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[ukan]

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[kissthatgoodbye]

"Everyone dies." He means it to sound firm, it's obvious from the way he almost frowns when it doesn't, when he tries again. "Everyone dies. Take what time you have here together, don't spend it fighting because you don't know what else to do, don't waste it because you can't grow the fuck up, and be grateful you get to have it at all."

[ukan]

"They do. And they should." Lark turns a little to face him. "But if you got the chance to save me, I want you to take it. And... If you need to save someone- I want you to do that, too."

First. Instead of freeing Lark. He swallows hard. "We'll all still due, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to feel the loss. I'll feel it when you're gone."

[kissthatgoodbye]

Alec, in turn, leaps on that like Lark has tossed him a rope in the middle of a frozen lake.

"That's the difference. Snart doesn't want it - or says he doesn't - and you do. I would do whatever I had to do in order to bring you back because I know that's what you want." Which is as far as he gets when he trips up on the notion of when he's gone, when he realizes Lark does know what name he isn't saying.

"I have a plan for Biggs," Alec says, firmly, for both of them: to try one more time to convince himself he didn't just give up, to assure Lark he doesn't want to need him to stay for a deal someday, that he hasn't changed his mind.

[ukan]

Lark doesn't have to study him hard before he knows he believes Alec, completely and without much complication. Much.

"Does it help the loss to know you have a plan to save him?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

He considers stealing the towel back. He brushes at his hair with his fingers instead, then picks at the sleeves of his hoodie, then shakes his head.

"Nothing will until it's done," he says quietly but clearly. "I don't know why this feels different. I don't know why this one is so hard to carry."

[ukan]

"Because it's Biggs?" Is Lark's best guess, even though it's obvious. "Because the situation has changed drastically multiple times since you heard him die?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

"Because maybe I don't have the right?" Alec adds onto the list. "Because maybe I don't care? Because it keeps getting dragged out by other people? Because there's too much unknown? Because it was humans? Because a lot of us died but this time I got to see the body?"

The problem isn't that Alec can't imagine a reason. It's that there are too many options.

[ukan]

Lark hums and now his soda is empty, and he lies down. He shifts, fidgets, wants to put his head on Alec's lap and makes a soft sound, a wordless request. "What part of all that does Snart's situation prick the most?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

Alec is perfectly capable of making himself look relaxed, at rest, as long as no one is touching him. He is a master at fooling every sense but touch, the one thing no one at Manticore ever wanted to do unless it was necessary. He doesn't actually notice the sound, except it's become so familiar by now for Lark to lay against him that Alec looks over when he doesn't, his near arm already raised out of the way.

"I told him to stop wasting his chance to make his death easier on the person he's leaving behind," Alec finally says. There was a reason for it, of course, but also an undercurrent of bitterness. "It's just - it's Biggs, Lark." Something falls out from under his voice, some crucial pillar, some weight bearing beam. "It's Biggs, and I don't know what to do with all of it if I don't bury it."

[ukan]

The moment Alec's arm raises, Lark slides under it, tucking himself in with Alec's hand on his chest.

The advice Alec gave Cold is good advice, maybe the best advice. It's not unlike what Lark tries to do, subconsciously but persistently, for Alec: to make life a little happier so there are fewer regrets when one of them is gone.

"What does 'all of it' mean when it's Biggs?" He asks, to keep Alec thinking, talking, introspecting.

[kissthatgoodbye]

At first, Alec doesn't react beyond letting Lark settle in closer. Then he's dropping his arm a bit, though, and then his fingers are brushing against Lark's skin, and then he's actively holding on. Then a little tighter, pulling Lark against him while he searches for words.

(The happiness that Lark shows Alec day by day just makes him want to keep his deathgrip on it tighter, makes it just that much harder to imagine going back the way he came.)

"He's not here, he's not in the world, he's - I saw him hanging, Lark, I saw - I had my hands on the men that did it and I just - that life will kill us, every single one of us, strung up like gutted deer -"

[ukan]

"This is why you have a plan," Lark says, first of all, his voice steady and secure and just a touch mesmerizing. "You're in a position to change that. You're not going to stay where they can get at you, and neither is Biggs."

But second of all, he rubs his thumb along the outside of Alec's wrist. "But that doesn't mean your grief is any less real."

[kissthatgoodbye]

"Going to," Alec echoes, very much in the tone of what good is going to when so much can change, but he shakes his head and stops himself there, watching Lark's thumb.

"I don't even know what that means. Grief. I don't -" But he lets that soothing motion pull him down enough to trail off, lets Lark's weight against him anchor him here.

And quietly says something he didn't know if he ever would: "She didn't die, Lark."

[ukan]

Lark's brow furrows a little, his mind supplying a scant few options as to who 'she' is. "What do you mean?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

"I mean she didn't die," he says again, like that explains everything, when really he just can't find traction.

"The bomb went off, but I guess she made it clear of the car but not the percussive wave, and - she was in a coma, that whole time."

[ukan]

"A coma doesn't seem much different," Lark says, because it's true. It's just a prolonged form of grief; it's just harder to move on from.

"Did she ever wake up?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

Something flickers in Alec's expression, something difficult to pinpoint; no, it's not much different, except that it is. Except that he gave the memory of her up in part because it was useless to fight and lose over a dead woman.

"No," he says, as careful as setting the flag on top of a castle made of stacked cards, his voice toneless as the same: "And she's dead now."

[ukan]

Lark has Alec's hand in a grip that isn't crushing, but is certainly former than usual.

"What do you think about most when you think of her?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

Alec lets him keep it, lets him lay on him, lets him prod him without pushing back. He lets Lark's presence anchor him to this moment, while he goes searching for the rest. It's like having to touch each nail in a wall without knowing which one is hooked up to the electric shock.

"That moment she pulled back from me on the staircase. The last time she touched me." A beat. "It was a slap."

[ukan]

Lark keeps his thumb running slow circles over Alec's Knicks, the same one that has split Lark's lip, that has been sliced open by Lark during sparring. And during a real fight.

"If she had been able to know the man I know she would have regretted that." Because Lark, of course, thinks Alec hung the moon (as his grandmother would have said) and has never understood any disagreement from other people. But he does mean it logically in Rachel's case. If she could care for Simon she could care for Alec. For Knox.

[kissthatgoodbye]

It isn't the first time Lark has said something like that, and not the first time Alec hasn't really known what to do with it; it sounds like something Lark would say to someone he's trying to work under the guard of, but the times it comes out don't fit with that. Here, now, believing that would be a comfort, yes, but Alec knows it's not true. He heard her say as much herself.

"I don't think that's true," he says slowly. "Her father hated me. He was right to. She did when she was here. I just..." He should have been faster, then, to catch hold of her. Why hadn't he been faster? "It still hasn't even occurred to me to make a deal for her."

[ukan]

It is the sort of thing he'd say to someone if the moment was right, if they would let him closer for it. But the peculiar thing about saying it now is not that he means it, but how much he means it.

"She hated what happened. She hated a situation that she felt you had more control over than you did. She hated from a very narrow perspective because she, like all the people in your PTSD group, never knew what it was like to have no options. But if she had been in a place where she could have known you like I know you..." he shrugs slightly. It's a foregone conclusion that she would have adored Alec's laughter and his quick mind and his improbable, deeply buried streak of loyalty.

But that's not the important thing here. Lark only added that to give Alec a little bit of a buffer between his admission and Lark's next question: "Why haven't you wanted to make that deal?"

[kissthatgoodbye]

Of all the people Alec has been, Simon Lehane was hands down the softest - and probably will ever be the softest. It was a peculiar time in Alec's life, when he had been as genuinely eager to please as he ever had, when he hadn't yet learned to hate like he does now. In some ways he'd been at his most dangerous: capable but without the discipline to follow through, and the ability to turn what should have been a simple, straightforward operation into a clusterfuck that served no one and nothing and caused only pain all around.

Pain, and the sharper, harder man under Lark's hands now. "I only see two options for her as I knew her, assuming there is no situation I would have been able to lie to her indefinitely: either the one that is, where she hates me, or the one where she pities me." And he would much rather have hatred than pity.

So maybe that's it. Maybe that's why he can't ask the Admiral for her back. But it doesn't quite fit right: "I don't know. I just... haven't. Even though I've forced myself to consider it, I just don't."

[ukan]

Lark makes a soft, thoughtful sound, believing what he's told but not quite buying it at the same time. "If you did bring her back, what life would she have?" Maybe it's just that Alec doesn't see a point to sacrificing for her when she'd have relatively little waiting for her.

Or maybe it's that Rachel is a better lesson if she's dead. That's the whole reason Lark hasn't even wondered what it would be like to have Brad back. But he honestly isn't sure Alec is as ruthless or self-centered as Lark is; he can't quite see that reason being the one that keeps Alec from bringing her back.

[kissthatgoodbye]

The hole in Alec's life where Rachel had been is one of the messiest left to him. It is gaping and raw and ragged, twisted and deformed where it's healed over, infected where it isn't. So much of that is because of PsyOps and what she cost him to love; so much of it is not knowing, and he still knows so little.

He pulls one leg up tighter to himself, his muscles tense as he considers, as he lets Lark pin him with questions, as he tries to breathe while he thinks about her.

"Her father is alive. Manticore is dead and I don't think White cares about her father's work, so she'd be safe. Maybe college after all. Maybe scholarship." An entire life in the light, away from the one Alec lived in the dark.