strongerthanyouknow | Unnamed Legends/Avengers Verse

The Waverider isn't foreign to having the every now and again visitor, picked up in the middle of a mission. Dragged along for one. Dropping off, like so much chaff or a wayward puppy. The Avengers aren't exactly that, but at the end of the day The Avengers aren't Sara's concern. Her people are. Time is.

Cleaning house, and sweeping the people out, brings with it a sort of peace.
Another check in the books, that means they are at the end of the mission.

Means they can pretend for five or ten minutes, they're normal. Eat a damn meal all together, without everyone running off helter-skelter, guns at blazing. Means she can get some rest, in a bed really, really not made for three, but they've found ways to make it work, and there's nowhere else she'd be. Just a few more loose ends and mission notes to tie up. Then, a cursory glance over the timeline to see what and where Gideon thinks they should be headed next, and she'll be done with today.

[ For Bucky's Request To Come Aboard & Steve/Sara Conversations About This ]

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Liar, her eyebrows say at those words, and Leonard all sprawled in her chair.
It is a comfy chair, but even more, it's about being able to steal her chair, her, now.

(The biggest problem is that really she's going to be thinking about him, like this, all afternoon now.)

"Yeah." Sara says it definitively, dropping a hand on her hip, and staring down at Leonard in her seat. The one most people actually didn't take. Though they did sometimes take every other available space in this room. The chairs. The wall. The floor. The table. The stairs. Not even Mick, who basically lived in here when she was and wasn't here. Only Leonard. And how true has that been for years. "I'm sure."

"None of us have really turned out all wrong in this, entirely, yet, have we?"

"Not entirely, maybe." Anything less than entirely.... Well. Could any of them ever dare to call themselves Legends if they were anything else than whatever their own, personal brand of wrong may be, have been at any point, in all their time here? Probably not.

There's a moment--where his eyes slide down to the desktop, fingers drum an idle, single beat across the arm of the chair he stole--that all pretense or facade disappears entirely from his face. He isn't looking at her as he tries to decide which words, and in what order, should come out of his mouth next.

"....Why?" There's a second, maybe two, before he continues. "There's always a reason, right? When you--" A pause, and a hard blink, jaw tensing, as he hates every ounce of his personal thought pattern actually making it into his speech. "we pick up someone new. Something...specific, less generic than 'we can help'."

Finally, his eyes slide back up to her face as he echoes: "Why?"

Being alone. It cuts both ways. So it means, when Leonard decides to spring himself on her, they're alone and there aren't any distractions. It, also, means, when he freezes up, slips up, they're still all alone and there aren't any other noises, other voices, in the space to drown it out.

The way Sara's eyes narrow at the you. The screech of pause after it is alarmingly loud, echoding, and Sara's weight holds mostly on nee foot while she stares at him, trying to figure out what it is he isn't saying. About her. Even as he shifts to a them, that implies the team, she already isn't listening to that. He's asking her. Her, only. Why she made the decision. Why she said yes when he asked. Why she's moving him in.

There's something a little abrasive about it, that Sara can't lay her finger on. Or she can. Or it's all about the thing that has always most separated her from everyone on the Waverider. Even Leonard and Mick. Maybe the part where Leonard rolled straight through that stammer cover without a point at it, or maybe the part where he doesn't even look up until the end, until the very last second, like it's something he can't escape at the end.

Sara's mouth is definitely closer to a line, and there's a growing setness to her shoulders, and maybe there's a little-edged bluntness to the answer that comes out. "Because Bucky can't get the help he needs from a couple boy scouts and a day drinking playboy, no matter how much his team might want to help him, and he knows it, and they know it."

There's a distinct tension that he can't ignore, however subtle, in the narrow of her eyes, the line of her mouth, and he knows, without ever seeing her come to that particular look and when, that it was him. That slip of his inner thought processes slipping out into the verbal noise. He didn't exactly mean it. Not really. Not like that. Not in the way that might be easiest to read or assume. But...

"He needs--" You. though there's no pause to indicate anything else was ever a thought at all. "a bunch of rejects from the mountain of misfit toys." In the same way that they had all come to need each other, after agreeing to board this ship in the first place. "That's all it is?" Not spoken like he necessarily has ideas on what else it could be, just that it could be anything else at all, and the conflict that draws up under his skin.

"Worked for you," Sara pops off all airiness, and even a little dismissively calling him on the irony of his words, as she turns toward one of the consoles. Nothing like actually dismissing him, given there's no finiteness to it, in that question at the end that couldn't really have any other answer could it?

Sara's not looking for puppies and kittens to adopt,
but the Waverider attracts certain types like it's a magnet for it.

She can't really complain. She found her place, when she'd never known she could have one.
Had both died and been reborn certain that was off the table for her entirely after her choices.

She's kind of annoying when she's right. He wonders if she knows. "Yeah, I guess so." The same way it worked for everyone on this ship. But there's an edge every time a new face appears and makes itself a body taking up space on the Waverider, and Leonard has never been anything less than resistant to change.

Leonard isn't sure he can even completely put a word or name to the specific unease that has lead him here, to be having this conversation with her. Something just rubbed him all wrong about this new guy.

But if he trusts anything in the world, Sara's judgment is generally one of the sorts of things he could place money on. So for now, maybe, he'll just let it drop and see where these cards fall after Bucky has time to settle. Not that there is ever much time for calm on this ship for long, anyway.

Unnamed Legends/Avengers Verse

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