

"Whoever set you up will be looking for you to unload them," Mick told her. "The cops would be on top of us before we got even one buyer." Conveniently skirting that yes, they absolutely were trying to get out of this without hurting anybody if at all possible. Except possibly the asshole that set her up in the first place. Len wouldn't mind shooting him.

"The FBI," Rathaway correct absently.

"What?" Lisa demanded.

"The official report is that VelociVar’s data was stolen, but they don’t know what it contained exactly. But, the company reported potential data owners in multiple states, so the theft crosses enough jurisdictional lines to make it federal. The cops called the local field office on you a couple days ago," he explained.

There was silence for a moment, then Lisa said, “Can you check something for me?” She handed Rathaway a piece of paper. “That’s the last four digits and expiration date of one card. It was compromised before all this but…I have a feeling.”

Rathaway took the note and searched something on his tablet. “Yeah, it’s here. Why?”

Lisa looked down. “I know her. She’s a friend of mine. She had her identity stolen a little while ago.”

Mick whistled. “That’s low. I can’t wait to punch this guy.”

Len shook his head. Planting card information from someone Lisa personally knew was a nice touch. It would give the cops just a little extra reason to think Lisa was just opportunistic. The police loved it when they had a nice juicy personal betrayal to hang on their suspect.

“Are you kidding me? You lifted from somebody you know?” Rathaway said, drawing dark looks from Len and Mick.

“I didn’t!” Lisa hissed. “I was doing it to help her! I was gonna split the take with her. She’s not… Well, anyway, I wasn’t going to tell her where I got it, but I wouldn’t… She’s a friend. I didn’t know her card was on the list.”

Rathaway got an odd look on his face, but finally he said, “So you’re dumber than you seem.”

"No call to be rude,” Len interrupted. Cisco was right. Hartley Rathaway was a dick.

"I'm sorry, you come to me, dump a bunch of hot cards in my lap and get me seen in public with you? I feel pretty good about the rudeness." Rathaway glared at them. "I really genuinely am going to strangle Cisco."

Len reached over and retrieved the flash drive from Rathaway's hands. "All right. Let's dial back the violence. You don't want to go to prison for anything other than being an accessory, do you?"

"I don't want to go to prison for anything at all," Rathaway shot back. "Iron Heights isn't exactly my favorite place in the world."

"Not with a stylish and well-fitted sweater-vest like that. Wouldn't want to ruin your manicure," Mick said.

Rathaway glared.

Len felt his lips twitch. "Unfortunately, Mick, our violent associate has a point. We're stuck with each other for now. We may as well make the best of it," Len broke in.

"Okay, fine, whatever. We're on the same team, but so what? What do we do? Track down who actually owns VelociVar?" Lisa said.

Rathaway frowned. "What do you mean who actually owns?"

Lisa gave an elegant shrug. "We tried hunting it up for ages the other night. VelociVar Tech is somebody's shell company."

"Don't bother trying to track them that way, then. Shell companies are a rabbit hole it can take years to trace to an actual source, and we don't have that kind of time," Rathaway said.

"Hence my question: what do we do? If there’s not a plan of action, I’ll come up with one of my own," Lisa groused.

Len didn't let it show how his heart turned icy cold at the thought of Lisa going off on her own. "Our best bet is still tracking down where all this crap got started. Somebody put together all that information they handed you. They expected some kind of result for it, and I'm curious what that result was supposed to be," Len said.

"Might be nice to get an update on how the cops are doing," Mick mused idly.

"That one's easy," Rathaway shrugged. "Just hack into their system and read somebody's notes. Assuming you aren't stuck with one of the old- schoolers who takes…you know…actual notes." He said the last words in the same tone that someone might use when referring to a pile of dead, half- decayed slugs.

"We aren't hackers," Len told him. “And I have no problems breaking into a police station, but we’re trying to make things less complicated, not more.”

"Lucky for you, we're stuck with each other for now," Rathaway replied, putting heavy disdain on his quote of Len's words earlier, "and I am a hacker. It'll take me a little time, but I'll get a line on where the cops are at."

"I want to go have a look at the VelociVar building," Len said. "Maybe get some pictures of who works in it."

“VelociVar is a shell company but has a building?” Rathaway asked. “Why?”

“We’ll add that to the list of unanswered questions,” Len replied.

Lisa rattled off an address at the corner of Rossville and 17th. Len nodded before heading out to mount up on his bike and scope out the source of their current troubles.

Across the street from the VelociVar Tech building was a Mexican place. Len took a seat by the window and started ordering chimichangas every now and then to justify him staying parked at a table for so long.

He was several hours into his vigil when a red blur with yellow lightning breezed in. The zooming noise seemed to hesitate for a second and then the Flash—this one obviously the Barry Allen version—was seated opposite him at his window table.

"Flash," Len said, drawing out the word. “I love our little chats, but if you’re going to sit down you should order something.”

"Snart," Barry greeted. "I've got a bone to pick with you."

"Not happy to see me, Flash? And we were getting along so well," Len sighed.

"Were we? I'm starting to wonder," Barry said.

Len turned to look at him. "Now what could you mean by that?"

He only vaguely remembered squaring off with Barry in the Speed Force. Shouting things about how he'd changed because of Barry's stupid idealism and trying to shoot him out of pure frustration. He'd been in the Speed Force for a while by then, and things had stopped making a whole lot of sense.

It hadn't seemed like much later when Bart Allen had dragged him out of the Speed Force without any kind of explanation. According to people who had had access to things like calendars, it had been the better part of a year, but the Speed Force was a weird place and it had felt like five minutes. Maybe it was both.

So, after some more shouting, with less attempted murder, he felt like he'd finally gotten it all out. No more crime. No more looking over his shoulder, running from the police, cat- and- mouse with the Flash. Time to live like a person.

And that was all Barry knew about. He didn’t know that Len had forgotten to account for his sister in his calculations. There was no reason for him to be antagonistic.

"Len, your sister is on the hook for a data theft and you wander in to STAR Labs with some weird numbers you don't want to discuss the origin of? Do you know how much trouble you're in?" Barry demanded.

Okay, fine. Only a little reason to be antagonistic. He was doing that weird thing with his voice to disguise it and he had left his mask on, but the earnest pleading in his voice was just the way Len had known it would be.

"Listen, Flash, whatever you think my sister did, she didn’t do. She’s a good person."

That…had come out wrong. He had meant to say something less…loving. Maybe more threatening. Lisa was right. The Wave Rider crew had done something to him and Mick. They just weren't like their pre- Legend's selves.

Barry ducked his head with a groan. "Snart. What are you getting yourself into?"

"Nothing you need to worry about, Flash," Len replied. "You wanted me to be a better man, I'm trying to do that. My sister needs help. I'm supposed to just let her twist?"

"You're not supposed to help her with crime," Barry hissed.

"I'm not helping her with crime," Len lied. He was not going to bring up the Big Belly Burger Burglaries. They didn't count.

Mostly.

Fuck.

"Only amateurs actually talk like that, anyway," Len added. Mostly to cover his difficulty with this conversation, but a little because was really annoyed with Barry's phrasing.

"I'm not a criminal. Amateur or otherwise," Barry replied.

"If you insist, Sam."

Barry glared.

"What do you want from me, Flash? I got a job, I got an apartment. They both suck, but I'm trying."

"You were trying," Barry replied. "You haven't been to work in three days and you cleared out of your apartment with a note and some cash for your landlord. You, your sister, and Rory are all in the wind. Do you know how hard it was to track you down here?"

Len gave his answer in his coldest, most sarcastic tone. "Considering I'm directly across the street from the site of heist you think my sister pulled, not very hard, I'm guessing." He turned to look Barry full in his mask. "But I'll bet you went building to building looking, just to be thorough.

Barry glared. The mulish set of his jaw told Len he was bang on the money with his building-by-building accusation. Even as fast as Barry could go, there's no way that hadn't taken a while. "The point, Snart," Barry said, sounding very frustrated indeed, "is that the way you're acting isn't inspiring confidence in anybody. And we can't get Ray on the phone."

"You calling the Eagle Scout for character references now? Don't trust your own judgment anymore?" And he would never admit this out loud, but dammit that one made him angry. There were a few ways two people could get to know each other very well very quickly, and one person trying to kill the other was one of them. He and Barry had been enemies long enough to have a good measure of each other by now. That shouldn't just disappear in a puff of smoke because Len had called it quits on the attempted murder.

Apparently Barry thought it should.

"He worked with you for a year. Couldn't say enough good things about you after you died. He's your friend, Len. He knows you better than I do," Barry replied.

Len looked out the window to the VelociVar building. "Apparently, he does."

Much to Len's satisfaction, Barry actually flinched a little. He sighed and looked down. "Look, I want to believe good things here. But you're not making it easy for me. Throw me a bone, Snart. Give me something."

Len scowled. There had to be some way he could convince Barry to give them some wiggle room. Just enough that they could get clear of whatever STAR Labs investigation was going on for a few days. Finally he said, "Mick and I are looking into the VelociVar job. We have connections you don't. Lisa's on the hook for something that isn't hers. But if word gets around that we're playing at crimefighter… Let's just say some of my old friends aren't as friendly as you."

To Len's absolute shock, the words that had just come out of his mouth were all actually truthful. Lisa wasn't really the mastermind behind the VelociVar theft, that was whoever had set her up. Hell, her motives were almost good, given that she was trying to help a friend. (He could hear a voice in his head that sounded like Raymond start to disagree and he quickly cut that thought off.) And he and Mick really were looking into the theft.

Sometimes his ability to lie easily surprised even him.

Barry looked satisfied, though. "All right. Well. Just…remember which side of the law to stay on." And he was gone in a whoosh of wind and a flash of lighting.

Len looked back across the street with a frown. If he focused on VelociVar, he wouldn't have to think about how much it bothered him that the Flash wasn't trusting him at the moment. Or that he didn't really like Hartley Rathaway but had a terrible suspicion they could actually trust him which meant putting up with him longer. He definitely didn’t want to think about how he had absolutely not had a habit of hearing the voices of absent friends in his mind before the Speed Force.

Double fuck.

Five o' clock rolled around and, right on schedule, employees started exiting the building across the street and Len began snapping pictures on that one burner he'd splurged on to get a half-decent camera. Pre-paid smartphones. Who knew?

After a few moments, they'd all left. Len gathered his things, tipped his bewildered server and left.

He arrived back at their hide-out to find that Rathaway had moved in with them, which was more than a little shocking, and not just because Len didn't like the guy. Someone with sweater vests and correctly starched collars should not be living in a warehouse in the industrial district. It just wasn't done.

More shocking was when he found out that not only was this development Mick's idea, but Mick had a very convincing defense for his choice. Since they were all working together, and since they weren’t friendly, this way everyone could keep an eye on each other and communicate quickly.

Len sometimes forgot that Mick was smarter than he acted.

“So, I got some pictures of the VelociVar minions,” Len said to Lisa. He opened his laptop and plugged the phone into it. “Come over here and tell me if you recognize anyone.”

He and Lisa spent the next several minutes poking through the photos he’d taken before she finally said, “There! That guy! That’s the guy who gave me the job.”

Everyone came over to see the man Lisa had pointed out.

He was a red-head, and pretty good-looking in Len’s opinion. But he had a sneering expression on his face, and Len could just tell by looking that the man was an absolute dick. Moreso than Rathaway, most likely.

“Wow. He really looks like someone it would be fun to punch,” Mick observed, peering over their shoulders.

“So, name?” Lisa said. “Can you do a facial recognition thing or something?” She looked to Rathaway.

“No. I do not have any computer programs worth thousands of dollars just hanging out on my machine,” Rathaway replied from where he was doing something on his computer and pretending like he wasn’t eyeing Len’s with utter jealousy. He frowned thoughtfully. “We may have another option to try, though.” He pulled something up on his computer and began some kind of internet search that Len was a little terrified might be much more illegal than the string of armed robberies he and Mick had committed the other night.

Finally, Rathaway sat back with a frown. “Okay. I can access the driver’s license database that the state has on file.”

“You can? They don’t, like, make that hard to get to or anything?” Mick asked in surprise.

“Government cyber-security is nearly always a joke for anything that doesn’t involve money,” Rathaway replied. “Sometimes for things that do.”

“That’s a little terrifying,” Lisa observed.

“Well, it helps us, though. Hopefully your guy is registered in the state because searching all licenses in the country would take a lot longer, but I can write a program to search for licenses that match the information we know about this guy and we can pick him off his picture from there,” Rathaway said.

“Huh. You’re not as useless as you look,” Mick observed.

“Better than looking less useless than you are,” Rathaway fired back.

Mick huffed. “Quoting a Bond flick is not a comeback. Make with the typing.”

Rathaway smirked, but did actually start working on creating a search program.

It didn’t take Rathaway long to actually write the program. It looked like he was doing the same thing with minor variations multiple times, but Len’s experience with computer programming was non-existent. Once he was done with that, he set the computer to do something he called “compiling” and the four of them played poker for a while.

Len had to admit, Cisco had billed Rathaway correctly. The kid was just about the rudest person he’d ever met. But he wasn’t an idiot, had pinned down what their numbers were in under a minute, and was making a whole computer program just so that they could identify the asshole who’d set Lisa up. And he wasn’t an entirely terrible partner for poker. Won enough to make things interesting, but wasn’t nasty about losing.

It was late when Rathaway’s computer dinged. Loudly. Everyone jumped.

“Sorry,” he said with a sheepish look—the first normal expression Len had seen him wear. “I’d forgotten how loud that sound is. Anyway, the program is ready. Let’s see if we can find our jerk.”

Rathaway seated himself in front of his computer. “So, he’s male, obviously. How old is he, more or less?”

“Mid-thirties, at least. Definitely not north of fifty, though,” Lisa replied.

“Right. So most of the male criminal population of North America,” Rathaway said repressingly. Then he shook his head. “My fault. I started with age. Race?”

“White.”

“Hair color?”

“Red.”

“Now that’s gonna narrow it down,” Rathaway told her with a grin. “And that’s most of the big stuff people would definitely catch. I don’t suppose you caught his eye color?”

“Brown.”

“And that’ll definitely narrow it down,” Rathaway said. “Let’s see what that gives us.”

He entered the information into the relevant boxes and hit the search button.

The screen went blank.

“Did it break?” Lisa asked.

“Loading screens don’t really do anything,” Mick said. “They’re just pictures to make people feel like the computer is really working.”

Lisa stared at Mick. “How do you know that?”

“I…uh…had some people teach me some of the basics about computers,” Mick answered.

The Time Masters. Chronos. Len sighed.

“Some people?” Lisa pressed.

“Lisa,” Len said quietly.

She looked over.

“Conversation for a different time,” Len told her.

“A time with more alcohol,” Mick agreed.

Len frowned. He hadn’t noticed it until just then, but Mick was drinking a lot less than he had been. He hadn’t quit, of course, because he was probably hoping to die of liver poisoning before anything else got him, but even so. A lot less.

Well, that was probably good. Sober Mick was less violent than drunk Mick. Still, it was an unexpected development.

A picture appeared on Rathaway’s computer screen with some license information under it. A few moments later, another picture appeared beneath it. Then the next.

“The results will just keep adding on as the search identifies them. We can print the list or whatever afterwards,” Rathaway explained.

Once the search completed, they did not print the results. Rathaway copied them into a Word document and sent them to everybody’s email addresses. Len leisurely scrolled through the results until Lisa finally said, “There he is!”

“What’s his name?” Rathaway asked.

“Warren Lawford. Ulch. What kind of name is that?” Lisa said.

“A rich asshole one,” Rathaway sighed. “I already know this story.”

“Oh? Are you a rich asshole?” Mick asked.

“I was.”

That got everyone’s attentions.

“More technically, my parents are.”

“Wait. Rathaway. Didn’t we steal that ugly oil canvas off some Rathaways once?” Mick suddenly said.

“That was them,” Rathaway shrugged.

“And you didn’t shoot us all right off the top because you’re a very forgiving person?” Lisa said, sounding deeply skeptical.

“No, it’s because I hate them.” He sighed. “Fine. I’ll cut the story short. When I came out, they kicked me out. I was sixteen. So I joined STAR Labs and we all know how that went. They came around on me having the gay eventually, and things were good for a bit, but they couldn’t forgive me for still being friends with the people who took me in after they ditched me, since that family wasn’t upper class.”

Len nodded.

“They religious or something?” Mick asked.

Rathaway laughed. “Not a bit. My dad just has very specific ideas about how men are supposed to act. The family that took me in actually is religious, but when their son came out they made sure he knew he was their son and they loved him and that was never going to change. They found out I was homeless, they took me in, and that was that. It’s kind of a weird space to be in.”

“They sound like complicated folks,” Mick said. “You really don’t have any hard feelings about us robbing your mom and dad?”

“Nope. What did happen to the painting, though?” Rathaway asked.

Mick looked away. “I… uh… I set it on fire.”

Rathaway actually started laughing at that. “Oh, that’s perfect. Anyway, Warren Lawford. So, yeah, I grew up a spoiled rich kid, but Lawford… Damn, that boy was like the Spoiled Rich Kid. He’s a few years older than me, so we didn’t hang out, and he had…” Rathaway trailed off, looking thoughtful. Finally he said, “Okay, so you have to understand, when you’re that rich, nothing else matters but staying that rich. Someone is out to get you, period. And Lawford’s parents learned that the hard way because they both died when he was only twelve.”

Len’s brows drew together. “You think he killed them?” he asked.

“Their deaths are officially accidental. But I wouldn’t rule out murder. Because he inherited Lawford Oil, and that company was enormous,” Rathaway said.

Mick frowned. “He doesn’t sound very friendly.”

“It got worse. He used to pal around with these two other guys named Armand Lydecker and Gunther Hardwicke, and those two were also rich orphans who inherited giant, active fortunes from their parents. They were all three friends before their parents died, and all three boys became orphans over the course of a few months,” Rathaway told them.

“Don’t tell me, I’ve heard this story before,” Lisa said. “Mysterious accidents. Nothing ever proved. And these kids were so distraught and grieving that they were obviously not involved.”

“Exactly. Three little orphan rich boys who suddenly found themselves with too much money and not enough world to buy with it. But they gave it the ol’ college try. Did every extreme sport that was legal, several that weren’t, whole nine. And all of this under the shadow of knowing they were that rich and somebody or other was gunning for them. These guys went from bad news to worse news and didn’t bother to try and hide it. Maybe they were so extreme because they were all Gotham kids, but anyway, that’s where they ended up for college: Gotham State University.”

“So…not football fans, then?” Mick laughed.

“They’ve got a decent hockey team,” Len observed mildly.

“Well, whatever sports they suck at or not,” Rathaway broke in with a long-suffering tone, prompting a smile from Lisa, “Lawford starts dating a chick named Rebecca Fallbrook. Or maybe they were all dating her, but it was more Lawford than the other two. Right around this same time, this weird rash of burglaries starts up. Three guys wearing animal heads start knocking over rich people. And they’re mean about it. Way more violent than they needed to be. Had code names and everything. Fox, Vulture, and Shark. Called themselves the Terrible Trio.”

“It was the three poor little rich boys, skip the big build-up,” Mick growled.

“Well, they beat up Rebecca’s dad and then lured her out to a resort cabin where they tried to murder her, but yeah, that’s the short version,” Rathaway told them.

“So, not very polite dates, then,” Len said, mostly keeping the shock out of his voice. He didn’t know why he was so surprised. Not too long ago, he’d have been just as ruthless. But, now, having had people who genuinely trusted him, hearing this seemed so much worse.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad. Batman and Robin personally beat them up for it and saved Rebecca’s life. Fallbrook—her dad—recuperated in the hospital and then went right back to his exciting career as a real estate tycoon, and those three went to prison,” Rathaway finished.

“How’d they not end up as lifers?” Mick asked.

“Let’s see what the Google-machine says,” Rathaway said. He turned to his computer and punched some things into his web browser. “Looks like…they had enough money to hire some Johnny Cochran knock-off who managed to get the attempted murder pulled down to aggravated assault by turning it into some kind of he-said, she-said thing.”

“And now they’re out,” Lisa sighed.

“Yep. The companies…all took massive nosedives when the owners got convicted of felonies,” Rathaway continued.

“What a shock,” Mick grumbled.

“Stock down, people jump ship, blah, blah, blah. Legal fees ate up a bunch of the rest of it. Probably, once these guys paid their debt to society, they had gone from super rich to comfortably middle-classed,” Rathaway said. “I mean, there’s some guesswork in there…”

“It’s crime, Rathaway, not high school. We aren’t going to check your work,” Len told him with a roll of his eyes.

“Right, well, they’ve been out of the news since then, so…ooh, and we lucked out. They got jobs at…oh, that explains a lot. They got jobs at Cybertron,” Rathaway finished.

“The company that built the evil computer?” Lisa demanded.

“Didn’t they…stop existing or something?” Mick asked.

Rathaway looked at him in shock. “You follow tech news?”

“No, but I have an idiot friend who does. Talked about the evil computer thing once,” Mick sighed. “He was a little drunk, because he actually thought I’d be interested.”

Rathaway shrugged. “Well, you’re right but also wrong. Cybertron was mostly dismantled, but it was a tech company and it had warranties on products it had to honor, service contracts, all that kind of jazz. The owner shuffled what he could off to other companies, of course, but some things had to stay under the Cybertron label. Had to. By law.”

“Who cares about that?” Mick asked.

“Apparently Karl Rossum,” Rathaway said. “So, anyway, some guy named Adair Edge got hired on to run what was left of things, and he’s now listed as the CEO of Cybertron, which is building back up as a tech company with a…not-so-friendly reputation.”

“Okay, so that explains why they’d hire Lawford. But why would they want me to steal card information from their servers?” Lisa asked.

Rathaway frowned. “Unclear from what’s publicly available on the internet. We’ll need to ask.”

“You mean go to Cybertron and poke around,” Len translated.

“I thought you were above all that these days,” Lisa said, very poorly disguising her disdain.

“For a good cause, I could be persuaded,” Len told her.

Despite never having worked with them before, and despite clearly being a complete ass, Rathaway was pretty easy to fold into their team as they planned their invasion of Cybertron, easily contributing ideas and expertise.

The next morning, Mick, Lisa, and Len went to Linc’s Janitorial Business—contracted to do the cleaning work for Cybertron’s Central City offices—and paid the owner two thousand dollars to take the day off. He didn’t take too much convincing, since it was a cloudy, overcast day where no one really wanted to get out of bed anyway. Twenty minutes minutes later, they pulled up to the Cybertron building and strolled in through the front door with their borrowed credentials like they had always been doing the cleaning there.

They all pretended not to notice the Geek Squad Bug in one of the parking spaces.

The building was not one of those super high-end offices that you see on TV shows. With the super high ceilings and banks of glass-paned elevators rising into infinity, marble floors, bronze nameplates everywhere. This was a much more down-to-earth office building, all muted colors and soft lighting. There was even a ficus tree by the reception desk to liven the place up.

Len noted Rathaway being escorted out of a door marked “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” but didn’t spend a lot of time looking at him. It was obviously not the kid’s first con. He wasn’t even nervous. The rest of them wandered purposefully towards the back of the first floor, and began dusting off surfaces in the first room they found a building directory.

Rathaway’s voice came on the tiny little earpieces he’d handed out the night before. “Cameras are handled. We’ve got twenty minutes until the surprise meeting I scheduled lets out and Lawford is back in his office.”

Lisa casually got out her spray bottle and rag and spent a good few minutes cleaning the glass over the directory.

After they finished up in the first room, they meandered into an elevator that Rathaway just happened to enter at the same time, and immediately started pulling business casual clothes out of the bottom of the cleaning cart. Lisa hit the button for the sixth floor, the highest in the building.

“Of course a pretentious jerk like that would have an office that high,” Mick sighed, buttoning a collared shirt up over his tee shirt.

“I told you, Lawford was the arrogant rich guy. Batman personally beat him up for it,” Rathaway said, looking much more comfortable than Mick in the blazer he seemed to have shrugged on from thin air, as he unclipped the skinny black tie he was wearing and clipped a red one in its place that was much harder to spot as a clip-on.

“Let’s pretend, just for today,” Lisa said, deadly sweetness in her voice, “that Batman doesn’t exist.” She shook her hair out and snapped an ornate barrette into her curls.

Rathaway gave her a very amused look, but what he said was, “It’s a heck of a come-down, though. Lawford Oil had an eighty-seven story high-rise in Gotham, and he was the owner of all of it.”

“Well, at least that’s something,” Mick said with a smile.

The rest of the ride was a remarkably companionable quiet, and Len couldn’t help but feel pleased at how well things were going so far.

The upper levels of the building were obviously home to some pretty slimy people. As far as Len could tell, only the men were actually working for the company. All the women looked like secretaries or interns. He was really starting to like that they were going to get at least one member of this company in some serious legal trouble.

“Lawford’s office is on the far end. Our badges won’t get us in,” Lisa said quietly as they headed that way.

“Got it covered,” Mick replied.

When they arrived at the office, Mick pulled a handheld blowtorch from out of one of his pockets and used it to sever the bolt on the door, looking unbelievably casual as he did it.

And then they were inside.

It was a big office. Lots of space and light. Huge windows on the wall revealed the very gloomy day they were having.

Lawford’s desk was empty and his computer was helpfully unguarded. Rathaway crossed to it and tapped a button on the keyboard to reveal a login screen.

“Great, now we have to guess the asshole’s password,” Rory sighed.

“Probably not, actually,” Rathaway said. He tugged open a drawer and pulled out a notepad. On the top of a torn sheet of paper was a scribbled “DeadlyRedFox1!” in a messy scrawl. Rathaway typed it in as the password and the desktop obligingly appeared.

Len felt his lips twitch. “No more security than a Cricket store.”

Mick grinned.

Rathaway frowned. “Wait a minute. Didn’t the Big Belly Burger Burglars use a boosted phone from a Cricket store?”

“You know,” Len said, playing up contemplative and thoughtful to the hilt, “I think they may have.”

Rathaway shook his head. “Okay, it’s obvious that Lawford is pining for his supervillain days, and also that he was never a master criminal. But I still don’t think he’s gonna have a folder labeled ‘My Evil Plot’ laying around on his hard drive.”

“Actually…” Lisa pulled out her phone and started hunting through something on it and finally said, “This is the file path where I had to go looking for what this guy had me steal.” She laid the phone down where Rathaway could see it. Rathaway started searching through file folders.

While Rathaway poked around on the computers, Mick and Len started poking around the rest of the office. Mick was going through the drawers of the desk while Len started hunting through several folders on a nearby bookshelf. It was nearly all boring company-policies-and-procedures stuff, but there was a chance he might find something juicy.

“There’s a lot of other junk in here,” Rathaway mused, having apparently found the file. “Let’s see…”

“What happened?” Lisa asked after a moment.

“These files apparently need to be opened in a specific way to read correctly,” Rathaway explained.

“Open it as a text,” Mick growled, digging through the bottom drawer of the desk. Len turned to look at him, noticing his sister mirroring him in movement and expression.

Rathaway didn’t realize there was anything unusual and did as he was bid.

“Looks like…it’s another mess of cards,” Rathaway said, “but more of them. Using a different format. I bet these are primed to be used electronically somehow.”

“How are they getting all these card numbers?” Lisa asked curiously.

“What does this company even do?” Mick agreed.

“A lot of stuff,” Rathaway said. “They make and sell electronics, they host websites, they do tech support for other companies…”

“What kind of websites?” Len asked suddenly, looking up from a stunningly boring HR booklet.

“All kinds. Businesses, personal ones, I think Wikipedia might spend some time on Cybertron servers. Parts of it, anyway,” Rathaway shrugged. “Lots of different things.”

“And if any of those websites ever collect money, then they could get the card information that was used?” Len pressed.

Lisa’s eyebrows flew upwards. “You think they’re using the whole tech company to skim cards?”

“It would give you a bigger pool than an ATM,” Len pointed out.

“Oh, we’re gonna send their entire board of directors to jail,” Rathaway laughed.

“I wonder what the deal is with the VelociVar business?” Lisa mused.

“I think I know,” Mick said, standing up with a three-ring binder in his hand. He put it on the desk and said, “These are directions to move data collection off-site, and distance it from the company as much as possible. Lawford and his two Gotham friends were the ones running that show. Looks like the entire company administration knew about this and hired these three to oversee it on purpose.”

“Why have me steal anything, though?” Lisa asked with a frown. “I mean, they’d be getting away with this if they’d never hired me.”

Mick started hunting through some of the papers in the folder, and Len and Lisa joined him on one side of the desk while Rathaway started reading through Lawford’s emails.

“Okay, so a few months back, they were wanting to get some kind of federal grant for cybersecurity, but they’ve never had any kind of breech, so they were denied on account of not needing it,” Rathaway announced after a moment.

“And there’s a lot of notes here about working with an ‘outside contractor’ to ‘highlight the need’ for getting a security grant,” Lisa said.

“They hire you to steal the data, get the cops to arrest you, and they get a US government payout,” Len said.

“And I thought we played dirty,” Mick agreed.

Rathaway’s brows went up. “Damn. We really are gonna send the whole board of directors to jail.”

“Before we do though, how’s this guy’s stock portfolio?” Len asked.

Rathaway frowned curiously. “What?”

“I think we can do a little better than just throwing the cops at them.”

Rathaway spent a few moments poking around on the computer before finally announcing, “Okay, found it. Looks like…a pretty healthy portfolio. The guy’s a total douche, but he’s good with money.”

“How much money would he make if he shorted Cybertron stock just before the entire board of directors goes to jail?” Len asked.

There was a very deep pause before Rathaway said, “Lots.”

“Dump every stock he owns and short Cybertron for as much as you can. Have the funds sent to this bank account,” Len said, handing Rathaway a scribbled note.

Rathaway’s eyes lit up. “Insider trading. Nice touch.” He started on the transfers.

“And this helps us how?” Mick demanded. “How are we gonna flag the cops on this so that we don’t get pinched ourselves?”

Lisa scowled and then suddenly started smiling. “How do you three feel about pizza for lunch?” She held up the thumb drive.

Rathaway ordered them two large pizzas for delivery to the lobby using one of the cards Lisa had stolen and then wiped the thumb drive clean of any fingerprints and tucked it into a drawer of the desk, behind a box of paperclips. Findable, but out of easy sight.

Looking hidden.

The four of them beat a hasty retreat to the lobby, Rathaway transforming back into a very harried IT contractor who was apologizing profusely to an angry Mick as the exited the elevator. Lisa stepped in to “save” him and gave him an escort into that “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL” room to retrieve Rathaway’s equipment that had modified the building’s security. Len met the delivery kid with their pizzas at the door and handed him a fifty saying that was the actual payment for the pizzas, since the card payment would probably be questioned. He made his way to the far end of the courtyard at the entrance to the building to watch the fireworks.

Lisa and Mick joined him a few moments later. Rathaway appeared, back in his sweater-vest about a minute after that.

The fireworks did not disappoint. No fewer than eight police cars, and two unmarked black SUVs with blue and red lights—that may as well have had FBI stamped on the doors, for all the subtlety of the lights—all pulled up at the building’s entrances and a lot of uniforms and suits piled out and made their way into the building.

“How long until they come ask us what we’re doing here, you think?” Lisa asked.

“I give it twenty minutes,” Rathaway said.

“I’ll take that bet. The Flash’ll show up and we’ll have someone out here in five,” Mick replied. He slapped a ten dollar bill down on the table. Rathaway matched it with one of his own.

People in smart suits started coming out of the building, each escorted by a police officer or FBI agent.

“There he is,” Lisa suddenly said.

Len looked up and they finally laid eyes on the man who’d nearly sent his sister to prison. He looked much like he had on his driver’s license photo. His hair was deeply red and he had an oddly superior expression on his face, given that he was being manhandled into a police vehicle. He was flanked by two other men, one blond and one dark haired. His old Gotham friends, apparently.

Lawford caught sight of them watching him and started speaking animatedly to the officer pressing him into a police car. The officer looked over to see the four of them, and they all smiled cheerfully back. Lisa gave the police a friendly wave.

Len had to give the cop credit, he didn't flip out. Instead, he rolled his eyes and made a motion to another officer, and suddenly a whole bunch of other people started acting a lot busier.

It was eight minutes after they had started munching on their pizzas before two red blurs raced out of the building and over to their table.

Rathaway groaned and Mick collected the money.

“You ordered the pizzas?” one of the Flashes—Wally, if Len was judging around the weird voice trick correctly—asked in shock.

“And you’re eating them here?” That one was definitely Barry.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Lisa told them. Most likely out of a sheer, bloody-minded desire to be contrary, thunder rumbled in the distance from the half-dark, overcast sky.

“Besides, it looks like something interesting is happening,” Mick agreed, before taking another bite of pizza.

The Barry-Flash sat down at their table and snagged a piece of pizza. “Talk to me. Tell me what is going on.”

"I'd like to hear the story on that one myself," announced a new voice. Len looked up to see Detective Joe West joining them.

He turned to Barry. “I told you. My sister was on the hook for something that wasn’t hers. We looked into it,” Len replied.

“Why didn’t you just tell us?” Barry asked. “Why come to us with cryptic number puzzles and ‘you don’t want to be caught associating with us’ ominous conversations?”

“With our records? I barely believe us, and I was the one being framed,” Lisa said.

“So you made us believe you were falling back into your old habits instead?” Joe said. "Besides which, buying a pizza with a stolen card just so we'd have probable cause to search the computers is not exactly legal, Snart."

"We had to get your attention somehow. Some way you'd believe it," Lisa said.

“And I gave the delivery kid some cash to cover the pizzas,” Len said, fishing the receipt out of his pocket. “His name’s on here.”

“Would you have believed us if we’d come to you with any of this?” Mick asked.

Wally and Barry exchanged a glance. Finally Wally shook his head. “Probably not.”

Joe blinked. "You really did think this out, didn't you?"

Mick spread his hands wide. "Got tired of always running away so much."

Joe rolled his eyes. "Don't leave town. I have to go interview a pizza delivery teenager because of you. If you so much as jaywalk, I will arrest you just to get even."

“We’ll grow on you,” Len said. “Next time, working together will be easier.”

Joe stalked away, leaving all four of them undetained.

Wally shook his head as he sat and grabbed a piece of pizza for himself. “Whatever. I can’t believe you guys broke a giant phishing scam on your own.”

“Fishing?” Mick asked, making a rod and reel motion with his hands.

“P-H-I-S-H-I-N-G.” That was from Rathaway. “It means conning people out of personal information over the internet.”

Mick made a noise of acknowledgement and went back to his pizza.

Lawford caught sight of them still sitting there, and no longer with any police nearby and he and his two friends started shouting. None of the cops near them seemed at all impressed and packed all three into a police vehicle.

“I don’t think I like them very much,” Len said after watching a moment.

“Nobody likes them,” Barry replied. “No one in the building had anything good to say about any of those three.”

“You four should stick around for a while,” Wally broke in. "Joe really is annoyed."

“That’s an awfully nice way to say ‘you're still in trouble,’” Rathaway put in.

“I’m a nice guy!” Wally protested.

Rathaway appeared mollified and Len frowned. His own quasi-friendship with Barry was already more complicated than it should be. Throw in Lisa’s little flirtation with Cisco, Mick’s “grumpy uncle” status with Bart, and apparently Rathaway’s budding friendship with Wally and they might as well sign up for the Justice League.

On the other hand, considering he was trying not to be a bad guy anymore, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

Things didn’t shake out immediately. It took a little creative accounting and a few days, but Rathaway came back to everyone with their cut of the stock shorting by the end of the week. More than enough for Len and Mick to get their own apartments—decent ones, that weren’t quite so Baltic in temperature—and give Lisa enough to cover her friend’s bills for the month while the bank sorted out the legal end of getting her money back. Mick and Len quietly got together and gave a tidy, anonymous donation to the auto shop Lisa had robbed with a note that just said that the thief had a change of heart. And they still had beer money left over.

An outrageous amount of beer money left over. Rathaway was better with money than Lawford, apparently.

It was a week later when Len was putting away groceries in his brand new fridge when he was seized by a rush of yellow lighting and dragged away from his apartment. He just barely managed to grab the cold gun at the last second.

When they came to a stop, he raised the gun and spun, spotting Barry at just the last second and aiming for him.

“Hello, Flash,” he snarled. “If my ice cream melts because of you, I’m going to freeze your toes solid.”

“I thought you enjoyed our little chats,” Barry replied.

“So this is a friendly kidnapping?” He took in his surroundings and frowned. They were in a long, curving hallway, with a lot of exposed piping and wiring. The hall itself was circular, and above their heads were little…somethings, jutting out from the wall. “Where the hell did you kidnap me to, anyway?”

“This is the Pipeline,” Barry answered.

“Ah. I’m not a nostalgic type,” Len answered, though he powered down the gun and brought it up to rest on his shoulder all the same.

“Right. That’s why you came in to check on Bart,” Barry answered. “Because you don’t feel anything about anything.”

“That’s right.”

“What horrible thing do you think is going to happen if you just admit you care? A little?”

“I might have to listen to moralizing speeches from you.”

Barry rolled his eyes. “Those things up there the cells where we used to house the meta-criminals. Back before Iron Heights was ready to take them.”

Len eyed the protrusions and frowned. “Not very spacious.”

“No, they’re not.”

“How’d they get any exercise?” Len asked.

“They didn’t.”

Len turned to stare at him in shock. “Well, well, Flash. You really are getting violent for your young age.”

Barry’s expression turned dark. “Well, I’ve been locked up in here a few times myself, so I got a new appreciation for how terrible it is.” He looked back to Len. “I know you aren’t telling me the whole truth about what happened with Cybertron. And I’m just hoping we won’t need to use one of these cells for you.”

“Are we still playing this game?” Len sighed, not letting his disappointment show through. Why couldn’t he just…not care what this kid thought? He didn’t care what anyone else thought.

“And I’m curious where your sudden influx of cash came from,” Barry said.

“We stopped a lot of identity theft,” Len answered with a shrug. “Some of the victims were rich. Some of them were grateful.”

“Nobody’s that grateful,” Barry answered.

“But we are that good.”

“And the fact that Warren Lawford swears up and down he doesn’t know anything about any insider trading has…nothing to do with it?”

“Coincidence.”

Barry shook his head with a rueful smile. “I know you mostly did the right things. Eventually. That’s important. Just…just don’t let me catch you doing anything illegal, Snart.”

“Flash,” Len said, holding his arms wide, “I would never let you catch me.”

And just like that he was back in his kitchen.

A few more days passed before he got a text from Rathaway to meet them at Saints and Sinners.

Once the waitress brought them some fries, Rathaway looked around curiously. “So, I have a proposition for you.”

“What kind of a proposition?” Mick demanded.

“One where we get paid again. I met someone a while back. A guy who was using some kind of shared workspace thing,” he said.

“I’m assuming this is leading somewhere that we’re actually going to care about,” Lisa said with a sigh.

“The office manager caught on to some app he was developing and swiped the plans for it. Launched it on his own and made a mint. When the guy tried to sue, he ended up with some bullshit arbitration. Never saw a penny of what he was owed,” Rathaway told them.

Len blinked in surprise.

“Don’t tell me you have some lost little soul who needs help,” Lisa hissed in irritation.

“I don’t know about ‘lost,’” Rathaway replied with a shrug, “but he does need help. And he is beyond the reach of the law.”

Len felt his lips twitch. “You want to help people with crime?”

“Just because we pretended to be amateurs for a night doesn’t mean we are, Snart,” Mick growled.

“Okay, but newbie phrasing aside, why not? We’re good at it. We even got paid! I feel like we could do some good here, too,” Rathaway said. “Probably more than just here.”

Mick shrugged. “Might be nice not to have to worry about rent. Or eat crappy microwave food.”

“If you need to worry about rent after our last payday,” Rathaway said, “then we need to have a serious conversation about money management.”

Mick gave Rathaway a dirty look.

“Mick, if you bought a fur coat, I will strangle you with it,” Lisa put in.

“I’d like to see you try,” he returned.

The two actually started arguing.

Rathaway stared at them for a moment before turning to Len with a vaguely curious expression. “Do they always squabble like this?”

“If you’re serious about this?” Len asked.

The other man nodded.

“Then you’ll get used to it,” he replied.

THE END

*~*~*

Author's Notes: For my non-American friends, Cricket is an actual cell phone company that covers the low-cost end of the spectrum. The one that Mick and Len break into is based on an actual Cricket in Wichita where a Yelp review says the customer walked in and found the place to be a dump and themselves mysteriously signed up for a phone they didn't consent to buying. I've never met anyone that actually happened to, and you can make up anything and write it online, but there is some real-world basis for the belief that Cricket may not be the most…secure of establishments ever.

The first few episodes of Captain Cold, we see him methodically planning his crime down to the seconds. So, he would be aware of all the little, exploitable tics of human behavior that criminals can use. That being said, all my criminal "knowledge" comes from a combination of having worked and therefore knowing exploitable loopholes from the inside, and from pure guesswork, and from various crime and detective stories I have read or watched.

Also, I strongly doubt you could rob twelve stores of the same chain in one night unless you had a way to do them all at once. The cops would just wait for you at the last one. This story banks on low traffic between locations, Mick and Len being in and out in under two minutes every time, and the initial robberies getting reported too slowly for the police to actually show up at the remaining stores in time to nab our intrepid Rogues. It’s highly unlikely all of those elements would come together so neatly in real life. One red light in the wrong place, and it’s game over.

For the sake of my own sanity, I picked out an IRL city that I am using as a stand-in for Central City’s map. And because I hate McDonald’s, I decided to delete it and replace it for Big Belly Burger. So I went to my stand-in city and googled up how many McDonald’s there really were there. I was figuring on six, at the most, and that felt a little high. Come to find out, twelve is only how many there are actually inside city limits. There’s three or four more hanging out in the area. (I hate McDonald’s. Why do they have to be everywhere?)

Okay, so I made a mention of Lewis Snart’s wife totally ignoring the abuse at home. So, there are two ways that things at the Snart household could’ve gone down. First, Mom Snart is also abused by Lewis and is just as much a victim as her kids. And that was my initial thought. But then I realized that the Snart kids never talk about their mom. She’s not even mentioned as dead. There’s no thought given to her at all. Now, we see how the abuse drove them together, so we see the way these two react to it is by closing ranks. If she’d been suffering right along with them, then we could expect to see a similar closeness to their mother. Instead, the two Snarts may as well have sprung out of holes in the ground for all the maternal affection they seem to have. Which leaves the other option: she was not a victim. Either she knew about the abuse and did nothing to intervene or assist, or she actively participated, most likely in non-physical ways. Frankly, I’m inclined to believe the emotional/psychological abuse angle based on the way we see the adult Snarts act. Neither Leonard nor Lisa are comfortable with open displays of affection, and they both are a little surprised and mistrustful anytime anyone wants to help them even when those people have been honest and straightforward in the past. Now, there is some conjecture here, but that could easily indicate being conditioned to expect psychological abuse and manipulation.
TL;DR: I think Lewis Snart’s wife was just as much an abuser as he was, but in non-physical, more head-screwy ways.

I actually don’t dislike Wally. And it is entirely possible for someone to be overwhelmed trying to mentor a child they aren’t prepared for and not be a bad person. However, Len has a bad background for that to land well, and he feels like he has to be on Bart’s side because he owes him for the rescue. So he’s not going to take it in stride. He’s going to be pissed on Bart’s behalf.

All of the "credit/debit cards work like X" information is true, by the way. They all follow the numerical patterns I described. Zip codes are rarely matched to anything. And Hartley probably could've bought something on Amazon even without knowing the card-associated billing information. For most cards, you can enter any valid zip code and the card will still run. In fact, for most cards you can enter nonsense information (claim the name on the card is Mickey Mouse, for example) and the card will still run.

I have no clue whatsoever if you can hack in to a database of drivers’ license information the way our Rogues do here. Nor how strong cyber-security on such a database is likely to be. I made everything up in that whole section. I did find an internet site that purports to search over 210 million driver’s licenses in the United States (and considering the US population is 325 million, and allowing for the exclusion of people too young or old to drive or who don’t have licenses, that’s gotta be a claim covering most/all of the driving population of the country), but the test searches I ran timed out, so it doesn’t seem that useful. Therefore, I imagine if you wanted to be a sneaky little sneak like this, building your own search program probably would be the way to go. Also, this way, you can write your own search parameters, instead of being stuck with whatever options the website chooses to give you.

The thing about loading screens/progress bars is actually true, by the way. Basically every progress bar you see ever is telling you a lie about percentages of completion and all that jazz. They just display some number or other, increasing at a random amount at random times. There’s a history on this that goes back to when the first, giant, bigger-than-a-refrigerator computers kept getting hijacked in the middle of computations by people who didn’t realize they were already working on a thing. I believe, without looking it up to check, the original “progress bar” was a handwritten note that was taped on, but the bottom line on this is: if the computer has some sort of display to tell the human operators that it really, honest-to-goodness is actually working on a thing, people are much less likely to interrupt it in the middle of working on that thing. However, because computers are stupid, you have to tell the computer to do the display or else it won’t do it. And Rathaway was more focused on just making the search work, so he didn’t bother to make it people-friendly.

I wrote this story concurrently with the story in the series where they break several JLA members out of a prison IN SPACE! So Len will get an answer on why Mick hit the brakes on the alcohol. In, from his in-story perspective, about two years.

Warren Lawford is directly taken from the TAS episode “The Terrible Trio,” which went down pretty exactly like Hartley sums it up.

Johnny Cochran was the defense attorney in the OJ Simpson murder trial in the 1990s.

Cybertron is the name of a company that built a computer named HARDAC. The designer, Karl Rossum, created the computer with the goal of commandeering computer systems to improve their efficiency and safety to reduce death by human error after his daughter died. He realized that this was crazy grief before carrying out his plan, though, and stopped long before it was implemented. HARDAC, however, being an AI, went all VIKI in I, Robot and started making robot copies of people and locking up the human ones. Batman saved the day, and Karl Rossum retired in shame.

Initially, Lisa was not acting out of altruism for her friend in any way. In fact, the original draft had a plot with the elements a lot more disjointed. I didn’t even think of the frame-Lawford-for-insider-trading-and-steal-the-money angle until I had written past the point where they do it. The original draft also featured more ~*EMOTIONS*~, which are very important, but was kind of OOC for Len as the point-of-view character, so those are all squirreled away in a series of scrap notes that may or may not end up as references or inclusions in future stories. Anyway, the point is, first drafts suck. They’re the worst.

Yes, the title is a Leverage reference. A bunch of criminals decide to put their skills at criminalling towards the greater good? Yep. Leverage, Inc. Definitely.