Author's Note: This is 11 chapters and it's already DONE! Hope you enjoy. Many thanks to Pir8grl!

Please note that this is post-breakup Sara and Ava, and Ava is a bit of an antagonist. (Honestly, I find her more fascinating that way.) Doesn't mean things won't change, however...

Leonard careens down the corridor, alternately pissed and alarmed at his own disorientation and weakness. The alarms that are screaming all around him don't help, making his already battered skull ache and his head swim. He thought he'd handled the lock rather masterfully with his makeshift tools, but he must have set something off.

He can hear yelling, changes direction, bounces off a wall he would have sworn had jumped out at him, keeps running. Or staggering. Whatever. What matters now was that he's out. Away from Druce's sadism, away from the room where he'd been kept for…how long? He's out, and he can figure out what was going on, find somewhere safe, contact the…the others. Find out how long it's been. Druce had taunted him with the suggestion that it'd been longer than he thought, but…

Leonard rounds another corner then and came face to face with two people, a tall man and a short woman, both wearing dark suits. They gape at him, taken aback by his presence even though the alarms are apparently telling them of a fugitive on the loose, and he takes advantage of it, barreling through them and onward.

The woman tries to grab him and connects with his left wrist. Leonard yelps even as he yanks it away, even as he curses the weakness of the pained noise. The open wounds throb, the pain so sharp that it makes him reel dizzily, and he rather distantly thinks that he'll definitely be leaving DNA evidence behind him. Doesn't matter. He has to get out of here.

His usual stellar sense of direction avails him little here, though, in this thoroughly unknown place, and he's disoriented enough that he isn't even sure he isn't going in circles. But…

Then Leonard turns another corner, looking back over his shoulder, and crashes into another person. They almost topple—if he'd been managing more speed, they would have, but his limping stagger had been getting slower and slower—and while Leonard tries to pretty much course-correct immediately and keep going, he's just about tapped out. The other person yelps, and they get tangled up in each other. Leonard gets a brief impression of blond hair and limber muscle as they sort themselves out, as he pulls back and sucks in a pained breath, planning to bolt again.

And then they're staring at each other, there in that bland office-building hallway with alarms blaring all around them.

Leonard's head spins. This isn't real, it can't be, but it seems real, and…

"Sara?" he breathes, disbelieving.

If it isn't her, it has to be her doppelganger, her clone. ("Her daughter?" whispers the part of him that's silently terrified that he's simply missed far too much time.) The woman across from him looks a little older, maybe, but not much, and that's…that's surely recognition in her eyes, right?

Recognition and complete and utter incredulity.

"Leonard," she breathes in return, staring at him in a way that he can't quite read, especially not now, with his head aching and his equilibrium completely and utterly shot. "How…when…"

Sara, his Sara, the one he'd known before the Oculus—it must be, it must—reaches out a hand as if to place it on his jaw. But Leonard winces despite himself, more because of the scruffy, unkempt, mostly gray beard he knows is there, and her hand drops away.

And then she's all business, uncertainly hidden, and that's OK, that's what they need right now.

"You're trying to get out of here?" she asked Leonard, as if needing confirmation.

"Wherever here is," he agreed.

Sara reaches down to grab his hand—fortunately getting that and not his wrist. "Come with me."

About three weeks ago

"No." Sara shakes her head, staring at Ava, Time Bureau director, her ex, the woman she still cares for—the woman who'd just said those unbelievable, awful words. "No. No. No."

The rest of the room is mostly still, and her words drop into the silence like it's a pool of still water. She'd heard intakes of breath from both Mick and Ray, who are flanking her, the only two other original Legends remaining, but rather to her surprise, neither of them moves or say more. Maybe they couldn't quite believe what they were hearing, either.

Behind them, Charlie—she thought it was Charlie-says something quietly, and Nate answers her. Zari is quiet, too, and in the tiny corner of Sara's mind that's always keeping tabs on the powder keg that is her team, she thinks that's odd, if perhaps better in the moment.

John is off doing…John things, and he's taken Nora with him, so at least that point—those points—of potential trouble are out of the game, Sara thinks—and she's perfectly aware that she's doing this mental rundown of her troublemakers to keep herself from screaming at the woman in front of her, who's staring back at her with an expression that suggests she just doesn't get Sara's reaction.

"I know Director Hunter didn't want the Time Bureau to become the old Time Masters," Ava says carefully, leaning back against her desk and folding her hands in what Sara recognizes as her "official director pose." "Including having the tools they had to…to do their job." She scans them. "But this time, the tools would be in better hands."

Her gaze fixes on Sara, who's pretty sure she still looks horrified, and the expression turns just a touch beseeching. "Sara. Think of the good we could do! No more running around trying to clean up messes—we stop the messes from happening first."

Ava shakes her head then. "No more disasters like the one that took out so many agents earlier this year," she adds softly. "No more."

Sara still can't find words. But Ray does, finally.

"You're talking about rebuilding the Oculus," he says, his voice disbelieving. "You really are. What…how could you?"

As if Ray's words finally convince the others that this is real, Mick finds his voice too. "Snart died to blow that thing up," he snarls, stepping forward, and Sara almost senses rather than sees the others moving, as if ready to pull him back—or help him, she's not sure—if he moves farther.

This is already so very, very out of control, but Sara holds up a hand anyway. Mick subsides, but she can feel him simmering at her side, and she can't blame him, she can't, this…

"How did this even come about?" she asks, trying to sound reasonable and not like she wants to scream. "Rip set up all his rules and plans so that this would never happen. You told me that." She takes a deep breath. "The Oculus is…is gone. It blew up. Who even told you it was possible to recreate it?"

Ava studies her, then nods, seeming to decide to continue although she does give the others a dubious look. "About a month ago," she says, lifting her chin, "a young Time Bureau agent decided to use his new time courier to visit the place where, in a way, all this started."

Silence. Then: "The Vanishing Point," Ray says quietly.

Sara shudders. She's pretty sure Mick does too. But Ava continues. "What's left of it," she acknowledges. "But when he returned to the Bureau…" She pauses, then nods again. "Well, he brought something—someone else with him. Someone who apparently had been stuck in time itself, until the time courier created a portal."

Mick says something they can't quite hear. Sara reaches out and puts a hand on his arm, but she doesn't stop staring at Ava. The other woman turns to the door behind her and says something, and the door opens, two armed agents escorting in an apparent captive and…

It can't be. It…

It isn't.

The tall man who steps in the doorway isn't a long-lost, snarky, missed crook. He's something Sara had dreaded seeing almost as much as she'd hoped to see Leonard.

"Well," Zaman Druce, former head of the Time Council, says smoothly. "Fancy meeting you again." His lips twitch just a little. "I rather figured you'd all have managed to write yourselves out of history quite some time ago." He scans them. "Or perhaps some of you did. Such a…pity."

There's a beat of silence…and then Mick roars, bringing his heat gun up and pointing it at Druce even as Nate and Zari move to grab their teammate's arms and Charlie starts cursing. Ray does as well, using language Sara has never heard from him before, and Ava steps forward too, in front of Druce, as the time agents look like they're not sure who to point their weapons at.

Only the former Time Master and Sara don't move, and only they are silent.

But if looks could kill, Sara knows, she'd have one more notch on her scabbard.

"Do you know what he did?" she asks Ava quietly as the din begins to die down, and Nate and Ray steer Mick out of the room at Sara's request, the others going with them. "Do you know?"

The director looks a bit defensive but more angry. "He's trying to make amends," she protests sharply. "Surely you understand that!

Sara tries to act like those words, which certainly do come from a place of deep understanding of Sara herself, don't sting. "His actions killed thousands," she responds, a little sharply herself. "Including Rip's wife and child. And…and a member of our team."

She's made a practice out of pretending Leonard Snart had never existed, over the past four years—especially since they'd returned his apparent earlier self to the timeline. But the flash of unexpected and painful hope from a few minutes ago is still singing in her veins, and damn it…

"And so did your teams' actions, when you blew up the Oculus and the Vanishing Point," Ava points out, in what Sara privately thinks of as her "I'm-by-far-the-most-logical-one-in-this-room" voice. She's reaching for control of the situation again, and part of Sara wants to do everything possible to rip it away.

But it won't work. Ava is convinced of the rightness of this, at the moment, and not even Sara can convince her otherwise.

The director is waving earnestly at Druce, who's wearing a dignified expression that makes it seem like he is indeed the martyred leader out to make amends here.

"He's not at liberty to wander," she continues, "and…" She pauses, sighs, looks at Sara again as if imploring her to listen. "He has so much information. So many things we didn't even know, things Director Hunter never told us. We'll do it the right way this time. We won't let it corrupt us. You need to help us…me."

Sara just stares at her, until Druce speaks up again.

"Yes, 'Captain' Lance," he says, and Sara thinks she's the only one who hears both the mocking quotes around the title and the hint of amusement in his tone. "Why don't you want to do the right thing?" A pause. "Unless you're afraid you're the one who will be corrupted. After what your people did."

It would be so easy to put a knife through his throat. But…

That's not you anymore.

"Ava," Sara says instead, ignoring Druce, focusing on her ex. "Have the time agents found…anyone else in the timestream, around the Vanishing Point?" She refuses to look at the Time Master, refuses to see his knowing smirk.

Ava just looks puzzled. "No," she says simply. "Not at all." She spreads her hands out before her. "The odds that Master Druce himself somehow survived were…astronomical."

Sara nods, although that "Master Druce" turns her stomach. Then she meets Ava's eyes one more time, letting regret and resolution both into her gaze as she takes a step back.

Despite everything Sara's said, the other woman still looks surprised, even a little hurt. "You won't help?" she says, tone stunned. "You won't help me bring the Oculus back, even with all the good it could do? The people it could save?"

"No," Sara tells her simply, turning away, "we won't. Not now. Not ever."

The armed agents escort Druce back to the small suite of rooms that serves as his prison, then, leaving the Time Bureau director sitting at her desk, staring out the windows.

It's not a bad prison, as prison go, Druce thinks to himself as they usher him in, closing the door and looking it securely behind him. Not so comfortable a living space as he's used to, of course, but so much better than the endless nothing of where he'd been in the timestream. And as he insinuates himself with various higher-level agents—he's been finding them, the one by one—it becomes even more comfortable.

Of course, it's not really a prison at all, not anymore. Not that his captors know that.

His lips twitch again, and he pushes up the voluminous sleeves of his robe to show a time courier strapped to his arm, above his elbow where it won't slip down, just in case.

These foolish time agents, this so-called Time Bureau created by Hunter, didn't keep nearly good enough track of their toys. And while Druce's origins are so far older than Hunter's that he can barely remember the time period, he'd also been a mere street thief, once upon a time. ("Kleptai!" someone shouts in the dim recesses of memory.) It'd been child's play to acquire one.

It's been most useful. He needs to figure out how to use it for more, soon, but not right now. There will be time.

He is, after all, a master of it.

Druce steps into his sleeping quarters, shutting the door firmly behind him. He's already "trained" his captors to respect his privacy while he's closed off in here—and whether or not Hunter's protégé, the blond woman who tries so hard to pretend that she's not more than a trifle uncertain in the job, realizes it, she wants the knowledge (and the control) he has so desperately that he already has a powerful hold over her. He will be undisturbed.

And so will his "guest."

The niche, closed off by another door from the sleeping quarters, isn't much bigger than a closet. Druce, humming to himself, jimmies it open, then smiles thinly as said guest winces away from the light.

"Well, my friend," he tells the man there, a man bound by his wrists by the ceiling hook probably meant to hold a light fixture. A man who, like himself, had fallen out of the timestream thanks to a time courier portal—but into a trap laid by Druce, and not just the confused regard of a group of clueless time agents. "I saw your teammates today. Some of them, anyway. Seems others hadn't survived." He pauses. "Shall I tell you which ones?"

Silence. The man's eyes remain closed.

"No? Ah, well." Druce considers him a moment longer. "You are going to help me, you know," he tells the man. "You'll have no choice in the matter. I'm going to need all the temporal energy you've absorbed, and your friends don't even know you're alive."

Nothing.

Druce shrugs and closes the door again. He pushes his sleeve up again, taps something out on the time courier, and then steps through the portal that appears.

All is silence for a minute or two.

Then Leonard Snart opens his eyes.

They're cold, and blue, and very, very determined.