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He could have survived losing Len.
It would have hurt, hurt like having your guts pulled out of you with a red hot poker, but he could've survived. He's faced loss before. His family is still a wound in his side, though old enough to have scarred.
But it's not just Len.
It's stupid, earnest, loyal Ray Palmer, who knew he couldn't replace Len but wanted to be loved so badly he was willing to try, taken out by the slick poison fumes of a creaking old refugee ship rigged to explode. He stopped the explosion and saved nearly three hundred lives, not least of which were those of his team. There are a dozen children called Raimund in his honor, a funeral filled with weeping, and fireside stories filled with glory galore, just like he would've wanted, but he's still gone.
It's Sara, who lost her mind to vengeance for her sister, who get her revenge with a smile as she held Damien Drakh and Malcolm Merlyn both down as the volcano erupted around the three of them, the heat dissolving their flesh and bones to ash and the lava sweeping it away so thoroughly that you could flood the area with the water of the Lazarus Pits and not see a hint of them.
It's Jax, a good kid if Mick ever saw one, drowning behind a magic field that wouldn't let up, him and Stein solving puzzle after puzzle until the timeline was back in the correct order - but not quick enough to save their lungs, their radioactive flames smothered by the relentless, merciless press of water.
It's Lisa, golden Lisa, Lenny's Lisa, that took up her brother's stupid crusade and got herself killed by an other-world speedster and died choking on her own blood in Cisco Ramon's arms.
It's the Flash himself, Len's favorite opponent, tearing himself to pieces with his speed, sacrificing more and more and more until he was trapped in a never-ending loop of speed, forced to run forever in a hell of his own making.
He saved the world.
Mick doesn't care about the world. He never has.
He finds himself with nothing to say to Rip, who carries on with the mission, always the mission, never the people. He finds himself unable to care about the fresh new faces that fill the empty seats of the Waverider. Grist to the deadly mill of Time.
Mick's had a good life, but he can't live in this world anymore. Not without Len. Without Lisa. With Sara and Ray and Jax and even Barry goddamn Allen gone. Who even cares?
Rip knows how he feels, made some half-hearted invocation to be strong, not to give in to despair. Mick knows Rip thinks Mick is suicidal.
Mick is not suicidal. Suicide helps nobody at all. And Mick - Mick can help. He just has to plan it out right, like one of Len's plans, plan it long-term and right.
He's going to make sure none of this ever happens.
He feels a bit bad about disabling Gideon's ability to track him. He feels not bad at all about ditching Rip back in the 1870s, leaving his unconscious body in the care of one Jonah Hex, and taking the Waverider with him. When Rip wakes up, him and his new team will utilize the protocols Rip developed to summon the Waverider back to his time and place. They'll be stuck a few months, max, but by that point his trail will be so cold as to defy recognition. The timeline will defy recognition too, if he has anything to say about it.
He has a plan.
The Waverider gets him the first leg of his journey, the information gathering, the money, the weapons, the surveillance tech, the futuristic solar-powered batteries. The people selling eye his ship and tell him it'll never work, the ship's too big, too small, badly powered, the tech needs grounding - Mick just glares until they hand it over anyway, usually with a long instruction guide.
Honestly, the thefts and the negotiating and all that is too easy. It's amazing what you can do when you don't care anymore, when every step you take is a reminder of the hollowness of your life.
The research bits are harder, but necessary if he's going to do what he's planning.
When he's done, he takes the Waverider back to a particular point in time to pick up his old Kronos ship a few hours after he ditches it in favor of the Waverider's jump ship.
He doesn't let himself get a glimpse of Len.
It would snap him into pieces and he needs to be strong just a little longer.
The Waverider he ditches somewhere safe to start making its slow way back to where he left Rip. His ship - Kronos' ship, cold and heartless the way he'd been back then, given no name by the Time Masters but which in a (rare) fanciful moment he'd mentally christened the Revenge - will do for now.
He goes to the year he's picked, gives himself three months to set up. Being Kronos gave him a fine sense of paradox, but the whole timeline is going screwy right now, what with the Oculus destroyed and speedsters everywhere, left and right. He has a chance to fuck it up.
He has a chance to make it right.
He buys a house and puts it in trust, following Len's years-old speculations, even calling in a real lawyer to do it. He arms the place as best he can with tech that blends with the modern. He writes up his notes, his instructions, for the day he won't be there anymore. He paradox-proofs the shit out of the whole place.
Then he gears up as Kronos once more.
Mick's seen what happens to the Pilgrim's victims, whose timelines change so dramatically that they disappear in a burst of blue sparks. He knows that he has a limited amount of time.
He goes after Len first, because if Mick's going to give up thirty years of partnership in favor of a new timeline, then Len and Lisa deserve better than they got.
But given how intertwined their lives are, if Mick - if Kronos - is going to stay alive long enough to give them the better life they deserve, he's going to have to pick them up later than he'd prefer. Picking them up too early would result in an immediate erasure of Kronos from the timeline, because a Len raised well would have done too well for himself to find himself on the same road that he and Mick walked, Kronos is sure of that. No, he has to pick his time carefully: late enough to form a personality, early enough to spare them what he could.
On a night not unlike any other night, but one that was branded forever on an elder brother's memory, Kronos walks up to a little house in Central City and murders Lewis Snart.
Leonard Snart is sixteen years old. His sister is seven; for the first time, he was not been fast enough or clever enough to put himself between her and their father's rage. He is picking out the glass shards from where the bottle hit her with his hands, ignoring how the glass cuts his fingers; she has stopped crying only because she is exhausted. She has already said words she did not mean, cruel words about how her brother should have been there to protect her, how she doesn't love him anymore, how he's a failure as a brother, and though she will try to take them back, her brother will never again believe that he is anything else.
Leonard Snart hates his father more that night than any other.
Kronos comes, and Kronos kills, and Leonard Snart comes downstairs, his eyes empty and all emotion already wrung out of him, and he says, "Don't go upstairs and I'll get you whatever you want."
"I'm a time traveler," Mick says, breaking every single one of Rip's rules, the Time Master's rules, as he does; and it is Mick, because this was something that was always Mick's to do and he'll warm his empty heart with it until he is no more. "And all I wanted was for this fucker to stop hurting you and your sister."
Len's eyes flicker. "He does it again?"
"For twenty years," Mick says. "You escape and you hate yourself for escaping, and Lisa has scars like you."
Len shudders. This is his worst fear.
"So what now?"
"Now you come with me to somewhere safe," Mick says.
Len wraps Lisa in a blanket, packs her favorite toys - Mick snags the ones that Len sometimes mentioned wistfully when he is very, very drunk - and Mick takes them to the house he's laid out for them.
He feels the timeline writhing, but it hasn't settled yet. Lewis is a big shadow in Len's life, but as Mick had thought, he wasn't as big as Len's fears sometimes made him. Lewis impacted only the start of Len's life; the rest was the man Len made of himself.
Mick still has time before the timeline settles.
"The notebooks will tell you what to do," Mick says. "There's money in a trust in your name, and fake IDs if anyone starts asking too many questions. If I don't come back, invest in Yahoo, Apple, and Google when no one's heard of them, the dot-com bubble bursts, and that sub-prime housing thing is going to turn out real shitty in the end."
"Where are you going?"
"To make things better," Mick says.
He hopes.
He breathes in deep, and lets it out, lets Mick Rory out, and becomes Kronos instead.
His next stop he knows far too well: if Len is sixteen, then Mick is nineteen and his favorite foster-mother had no choice but to turn him out six months back to make room for more kids, and even then she'd kept him six months longer than the government had paid for. He's working a crappy job for crappier pay, sleeping under an off-ramp and storing his whole life in a rented locker, and he's already said fuck it and robbed two stores successfully so that he could have something green to eat for once, him and the other guys in his little corner.
It's the fourth one, a gas station that he couldn't resist lighting up by "accident", that gets him a six month stint in prison; it's prison that gets him a list of names of guys who could use some extra muscle that's willing to light things on fire; it's those jobs that get him hooked on mind-numbing painkillers that only halfway do the job he really needs from them, because what he needs is a prescription. It's not until he meets Len again, three years later, that he gets out of the Families' hold and onto proper medication instead.
It's not a great time in his life.
Kronos doesn't bother trying to reason with his past self, who's miserable and combative, he just shoots him with a sedative. He's given himself enough concussions through the years, even aside from Len's little lovetaps; he's not going to start adding any already.
He takes Mick back to the house in Central where he left Len, where Len is napping on the couch, clearly having succumbed to exhaustion in the middle of casing the place.
Len rouses at the sound Kronos makes, and exclaims, "Mick!" when he sees what Kronos holds in his arms. Len is still young and not as hard as he will one day become; his tone is full of open affection and concern.
"He needs medicine," Kronos says, and Len looks up at him, wide-eyed. "He's not hurt, but his brain chemistry's wrong. The full diagnosis is written out in the red notebook, plus the drugs he should take to treat it - they haven't developed the really good stuff yet, but I've written out the dates that they will, and he ought to shift over when they do. He's got some bad reactions to some of them - I've written out the ones I remember - but he ought to see a shrink that can monitor his intake."
Len nods, his sharp brain memorizing these facts. "What's going to happen to you, if you're from the future and you're changing things?" he asks, because Len was always a science fiction nerd and because he always cut straight to the heart.
"I'll be here as long as I can," Kronos promises, knowing that he probably has only days. "But there's one thing - a kid, Barry Allen."
"You're bringing him, too?"
"No, he's too young; he's a few years younger than Lisa. Just a baby, but happy. When he's eleven, though, something bad is going to happen to him. You probably won't be able to stop it, though you should try. If it does happen, he'll need help."
Len nods. "I'll do my best," he promises. "Is the future so bad, then?"
"It's not bad at all," Kronos says, because until the end, it wasn't. "But you deserve better."
Kronos goes to sleep that night content.
He wakes up surprised.
The ship's computer, routed through his armpiece, confirms that the timeline has settled; he can hear his younger self downstairs puttering around in the fully stocked kitchen, putting his questionable skills from being a short-order cook into practice as Len pretends (but not by much) to be much worse in the kitchen than he really is ("TV dinners are just as good for breakfast, right?" "Of course I know how to make oatmeal! You make instant oatmeal by putting the metal pot in the microwave." "What do you mean you can't eat the aluminum wrapping? It's the best part!") while Lisa giggles madly at Len's antics.
"How am I still here?" he asks the computer.
"You've become a paradox fragment, detached from your original timeline," the computer replies. Ginny, he recalls; he called her Ginny because he refused to call her Gideon. He'd forgotten that. "There were so many changes to the timeline that it's still in flux; the new timeline is set, but still open to reevaluation. People will come to try to fix it."
"Let them try," Kronos growls, and goes downstairs to show his stupid younger self how to really make french toast.
Len is relieved to see him, Mick and Lisa confused. Len explains while Kronos cooks.
Kronos wasn't really expecting to get to see the new timeline he's created, that’s why he made all those notes, but since he's here, he's going to make sure it goes well.
First order of business: setting Mick up with a good shrink.
"No way," Mick says.
"Yes way," Kronos growls. "You need it."
"Last shrink I had -"
"Was a piece of shit, I know," Kronos says, crossing his arms. "We'll keep trying them until we find one that isn't."
"What makes you think you know so much?" Mick challenges.
"He's future you," Len says, head on his hands and watching their argument with fascination.
"I never told you that!" Kronos exclaims, because his memory might have holes but not that many.
"I'm not stupid," Len sniffs. "Anyway, it doesn't matter. You two are gonna be different people when Mick's all grown up, 'cause of the different timeline."
"You sound pretty sure about that," Kronos says, amused despite himself. Len never let too long go by before he pretended he understood it.
"I read a lot of science fiction. You were worried about dissolving, which mean we're in an open-loop timeline; but you didn't, which means something's gone wrong with the timeline and future-you is either the same - no way - or you've made enough changes that we're in a multiverse fragment."
"You just used a lot of words," Mick says, rolling his eyes. "Wanna dumb it down for me?"
"In the future, I'm the one who knows all the time travel rules while Len's still guessing," Kronos tells him, which makes Mick's eyes go wide and amazed, and also Len to sit up just a bit straighter and beam.
Kronos always thought Len would be annoyed at evidence that Mick could out-clever him sometimes, but he never seemed bothered by it - but never so obviously pleased by the evidence of Mick's intelligence. Len is a lot freer with his expressions at this age, which makes Kronos wonder a touch uneasily if he's just gotten better at reading even a younger Len's face after so many years, or if there was some tragedy he'd averted that Len had never told even him about.
Well, it doesn't matter. As long as the timeline let him, Kronos isn't going to let anything happen to him.
This is - easier said than done.
Fuck, and he'd thought adult Len was a manic bundle of ice cold nerves and reckless adrenaline; he'd never realized how much judgment Len actually had compared to his sixteen year old self. Especially a sixteen year old starting to internalize the idea that his father was actually gone and he would never be back to burden his life again.
Kronos ends up sharing a worryingly large number of long-suffering looks with Mick over the next week and likely indefinitely into the future.
With Lisa, too; she is a very mature seven year old. Even if she did have a way of asking hard questions.
"Kronos," she asks solemnly, tugging on his sleeve. "When do we get the flying cars?"
"Um," Kronos says. "At...some...point?"
"How accurate is Back to the Future?"
"...more than you'd think, really."
He ends up trading shrink visits for Mick getting to play with the heat gun, which might not be good parenting but is clearly fun for the whole family. Well. The pyromanial side of the family.
"Both of you are going to see this shrink, right?" Len says dubiously when they both come in, beaming and covered in soot.
Len still wants to be a thief and a supervillain when he grows up, which means he has no place to talk. Lisa's still aiming for the Olympics, which she grudgingly accepts means that she still has to go to school.
Two weeks in, Kronos takes a day to go bribe his way into legal authority over the Snarts. No one questions his relation to Mick, of course, but Kronos takes him with him anyway as a means of demonstrating how good of a family guy he is. Kids make people less squeamish about taking bribes somehow, even if they're teenagers.
"Uh," Mick says. "I got a question."
Kronos looks at his younger self sidelong. They'd both been a little creeped by the constant knowing interaction with another version of themselves, Kronos in particular remembering his sixteen year old self with a wince, so they'd been low-key avoiding each other. Nothing serious, just casual, but it wasn't going to fly if he was going to stick around as parent-cum-protector.
"Yeah?"
"You and Lenny - I mean, me and Lenny - but in the future -"
"Oh god," Kronos says, realizing what this is about. "Yes, you hook up, yes, he's already interested, yes, you should grow a pair of balls and make a goddamn move already."
"Oh," Mick says. "Thanks."
Silence for a few minutes.
"How long it'd take you?"
"Nearly a year," Kronos says. "But I also don't want to live with that sort of unresolved sexual tension wrecking up my house, so don't be me. Be better."
"I swear I've heard that somewhere before," Mick says, wrinkling his nose.
"No comment," Kronos says.
They get the papers, but Kronos is strangely out of sorts later that day, after Lisa's gone to bed, watching Mick straighten his back and march over towards Len's room with the look of a man willing to brave a firing squad.
He finds himself playing with his ring. Lenny's ring, really, from a job that will never happen now. That's gone forever, just like Len.
"Shit," he says, and goes to sit outside in the park instead. He can't be here for this. He thought he could, but he can't. He was supposed to die. Disappear in a burst of blue sparks.
Not - linger like this. A timeline fragment without a timeline. Without anything but the desire to keep this new timeline going, to make sure some other version of him gets to be happy. Hope that he made enough changes to save not only the ones he pulled, but Sara. Ray. Jax.
He knows they'll find him soon - Time Masters, the Waverider, somebody - and that'll give him someone to fight, but it's harder than he thought.
Living.
"Shit," he says again, and puts his head in his hands. "Why'd you have to go do a stupid thing like that for, Lenny?"
"In fairness, you went and did it first," Len points out, sounding annoyingly calm and reasonable. "I know you liked Ray and all, but I wouldn't have done it for him, if you get my meaning."
"Yeah, I know," Kronos mutters into his fingers. "Just makes it all my fault in the end."
"It's not your fault," Len says firmly. "I'd tell you if it was. Blame the Time Masters if you like, just for having that stupid thing. You know I wouldn't have been able to resist trying to wreck it."
"You never did like being anyone else's puppet," Kronos acknowledges, still not looking up.
"You're taking talking with me better than I thought you would," Len observes.
That makes Kronos pause. "I was assuming you were an auditory hallucination induced by trauma and suppression." He had those sometimes, as Kronos. And it was usually Len's voice, too. But the hallucinations were never aware of themselves; they repeated Len's words or Mick's thoughts, usually on repeat, the miserable things.
"I think I'm offended," Len says. "And after all the trouble I put into making this Force ghost get up, too."
Kronos' head shoots up. He didn't have the mental capacity to make a hallucination with as awful a sense of humor as Len.
Len's sitting there next to him on the lonely park bench, dressed just as Mick remembers him last, stupid blue parka and all. He's a little translucent.
"Made you look," Len says smugly.
"How...?"
"Oculus temporal energies ripped me to shreds," Len says cheerfully. "But my mind got sent into this stupid Speed Force thing. Only thing is, we can only access the world when times they are a-changing, or with a speedster, if you get me."
Kronos frowns. "So - are you dead or alive?"
"I'm Schrodinger's cat," Len says. "Neither, until a speedster pushes me one way or another. Though the rest of the Speed Force does keep trying to lure me to the light at the end of the tunnel."
"...can we get you back?"
"Probably not," Len says apologetically. "Not till Barry's old enough to be the Flash, anyway, and that's a long time no matter what way you cut it. But I've found you now, so I can hang around Casper-style."
"Good enough for me," Kronos says. "I'll wait."
"Even though I might be an auditory hallucination?"
"Even then."
Lisa screams when the ghostly Captain Cold comes through the door and drops her midnight glass of water - both Snarts were actually camels with weird replenishing times, Kronos swears - which causes Len and Mick to stumble out of Len's room shirtless and go, "Who the hell is that?!"
"See," Len – Cold, perhaps, to differentiate him from his younger self – says. "Told you I wasn't a hallucination."
Just for that, Kronos tells the kids, "This is your mom."
Len's yowl of outrage is hilarious.
----------------------------------------
Having Cold around makes everything easier - even if he did complain on a regular basis that if Kronos had been the one who'd been at the Oculus, they could have called him "the ghost that roasts" and he regretted all his choices as a result, which littler Len finds hilarious and makes everyone else groan.
To be honest, Kronos barely even notices the time passing, but somehow years have gone by, Len's legal and out on his own with Mick by his side, Lisa's in serious juniors competitions, and suddenly it's time.
Kronos gears up to try to stop a speedster, because he and Cold have agreed that it's not fair to Barry to let it happen if it doesn't have to. Besides, Barry'll become the Flash either way, according to Cold's Speed Force friend. Friends. Metaphysical force of nature. Thing.
Kronos prefers not to think about it too hard.
"I don't know how much I can help," Cold says, scowling. He could only sometimes interact with the world - a brush of fingers here, a lifted tray there - and it exhausts him to do so. Kronos doesn't mind, though he'll admit that it would've been nice to have Cold's gun covering his back.
(Len and Mick have been highly trained in their use, of course, but despite them calling in to offer help, Kronos wants his stupid kids as far away from the action as possible, just in case. Between what the Time Masters know about speedsters and what Len's picked up from the Speed Force, he knows too much about what they're capable of.)
"Leave it to me," Kronos says.
He gets there and it's - well.
It's a positive smorgasbord of speedsters.
"I'm adopting that as the collective noun for speedsters," Cold declares. "Wow. I don't even know what to say here."
"None of our business," Kronos decides. "Let's go stop a murder."
"Please don't," an adult, harassed-looking Barry Allen wearing some sort of strange space suit-like version of his costume. "I've tried. It only makes things worse. So much worse."
"Even if -"
"So. Much. Worse."
"I'm still going to give it a try," Kronos says.
He hates inflection points as a matter of principle.
He goes in there, both guns blazing, because Barry Allen might not be able to change his past, but this used to be how Kronos made a living.
The speedsters are expecting other speedsters, not ice and flame; Kronos manages to clear them out, much to his own surprise.
"Thank you," the mother says tearfully to him when he saves her. "Thank you - whoever you are -"
"Listen to me," Kronos says urgently. "I've bought you some time, but someone'll try again if you don't get out -"
Henry Allen takes her in his arms. "Go," Kronos exclaims, seeing the crackles of lightning. "Go!"
They're slow, they're disbelieving, but he gets them out of their hell house, blasting speedsters in yellow, red, and blue, because he's going to change the timeline and he's going to make it stick.
"Thank you," Henry says, clutching his wife, who's still sobbing from her very close call with death. "Why did you - who are you?"
"Kronos Rory," Kronos says shortly. "You need to be very careful going forward, okay?"
"What was that?" Barry says, because that scared little boy is Barry. That little boy is going to grow up to be the fastest man alive. "What's all the lightning around our house?"
"Don't ask," Kronos says. "You'll find out eventually. You," he says to the parents. "You need to be careful. Do you understand me? Careful."
"Got it," Nora Allen says.
They're careful and Kronos is watchful, swinging by regularly whenever he can without burdening their peace too much, but the speedsters still find them a year later, in their car. Barry explains to Joe West, first on the scene, that it wasn't his father, it was the freak lightning again, but that just convinces Joe - and all the shrinks - that there had been a previous murder attempt, previous abuse, that Barry has reconfigured in his mind to lightning. Barry, just that little bit older, bristles and screams his rage in return instead of just accepting it, bending beneath adult opprobrium. He learns discretion, not avoidance.
But Joe takes him in anyway.
Kronos sighs and turns away. He tried.
"Nothing more we could've done," Cold says grimly. "It wanted to happen."
"We'll keep an eye on him," Len offers. Mick nods.
They've turned out so much better than Kronos had though, his strange young sibling and Cold's, his children to raise and protect. Len had still dropped out of high school, but he got his GED and a few years of college, engineering of all sorts, he got Cold's training and invariably sarcastic advice, he got Kronos' careful investing behind him, and he's brilliant beyond imagining. He juggles beautifully planned thefts on one hand and starting legitimate businesses on the other, and with a third hand that Kronos would've always sworn he had, he seems to be getting strangely invested in local politics. Though he swears that's just a hobby.
"Barry once said something about me becoming mayor of Central in an alternate universe," Cold whispers to him one evening, his ghostly form curled up beside Kronos in their bed. "I thought he was joking, but..."
"Fucking hell," Kronos says emphatically.
And Mick - he's so proud of Mick he doesn't know what to do with it. Mick's so much better than Kronos was at that age, than Kronos was at any age, than Kronos is. He's still a pyro, but the medication helps keep him stable and focused, and Kronos is happy to go out to scratch the itch in a controlled manner whenever he wants. More often than not, Mick's the only one who can get Kronos back into his own body when he gets lost in the flames.
Mick's running one of Len's little entrepreneur enterprises, a restaurant of all things, gleefully teaching himself to cook on the poor tastebuds of the slum districts, hiring all sorts of punks to serve tables and to beat the crap out of guys who hit on girls who come for some peace and quiet. He still goes along on the thefts, saying he has to keep an eye on Len but smiling gleefully the whole time in a way that speaks of pending violence.
He smiles, Mick does; he smiles. Kronos never smiled like that, happy, secure, healthy.
Lisa's a little spitfire of a teenager now, just like she was in Kronos' memory, but she doesn't have to hide a flinch when people move too fast or raise their voice. She has only one scar. Her heart belongs to the ice rink - but she doesn't say no to gifts of gold. If anything, that lust of gold of hers is even stronger; the only difference is that she’s seriously contending to get it at the Olympics in front of a stage of millions instead of stealing it.
Kronos is pleased. He just wishes he could've done more for Barry, for Cold's sake.
Then he gets a knock on the door, one day when it's just him and his ghost watching some television, and it's a lawyer asking if he'll take Barry in.
"What," Kronos says.
"You can think about -"
"No, I'll take him, but wasn't he being raised by Joe West?"
"Mr. West was unfortunately severely injured in the line of duty; his power of attorney is very out of date and his will doesn't explain what's to be done with his foster son."
"Foster? Didn't he adopt him? And will? How bad off is he?"
"It’s a living will. He's in a coma," the man says. "But you were listed second on the Allen's list of potential caretaker."
"Me?!"
"Kronos Rory, isn't that right?"
"Yes."
"Will you come down to the station?"
"Go, go," Cold hisses in his ear.
Kronos goes.
There are two weeping children, nearly fourteen years old.
"Shit," Kronos says.
Iris West has an estranged family that doesn't particularly want her, and Kronos is rich enough between the stock market and Len's enthusiastic thieving to make it worth CPS’s while not to interfere.
The estranged wife who shows up to try to get a piece of Joe's will - he's not even dead yet! – her, he threatens to light on fire after she makes Iris cry.
He takes them home.
"So you're Barry," Len says, smiling. "So happy to meet you at last."
"Wow," Barry says, gaping a little, which in fairness is not an uncommon reaction to Len smiling.
Iris giggles and elbows him, only to have to eat crow when Len greets her by kissing her hand and she makes a squeaking sound not unlike a stuffed animal having the stuffing knocked out of it.
"There's a few things you need to know about this house," Kronos tells them. "I'd prefer to tell you slowly, but I don't trust anyone to keep their mouth shut."
"What do you mean?"
"He means the house ghost," Mick says.
Kronos rolls his eyes.
"Ghosts aren't real," Iris says.
"They are too!" Barry says.
"Are not!"
"I'm gonna have to go with Barry on this one," Cold says, drifting out through the fridge like the drama queen he is. "Sorry, Miss West."
There's mostly delighted squealing at that point, so Kronos is going to guess they don't mind.
"You have a ghost," Barry says, enthralled. "That's so awesome. Is that how you knew to save my parents from the lightning?"
"Nah, that's 'cause he's from the future," Lisa says, aiming for cool and kicking her heels idly.
"You're kidding," Iris says.
"Don't tell anyone," Kronos says, giving up.
"You're kidding!"
"He's future me," Mick explains. "But he's a timeline fragment - don't worry, we'll explain everything."
"You're one of us now," Len says.
"Wait," Iris says. "If you're from the future, is there anything...?"
"I'll talk to Ginny to see if I have anything that could help fix your dad," Kronos says, deciding retreat is the better option. He's clearly not needed here.
"Ginny?" he hears Barry ask as Kronos leaves the room.
"The AI," Lisa says. "She's great!"
"I feel like I've messed up somewhere," Kronos remarks to Cold.
"You've messed up lots of things," Cold replies cheerfully. "But I think we're doing okay."
"We're not qualified to raise anyone but ourselves and Lisa," Kronos reminded him. "And I think we blew a big one when it came to the time travel thing."
"It's all to the good that Barry learns about the Reverse early," Cold says, shaking his head. They'd found the newspaper article about Wells' car accident last week - just like in the original timeline, only a year late. "That way he doesn't have to worry about it his whole life."
"Not easier knowing your dad's been put away for fake reasons."
"Better than wondering if the guys that say he's evil are right," Cold says dryly. "Nothing worse than disappointment in yourself for failing to properly believe - except maybe finding out they're actually as bad as all that."
Kronos nods and sends Ginny on a scouting mission.
"So, I got good news and bad news," he says, walking back in.
"What's the good news?" Iris demands.
"Ginny has tech that can heal serious brain trauma like your dad's got."
Iris bursts into tears.
"Uh," Kronos says. "That was the good news."
"Happy tears, Kronos," Cold says airily.
"What's the bad news?" Barry says warily, his eyes also filled with tears and a tremulous smiling forming.
"Brain injuries are hard," Kronos says. "And moreover, your dad healing overnight would raise some - questions. Ginny estimates at minimum of six months before we get him out of the coma, plus another six for rehab, and it might be longer."
"But he'll be okay?" Iris asks. "He'll be him, not a vegetable or something?"
"All memories and personality intact," Kronos assures her.
There are more tears.
Kronos makes a tactical retreat. Cold's already vanished, the coward.
"You guys stick with us," he hears Len say. "We'll make sure it's all okay. Say - how do you feel about stealing...?"
----------------------------
Kronos fakes a background as a family friend and parlays Lisa off as Iris' new best friend, which in fairness isn't far from the truth, so that the kids can keep hanging out with each other once Joe's awake again. Shaken, but no less determined to keep himself in the field.
"Better than ever, I swear," he says on the phone to his boss. "I'll take all the phys ed and psych tests you like; you'll see. Even my knees feel like I'm five years younger!"
Ginny may have been a bit over-enthusiastic.
Whatever. With Snart not being quite the notorious name it became in Kronos' time - Len's too busy telling activists of all stripes "no, you're doing it wrong, that's not - oh for gods' sake let me do the damn thing" in regards to City Hall to pull off some of their greatest hits, especially without his father around to drag him and Lisa down, and Mick’s been weirdly interested in how the Families work the city lately, saying something about methods of recruitment and organization and something about informal economic support structures - it's easy enough to sneak by pretending to be normal.
Even if the calendar on the fridge is measured in years, not months, and has certain dates years in the future circled: Sara's ill-fated decision to join Oliver on a pleasure cruise (Len's volunteered himself and Mick as distractions to keep her in their bed instead of Oliver's - he's intrigued by the possibility of spreading his influence to Starling, and at any rate it's been a while since the two of them shared a girl), Ray's fiancé's unfortunate street encounter (Iris and Len are planning a rescue: Len to bolster his already promising political reputation, and Iris to make her journalistic one), Jax's accident on the night of the Accelerator explosion (Kronos has enough money to buy himself a share in a football team: it won't be too hard to convince Jax's team to reschedule that particular game if a NFL team is offering them the opportunity to play a scrimmage the same night), Stein's lack of funding that drove him to STAR Labs (also solved with a little judicious investing on Kronos' part)...
Kronos does at least manage to introduce the subject of Eobard Thawne with relative grace.
"But isn't he a time traveler too?" Barry asks solemnly, Iris nodding along. "How come he doesn't know that we know?"
"Time travel's not a precise science," Cold drawls. "Look at me. I'm an art."
It has the desire effect of getting Barry and Iris to snicker, since Cold's humor has always been stuck at the fifteen year old level.
"He would have gotten stuck after what he did," Kronos says, ignoring Cold. "He didn't have time to prep, like I did."
"And other time travelers?"
"I've been - convincing them not to interfere," Kronos says. The Waverider crew had been upset at him ditching them, but by that point the timeline had settled and it would have been even more trouble to extract him. He'd made that point quite effusively to them the one time they'd swung by. The time pirates and occasional Time Master, on the other hand, Kronos dealt with using extreme prejudice.
Cold had very handy ghost-senses that were attuned to temporal displacement. He literally saw them coming before they arrived; an aftereffect of the Oculus and a little gift from the Speed Force.
"So what do we do now?" Barry asks, sipping his hot chocolate. With mini-marshmallows, of course; wouldn't want to shock Len's tender sensibilities. "Nothing I can do until the Accelerator explosion, though, right? And Len and Mick are already working on having the institutional power to clear the city's vulnerable areas when the time comes, aren't they?"
"Sometimes your brain worries me," Kronos tells Cold.
"It's your younger self that worries me," Cold shoots back. "I think he's starting a rival mob Family in that restaurant of his."
"I try not to ask," Kronos says dryly, because he's pretty sure that is, in fact, what's going on. "But anyway, Barry, Cold and I were - talking."
Barry looks mildly alarmed. Iris looks intrigued. Everything you need to know about these two in a nutshell, really.
"As we explained, Cold and I were your supervillains in our timeline -"
"- and you suck at fighting," Cold finishes. "If it wasn't for your speed, Barry, you'd never get anything done. Ever. You're impulsive, you're reckless, you don't know know how to throw a punch -"
"Please stop," Barry says.
"Fighting lessons?" Iris says eagerly. "Dad's teaching us some boxing, though I'm better at it."
"Yeah, boxing's part of the problem," Cold says. "Don't look so smug, Iris; you got yourself kidnapped often enough. So, we've decided: Kronos here's gonna teach you brawling. I'm gonna teach you - both of you - strategy. And both of us together are going to hammer the concept of open communication into your stupid heads until you actually learn it. Maybe by the time we get you old enough, you two will have a better start to Team Flash than the old one did."
Twin nods.
"We start tomorrow," Kronos says. "Go have cake."
They run off.
"Think we can do it?"
"We're going to do it," Cold confirms. "Only question is if we go crazy doing it first."
--------------------------------
Barry gasps and sits up, opening his eyes. "Where am I?" he gasps, disoriented; he tries to scan the area around him like he was taught - always make sure you know your ground, Barry, be aware of your surroundings, don’t let them take you by surprise -
"Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, relax. Everything's okay, man. You're at STAR Labs."
"STAR Labs?" Barry says, the clinic-like room coming into focus. "Who are you?"
There's a man there, about Barry's age, hair down to his shoulders, and a woman, a doctor.
Cisco Ramon and Caitlin Snow.
Barry's seen their pictures before, projected by Ginny on the wall during his prep sessions. They're going to be friends, and good ones. He can't wait to introduce them to the rest of the team.
"What's happening?" he asks, even though he thinks he already knows. "What's going on?"
"You were struck by lightning, dude."
"Lightning gave me abs?" Barry asks, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, because, uh, nobody mentioned that part of it!
"Your muscles should be atrophied, but instead they're in a chronic and unexplained state of cellular regeneration."
"You were in a coma," Cisco.
"For how long?" Barry asks, anxious to know if the timeline had been altered in relation to that and also because he probably missed so much. Shucks, and he and Iris had been planning on hitting on that cute guy at work to see if he was up for a threesome, too. She'd better have snapped him up on their mutual behalf while he was out of the action or he'll never forgive her.
"Nine months," someone says.
Long enough for Iris to get pregnant and have a baby, Barry thinks, and the thought alarms him enough to make an expression that clearly translates as horror, judging by Cisco and Caitlin's faces.
"Welcome back, Mr. Allen," the voice continues, and this time Barry can identify it as a lower voice, male, older than Cisco, coming from the doorway.
Barry turns.
Harrison Wells, in a wheelchair, smiling paternally.
The man who killed Barry's mother all those years ago.
At last.
"It's hard to believe I'm here," Barry says. "I've always wanted to meet you face to face."
He means it with all his heart.