Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mick Rory is not an alchemist. Growing up, alchemists were the people who worked in wireless transmission stations and construction companies in movies. They were old Mrs. Douglas out every spring in her rubber boots with a big jug of fertilizer, spraying out blocky arrays in everybody's fields to make sure the soil was good for whatever crops they were growing, and the youngest Larson brother who could fix anybody's truck or tractor or television set in ten minutes flat and accepted cigarettes as payment because his daddy wouldn't let him smoke at home.

Mick had only found out that some of his classmates had tested into special alchemy classes in second grade because suddenly the two girls who always made fun of him during silent reading time for how slow he read were suddenly gone during that hour each week.

"Can I do the alchemy classes?" he'd asked his teacher, and she had laughed, shaken her head.

"They're not really for kids like you, Micky," she'd said, in what he realizes years later was a whole new level of shitty condescension. At the time, it was just another thing that wasn't for kids like Mick, like a 4H calf and a day where his parents didn't yell at him, or friends who didn't make fun of him behind his back. Chances are, if he'd been allowed to take the aptitude test, he'd have failed and lost all interest. But like any dumb kid, as soon as he was told he couldn't have something it became all he could think about.

There was a lunchtime club that met every week, for kids who weren't good enough to get into the actual classes but had some little talent or determination. One of the younger teachers who was always telling her classes that they were trying new kinds of things to find each students own special learning style, and who handed out dried fruit instead of candy, spent every Friday at the chalkboard trying to teach the very basics of alchemy to a cluster of kids who didn't really have the attention span or time to memorize anything week to week. Mick had sat in the bushes outside the open window and listened in until it got too cold for the window to be open. Once the winter started he'd taken out any books on alchemy from the library he could. He'd used all the 'fun study tips' that teachers were always forcing on him to try and make him care about stuff like history and math, and the weekend before Easter he'd changed his red crayon into an orange crayon.

After that proof that his teacher had been wrong, he yet again probably would've lost interest, but then Star Wars had come out, and Mick watched Luke Skywalker carve an array to control lightning into a metal cylinder and create a lightsaber, and he'd thought, "I bet I could make a fire sword."

He never actually makes a fire sword, though he still thinks it'd be pretty cool. But unlike some people who run around in giant parkas and snow pants to deliver evil villain monologues, he has some fucking dignity. He's never really learned how to control the fire with that level of precision, but give him a lighter and a pencil and he can create an inferno in two seconds flat. It's the only reason he hadn't gone down for the fire that killed his family. No arrays left at the scene, and as soon as the investigators found out he knew some alchemy, it was like any other methods of burning shit were off the table.

Mick hadn't really understood that fire alchemy was anything impressive until the social worker who'd taken him to the group home after the stint in juvie where he met Len had sat him down in her car and said, "I need you to be super honest with me, bud. Ok? This is important. The fire: your file says it's alchemy. That true? It's cool if it's not."

Mick had glared out the window at the parking lot and wished he was back inside with his new friend. "Yeah," he'd muttered. "I learned how to do it when I was a kid."

"Who taught you?"

"Nobody. I'm too dumb for real alchemy. I just figured my stuff out from a book, that's why I can't do much with it."

"Michael," she'd said, "Sorry. Mick. Has anybody ever told you how rare it is to do fire alchemy? It's one of the rarest forms of alchemy, because it's so difficult to master. Even the theories behind it aren't well understood."

Mick had hunched deeper into his hoody. "I can't do anything else," he says. "I'm not an alchemist or anything. Besides, nobody wants me playing with fire, right?"

"That's... true," she'd said, a little uncomfortable. "But I might be able to find you somewhere you could work more on your fire alchemy in a safe way, with guidance. How does that sound?"

"Like another bullshit rehabilitation program that's supposed to make me acceptable for normal people."

He hadn't seen that social worker again, but that'd been pretty normal. Seemed like they changed the people they sent in to "bond" with kids in the system as often as he changed his socks.

***

Len is the second person to see Mick's alchemy as something special. He hadn't mentioned it during their stint in juvie, though Len probably wondered why Mick was forced to use a typewriter for all their mandatory 'memorizing shit about history and biology will definitely make you less of a fuck up' classes, and why he got a pass on the dumb fucking art therapy sessions. Mick doesn't really appreciate it at the time, but Juvy was pretty lenient in their restrictions for alchemists.

A few days after they meet up as adults, (well, Len is almost eighteen, close enough) Mick lights his cigarette with one of the lighters he's scratched his array on and tosses a little ball of fire over to get Len's at the same time. Len doesn't fumble his smoke or anything that obvious, but his eyebrows do go up a couple of millimetres.

"That's new," he says.

"Not really."

Len frowns at the back alley spread out under the window. "I didn't know you were an alchemist."

"I'm not," Mick says, shrugging. "I can just fuck around with fire."

"Hmm," Len says, and ashes his cigarette still mostly intact. "I gotta go. I'll see you later."

Mick can't read him. Len had slipped back into his life different, the too-clever, too-mouthy kid Mick had protected in juvie vanished under thin T-shirts so tight he can count Len's ribs, thin wrists leading to elegant hands and bruised knuckles. Somewhere in the past couple years Len's clearly realized anything he can't get with a flutter of long lashes and a lick of his lips he can get with the pistol Mick can see under his leather jacket. He smokes cigarettes in place of meals and there's something ruthless and hard in the way he talks, his casual violence just as disconcerting as his casual flirtation. Mick has his own moldy basement suite and his own shitty job and his own side gigs as extra muscle, and he'd thought this made him an adult, figured this was about all he had to look forward to until somebody with a gun and an itchy trigger finger got lucky. Len's grown up, too, and Mick hadn't realized growing up can mean two entirely different things.

Mick feels dumb and awkward and too much like the brainless thug he pretends to be, and simultaneously like he's got some kinda duty of care to fucking wrap Len in a blanket and make him eat a vegetable or twelve. And yet Len had searched him out, had sidled up to him in the bar that they were both too young to be in like he was in some kinda gritty crime movie, all confidence and swagger, and then stood there staring at him in awkward panicked silence for a good five minutes before Mick had taken pity on him and said, "Hey, buddy. You got taller."

And Len hasn't left his side since then. So this sudden retreat knocks Mick off-kilter and uncomfortable, guilty like he's done something wrong. But even with all of that he knows Len is like a cat-- the tighter you hold on the harder he'll fight to get away.

Mick doesn't hear anything from him for about a week, but then he shows up at the construction sight where Mick's been working and shoves a new fake ID and a bag of McDonald's fries into Mick's hands without a word. Mick's pretty sure there's nothing wrong with his current fake ID, and as far as he's concerned McDonald's is on the same level as prison food, but he can understand an apology when he's presented with one.

***

A few years later is the first time he and Len get dragged in as adults for a six month stint for petty theft, which Lisa gleefully calls "being charged with dumbassery", and he figures out the real consequences of that Alchemist label on his file. Len goes into Gen Pop, and before either of them realize what's happening Mick has been transferred into solitary confinement, with his hands cuffed and a guard outside the door. There's a few other alchemists there, but after listening to them taunting the guards for a day Mick doesn't have any interest in making friends or enemies out of any of them. Len's dad is a cop and a shitty criminal, these sick fuckers and the asshole law-enforcement who took them down are probably the only kind of alchemists Len knew growing up. It explains a lot, actually.

Even their food is special.

"Heard a story about one of you freaks," a guard says, pushing a bowl of what they've been calling soup into the cell. "Drew one of those circles in her mashed potato's and turned everybody around her into sand."

Mick's... pretty sure that wouldn't work, like, scientifically or whatever, but he's also not real interested in pissing off his guards.

When they get out, Len's got some embarrassing peach fuzz that he's calling a beard and a kinda concerning network of Family connections. Mick's got permanent scars where the skin under his cuffs had got infected and a new level of hatred and disgust for the justice system.

"That was actually useful," Len says cheerfully, once they're sitting in the back of the city bus that will get them closest to the Snart residence. Mick is too fucked up at the time to realize Len's optimism is some kinda self-deceiving bullshit so he doesn't hate himself even more for abandoning Lisa.

"Glad you had a good time," Mick says, coldly.

"Fuck," Len mutters. "Listen, Mick. I'm not gonna let that happen again."

"Yeah? How you gonna stop it?"

Len shrugs, like it's nothing. "We're not gonna get caught."

And the thing is, he keeps his word. Mick doesn't go back in after that first time. Len does, a few times, gets out on good behaviour or bribes or just by being a charming, slippery bastard, but he always makes sure Mick gets away. It feels like betrayal, but the one time Mick tries to take some of the heat off of Len the other man doesn't speak to him for a month. He's the reason Lisa's got a record, too, and he thinks Len blames him for that for a long time.

He doesn't figure it out until they're both drunk as shit and a little fucked up on the street drug of the day because sometimes when you're trying to play nice with the Families you take the goddamn pills on offer and say "thank you" and keep fucking smiling so nobody thinks you're being ungrateful.

"You should'a just let me go on my own," Mick says, the two of them lying on the floor of his shitty apartment while Len shakes and shakes and they both ignore the shine of tears in his blown wide eyes. "Wasn't that important for you to show up in person. It's the least I could do for you after last year."

"What?" Len says.

"Christ, do I gotta say it? Lisa."

"Jesus, Mick. I don't blame you for that," Len says. "I was behind the fucking desk, I heard what went down. She made that choice. She knew what would happen to you if you got caught, decided it wasn't worth her clean record. There were no good choices."

"But she's your baby sister."

"I'm fuckin' aware," Len says. "But sometimes you gotta balance out who can take the hits and get back up. We're real good pain accountants over here, don't you worry. Family secret."

"If you're gonna throw up don't do it on the carpet," Mick says.

***

So when Len says he's done with Mick, that their partnership is over and he's leaving forever because Mick is untrustworthy and a liability and loves the fire more than he loves Len (that last is implied), what he actually means is "I'm going away for a year to learn an entirely new discipline for which I need an understanding of chemistry, physics, math, and mindfulness that I'm completely lacking, even though almost everyone who learns alchemy learns it as a little kid when your brain is like a sponge." And he does it because he wants to be able to keep Mick safe. He wants to be able to freeze everything so the fire goes out. So he can treat burns if he's not fast enough. It's classic Snart, and Mick doesn't have any fuckin clue what to do with that sort of crazy.

The goddamn speed kid just makes everything worse. Of course. Len doesn't tell him about the whole supervillain/superhero thing until he's got Mick stretched out on the couch at one of his nicer safe houses, belly full of pizza and beer in hand and a stolen notebook with a fucking universal heat array on the table next to him.

"Why do you gotta be like this?" Mick groans.

"The ice array was easy," Len says, like Mick hasn't said a word. "And this cold array is going to make so many things easier. Doors are just gonna... shatter."

"People, too," Mick says, just to see that combination of nauseated horror and professional glee twist Len's face up.

"The ice array is a little harder to apply, obviously, unless I want to be bending down to touch the ground in the middle of a fight, and with the Flash that'd be too time-consuming. But the cold array, I was thinking maybe some kind of gun, create a beam of ice crystals, and as long as there's that connection between me and my target, I can use the cold array to freeze it. Or them."

Mick stares at him. "You're making this more complicated than it needs to be," he says. Clearly this year apart has left Len's brain to veer off into weirder and weirder places without Mick there to stare judgementally at him until he settles down. "Do not invent a snow gun."

"It wouldn't be a snow--"

"Pretty sure that's exactly what you just described, Frosty. Anyway, you can use the air," Mick says, sighing and chugging the rest of his beer. "Particles and shit. Can probably target it from a few feet away, like a laser that gets big when it hits its target." That level of precision is the sort of shit Mick's never gonna be able to do, but Len's smart, and he's all about precision. He'll get it.

"Use... the air," Len says. "Fucking excuse me?"

Mick actually considers sitting up for a second, but he really can't be bothered. "Air's made up of stuff like anything else," he says.

Len sputters. "There're a few tiny fucking differences," he says, and then, "Wait one fucking second. Is that how your fire works?"

Mick shrugs as much as he can. "I guess so."

Len grabs the takeout menu and starts sketching furiously on the back of it. Mick wonders if he's distracted enough that he can switch the TV away from fucking hockey.

***

"The Cold Alchemist?" Mick says, deadpan. "I figure nobody's ever actually said this to you before, and I had kinda assumed they had, so maybe that's my fault, but Lenny. Pal. You don't actually live in a comic book."

"Learn some fucking European history," Len says. "It's perfect. We even live in a place called Central City. Mick, do not ruin this for me."

Mick looks at Lisa. "He's obsessed with this country from like, 150 years ago," she explains. "I think he read about it in The Reader's Digest at the dentist office. I guess if you were an alchemist and you joined the military you got a superhero name or some shit. I'm pretty sure the country didn't even exist by like, 1930. Possibly it's part of Drachma? Or it's one of those places that is definitely not part of Drachma as of the nineties, I don't know."

Mick groans. "You need a hobby that isn't gonna end up with one of us having to identify your corpse, because if I walk in there and your dead body's dressed in some sort of spandex costume, I'm telling them I never seen you before in my fucking life."

"It gets better," Lisa says. "Supervillains need thematically appropriate partners, too, Mick."

Fuck. "Does this mean I gotta start calling myself the Flame Alchemist? Or the Fire Alchemist?"

Len coughs. "Uhh," he says.

Mick spends the rest of the night reading a history book that Len pulls up from the library on his phone. Yeah, ok, so maybe he's not gonna name himself after any potential translations of some asshole who helped commit genocide and then took over a country. Mick never went back to the burnt out husk of his childhood home after the fire, but that doesn't stop it from featuring in his nightmares.

"The Heat Alchemist," Lisa says, managing to pack about an hour of mocking laughter into the tilt of her eyebrow.

"It's... great," Len says, and then, getting more animated, "Actually, it really is. We match. A dynamic duo, one might say."

"One might not say that if they wanna survive the morning," Mick says. Len continues grinning at him, and Mick has to walk away so he doesn't punch him in the mouth or ruffle his barely-there hair. See? Fuckin impulse control, just like the shrinks say. Maybe you wanna try it, Snarts.

***

"I need to have my arrays prepared in advance," Len says one morning, staring hard at his coffee cup. "If Mick can put his shit all over his lighters and our coffee mugs just out of laziness, I definitely need to be doing it for actual work-related reasons."

"Do not tattoo a fucking freezing array on your arm," Lisa says, flatly.

"Don't be ridiculous," says Len, who had definitely been planning to do exactly that.

"Gloves," Mick says. "Maybe since you're useless in the kitchen you can learn how to sew instead."

Len waves him off. "Of course I know how to sew." Mick winces. He's still just that tiny bit out of synch with the Snarts, even a month after he and Len made up. It's not like Mick grew up rich, but there was always enough money for a pack of T-shirts and jeans from Walmart, and his mom could fix a hole with a needle and thread in a snap. Mick doesn't apologize, but he refills Len's coffee without being asked.

***

"Lisa no," Len says, staring at his sister and completely ignoring the Ramon kid whimpering on the other side of the room. Fucking Christ, Mick's been having a bad fucking week in the brain department and even he knows this is how hostages get the chance to sneak away. Steal a fucking gold array? Forget that, steal a couple'a ADD diagnoses and Mick could change the world.

"Lisa yes," she says, smirking.

"That is, uhh, super illegal," the kid says. "I'm not giving you an array to turn stuff into gold. That's like, fuck up the economy, breakdown of society, fundamentally wrong on so many levels. I know you guys don't care about little things like right or wrong, but this is a whole new ballgame."

And the thing is, he's right. Mick never really gave a shit about any of the old alchemy laws, and even he feels a tiny bit uncomfortable with what Lisa's asking. It's a brief flicker, there and then gone because when has the economy or society ever given a shit about Mick? But yeah, it's still there. Sometimes, for all their brilliance, Mick is reminded that Len and Lisa hadn't ever given alchemy a single thought until two years ago.

Turns out the kid can get over his innate objections pretty quick, too, once it's his brother's hands at stake.

Anyway, that's how, despite all Len's dramatics and Mick's history, Lisa becomes the most wanted out of the three of them. Len hates it. Lisa thinks it's hilarious. Mick still isn't quite sure how he wound up with these dramatic motherfuckers as his closest friends.

***

"He called us the Rogues," Len announces, sweeping back into the safe house of the week like a teenaged girl just back from her first date. Mick and Lisa share a commiserating look over the bottle of bourbon they've also been sharing while they wait for Len to come back from his fucking... whatever he was doing with The Flash.

"Did you fuck him?" Lisa demands, and, well, Mick wasn't gonna ask right off the bat, but Lisa's always been more leery of Len's weaknesses than he has. Snart siblings aren't allowed a vulnerability unless the other one can compensate for it.

"Even better," Len says, alarmingly.

"I hate this family," Lisa says.

"We have an agreement," Len says, the word rich with self-satisfied insinuations. Christ, this whole supervillain thing has really gone to his head.

Len drapes himself over the back of the couch so he can rest a hand on both of their shoulders. He smells like dead leaves and sweat. Mick takes a long drink.

"What did you promise him?" Mick asks resignedly, because as soon as Len implied it was sexual he knew it wasn't.

"No killing," Len says, with a lot more cheer than that statement deserves. "We don't kill anybody unless there's no other choice, and I don't share his identity, and he keeps the cops off our back and doesn't take us to his secret meta-human prison where nobody will ever hear from us again!"

Mick twists so he can take a closer look at Len's expression, and yeah, he's manic but it's not all happiness.

"I don't love that," Lisa says thoughtfully, fingers going white around the neck of the bottle.

"Don't you?!" Len laughs, hand tightening hard on Mick's shoulder. "I can't imagine what concerns that could possibly fucking present for you, my dearest sister. Seems like a perfectly acceptable and normal way for a literal fucking child with actual superpowers to approach the justice that he's decided to take into his own hands!"

"Wait," Mick says, a cold shock of concern zapping through his buzz. "Is he really a kid?"

"No fucking way," Lisa says confidently. "Lenny's just having a mid-life crisis."

"Fuck off," Len says, still alarmingly upbeat. "He's legal. That doesn't mean he's not a fucking child."

"That's kind of exactly what that means, actually," Lisa says.

Mick sags back into the cushions and wrestles the bottle away from Lisa. Apparently he needs it more. "Does this mean you don't want to get in his pants anymore?"

Len launches himself away from the couch, pinballing over to the sink where he's hopefully going to dunk his fucking head in cold water, or find his own stiff drink. It doesn't sound like he's got any sort of plan brewing, and all that energy and repressed emotion isn't gonna stay harmless for long. "You would fucking think the illegal detainment and the age gap would do it, wouldn't you? You would really fucking think."

He comes back over without having done anything, and he looks so distressed that Mick reaches up and pats his head. "We're here for you, buddy."

Len bites his arm. Probably Mick should have predicted that.

***

Lisa and Len dive head-first into alchemy and don't come up for air. When Lisa had got the gold array Ramon had said, defiant and terrified, "It's super complicated to actually get it to work. Alchemy isn't just a press and play game, you know?"

Naturally, that meant she had it working in about 24 hours. She'd already memorized a bunch of basic arrays, the shit Mick's never bothered with, and once she's had to stretch her brain to get the gold to work she's goddamn unstoppable, a utility tool of alchemic transmutations for any and all situations. She makes herself a gun that shoots literal molten gold, because why be practical when you can be dramatic instead? The results are alternatively surreal or weirdly appealing when applied to objects. Kinda horrific when applied to people, but it's not like Mick has a leg to stand on. Len starts working on a way to create her array out of ice because it's not like she can crawl around drawing it out during a fight, and while the gold gun is usually the only weapon she needs, there are occasions where it'd be nice if they could just gild or transmute everything within a specific radius. It's also a lot less lethal for their opponents' gun to turn into a hunk of very expensive very useless gold than it is to get hit with liquid metal, and Len takes his new deal with Flash very seriously.

Len doesn't bother with a lot of the basics, says if he needs them he can figure them out fast enough, but instead he hunches down over his books and notebooks and phone screen with the same focus he gives to blueprints. He starts creating his own arrays, fine-tuning the ice and the cold, setting up two part reactions and practicing his transmutations until he can create an elaborate ten foot ice sculpture at the drop of a hat and freeze off somebody's hands and feet without the rest of them even feeling the cold. Len's arrays are real old European, graceful curves and everything set out in protractor perfect circles.

And yet even with all of that, neither of them can get the hang of the fire.

"I'm looking at your array," Lisa says, "and I know how all of these elements work individually, but how the fuck... I don't get it."

"The array is fine," Len argues. "It's the actual transmutation that's fucking impossible. You can't just... make atoms do that. You've gotta be manipulating the oxygen, except that ain't fucking possible, so it's gotta be something else."

Mick shrugs. "It just... works," he says. "I dunno. If I think about it too much I can't do it, it just sort of happens."

"You disgust me," Lisa says, flopping back dramatically in her chair. "Oh, I just *feel* the fire. We share a deep spiritual connection. You must *become* the fire. Fuckin' alchemists, you're all ridiculous."

Len nods. "The Flash's buddies are just as bad, and they're scientists. I would've expected better."

"Uhh," says Mick. "Hate to break it to you, but you guys are alchemists too. Good to see you're finally accepting how ridiculous you are, though. Acceptance is the first step to recovery."

Len punches him, hard, in the stomach. "Just because you can't appreciate the beauty in a well constructed narrative--"

"Is that what they're calling it these days."

"Anyway," Lisa says. "We're not alchemists. We just know some tricks. It's like, not everybody who can change a tire is a mechanic."

Mick looks between the two of them. "So those supervillain names..."

"Artistic licence," Len says immediately, painfully sincere.

"You guys are so stupid," Mick says, a little amazed. "You know who's not an alchemist? Me. One trick pony over here. But you two? Seriously?"

"Of course you're an alchemist," Len says, irritably. "You've been doing this since you were a kid."

"Really not how that works," Mick says, but he already knows he's not gonna win this argument.

***

Mick goes out of town for two weeks and Len kills his dad. Because of course he does. It was self-defence, no matter what the situation was, as far as Mick's concerned. Lisa apparently had a fucking bomb in her neck, and whatever he'd done to Len was bad enough that he was still pretty fucking dissociated by the time Mick got back, and whatever motherfucker would do that to his own kids deserves whatever he gets.

"I froze his blood," Len says, instead of "hi, buddy, how was your trip? You wouldn't believe the week I've had."

Mick goes over to the whiskey cupboard, but then decides against it, given the subject matter. He sits down beside Len, not too close, and waits.

"Lisa was safe. The Flash could have stopped him before he did anything else. But I just... looked at him. And it was so easy. It was like... I was beyond feeling, I'd moved above it. I had the array on my gloves, I just had to reach out and put my hand on his arm."

Mick carefully keeps his face blank.

"I was gonna just leave it," Len says. "But The Flash fucking-- Christ. The kid. He was there, he saw the whole thing, he could have stopped me. But he ran back to their lab and got your heat array. Not as good as yours, obviously, you've modified it since I stole the original, but it still works. He gave it to me-- it was just on paper. As soon as I activated it the paper burned up. Got the bastard's blood back up to body temp, nice and simple."

"No arrays," Mick says. "No proof. That's how it works for alchemists."

"That's fucking stupid," says Len.

Mick looks at him, here in his apartment wearing old jeans and a navy blue hoody instead of prison orange, and shrugs. "We take advantage of people being stupid all the time."

Len presses his lips together. "I broke our deal," he says. "With the kid."

Mick huffs out a breath. "Far as I remember, you don't kill anybody innocent. You don't kill anybody unless you've got no other choice."

"Exactly."

Mick waves a hand at Len, the couch, the whole room." Sure doesn't look like Flash thought you broke any of the terms."

What Mick doesn't say is that now that they're all labeled alchemists it's not just him who has to keep out of jail. Flash probably knew what he'd be sending Len into if he let him take the fall.

***

A little while before Christmas, they wind up in the irritating situation of deciding to hit a particular museum exhibit at about three minutes before some asshole alchemist with a grudge against The Flash decides it'd make a good place to take a quick time out to lick his wounds. Or start drawing out an array even as his nose is gushing blood, same thing.

"Oh come *on*," Len says, banging his head gently against a display case. "We were having such a nice evening."

"Personally, I still am," Lisa says, sliding a rolled up painting into her bag. Mick doesn't actually give a shit about this museum or its contents, but Len had had a grudge against the curator and Lisa had been bored, so here they fucking are. The Flash bursts in through the door to the stairwell, which Mick only knows because the door bangs against the wall half a second after the familiar lightning sparks across the room. There's obviously something wrong with the kid, because crazy alchemist guy is somehow able to get away from him and shove him hard enough that his head smashes into a display case.

"Does he really think he's gonna have time to finish a whole array?" Lisa says, amused as she comes to lean against the wall beside Mick.

Mick chuckles. Len doesn't.

"No," he says, suddenly very calm. He's staring at the display case that Flash had knocked out of alignment. "Look at the floor."

Lisa, clearly hopping right onboard his train of thought, yanks up the floor-length cloth hanging over one of the tables running down the centre of the room. "Shit," she says.

Across the room, Flash is back at it, and now Mick can almost catch a solid look at him, and it looks like his left leg is pretty much dead weight. The kid shouldn't even be able to stand, let alone fight.

"Fuck," Len says again, kicking displays aside as he studies the chalk on the floor that they'd been hiding. "Mick. Break the north window. Now."

Mick doesn't ask questions, just bolts over to the massive window, heavy duty reinforced glass with an alarm trigger, but Len doesn't seem like he cares about alarms at this point. Even as Mick's hurriedly sketching out his heat array on the glass, Len pulls a handgun from the holster at the small of his back and starts shooting the fucking wall.

"Well sure," Lisa says, bemusedly. "Get your rage out. Cheaper than therapy, I guess."

"Get to the window," Len says shortly between shots. Lisa comes over just as Mick is activating his array. He gestures her back a bit. 1400 degrees isn't the sort of temperature you wanna get too close to. There's a sharp crack, and with a groan water starts gushing out from the hole in the wall Len's bullets have made. Must've hit a pipe, which means he's got plans for a fuckload of ice. Mick is liking this plan less and less, and he doesn't even know what the plan is.

Len slams a hand into the growing puddle, and ice spreads rapidly across the whole floor, excluding where Mick and Lisa are standing. The alchemist starts yelling, and The Flash skids wildly into a wall. Len moves fast, grabbing the kid under the arms and slinging him over his shoulder like a sack of squirming, bloody potato's. He's not as graceful on ice as Lisa, but he slides over to them without dropping the Flash pretty smoothly.

The window shatters outward, and Len gives Mick a look.

"This is what we mean when we say 'fuckin' alchemists'," he says. "When I said break the window I meant use one of these particularly obnoxious statuettes to smash it."

Mick doesn't say a goddamn thing, because there're some levels of hypocrisy that just don't need words. The ice shoots up the wall, then out of the window.

"I hate this," Lisa says, calmly. "I really hate this."

"Let go of me, Snart," Flash snarls.

"Nope," Len says, and then throws Flash out of the window. Mick takes a halfstep forward, but then he realizes the ice is continuing out and away from the window in a gentle arc, and Flash is zipping down it on his stomach, feet first.

"I agree with her," Mick says, nodding to Lisa. "I hate you and I hate your plans."

"Go," Len snaps. "Fucking move."

Lisa dives out the window next, coasting gracefully on her feet, arms extended. Len shoves Mick hard. Mick glares, but out the fucking window he goes, on his ass like a little kid because he doesn't have a fucking deathwish. Lisa has already dragged Flash out of the way when Mick gets down, closely followed by Len. The landing isn't exactly gentle, the ice slide getting steeper and steeper closer to the pavement, but Len doesn't give them any time to recover, just chivvies everybody into an alley and starts forming up an ice wall around them.

"Lisa," he says shortly, "my ice ain't gonna do much. You need to reinforce this."

Lisa's already got a can of spray paint out, faster than chalk, and the ground starts to shake under them as gold creeps up over the ice.

"Stay down," Len says to Mick and Flash.

"Seriously, what the heck?" Flash demands.

"That museum's gonna go up like a fucking firecracker any second now," Len says.

"Chlorine. Oxygen. Nitrogen," Lisa says.

"Among others. And it was a multi-step array."

"Big boom," Lisa says.

"Jesus Christ," Flash says.

The museum explodes.

Len and Lisa keep on transmuting, trying to maintain barriers across the entrance to the alley and over their heads. Mick hunkers down beside where Flash is lying and stares at the bricks of the building beside them. He's not gonna look at the fire.

"Shit," says Flash.

"Well, on the bright side, I'm pretty sure he's super dead," Lisa offers.

Flash groans. Len straightens up and sways dangerously. Mick jumps to his feet, putting an arm around him and holding on even as he bristles like a petulant cat. He's not gonna haul Len's unconscious ass back to the safe house just because he doesn't want to show a little weakness in front of his crush.

"Keep a better eye on your surroundings, kid," Len says sharply, glaring down at Flash. Mick hopes Flash knows him enough to know he gets mean when he's scared.

"I had it under control," Flash says, automatically. Len's mouth drops open.

"Scarlet. What, exactly, do you think the words 'under control' actually mean? I'm interested, because I suspect you're working with a flawed definition, and I'd hate for you to continue operating under that kind of misapprehension."

"What?" says Flash.

"You were basically gonna die," Lisa says, loudly, before Len can start. "If you're gonna be fighting alchemists you should have a basic understanding of what they can actually do and how they do it, or at least what to look out for. You can do online chemistry courses if you never made it that far in high school. Also, if you keep using that leg while it's still fucked up, you're just gonna make it worse and probably cause yourself permanent injury. I'm speaking from experience." She kicks a chunk of concrete out of her way and starts to head in the direction of where they'd parked their bikes. "Anyway, TL;DR, we saved your ass, you're welcome."

"I didn't fail chemistry!" Flash says, indignantly, like that's the most important part of that conversation. Len snorts a laugh, but when Mick looks at him he refuses to explain.

"You got somebody coming for you, kid?" Len asks. He's starting to slur a little, which means any normal person would've passed out by now. But the Snarts are used to operating on less than nothing.

"Yeah," Flash says. "I'll be ok."

Which is great, because Mick's not sure what exactly Len had thought they were gonna do about it if he didn't have people.

Once they're out of the alley Mick leaves Len propped up against the wall while he melts the ice slide. Gotta protect Len's plausible deniability. And his dignity. Especially in connection with this goddamn clusterfuck.

There's not much he can do about Lisa's gold, but if it's Flash's little science buddies coming to pick him up, Ramon will probably be willing to alchemize the gold into something a bit less damning.

Back at the warehouse where they'd been planning this job, Len staggers over to an old office chair and slumps backwards, head hanging over the back and arms dragging limp at his sides. Lisa brings him a beer, because even twenty years out the Snarts' ideas of caretaking are fucked. Mick throws a protein bar at Len's head, closely followed by a bottle of water. They both collide with his forehead with deeply satisfying thunks.

"I can't believe you built a fucking ice slide," Mick says.

"I can't believe you want to teach The Flash alchemy," Lisa says. Mick's entire life flashes before his eyes.

"You could at least let me have my moment of dramatic idea reveal," Len says.

"No," says Mick. "Lenny."

"He needs to be able to defend himself."

"Uhh, a variety of failed fuckin heists say he's doing just fine with that."

"There's a happy medium between teaching him some basic fucking chemistry and situational awareness and trying to teach your arch nemesis alchemy," Lisa says.

"Also, can you just fuck him and get it out of your system?" Mick says.

"Please," Lisa agrees, vehemently.

"You provide some interesting suggestions," Len hums, but it's definitely the voice he uses when members of his crew think they have ideas about how to carry out a plan. Mick wants to argue further, but when Len spins the chair and he gets a look at him, he's smiling the most honest smile since he killed his dad. And how the fuck is Mick supposed to say no to that?