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i.
The portal from the Time Bureau opened directly into Sara's bedroom on the Waverider.
Yay, thought Sara, rubbing her palms against the thighs of her jeans, home field advantage.
Ava stepped through. "Hey."
"Ava. Hi."
"You look - " Ava ducked her head " - really nice."
Sara had changed into fitted jeans and a top, with her hair in a loose ponytail; the bikini from their aborted Aruba beach vacation was half kicked under her bed.
"Well, it's not the cowboy look - " a blush tinged Ava's cheeks, something Sara noted, looking forward to some bedroom role play in her near to middling future " - but thanks. I really like your new look, too."
Ava wore her hair loose but not curled, and was wearing the same navy blue greatcoat she'd had on in the Old West.
Sara took a careful step closer and curled her hand around Ava's bicep, digging her fingers into the soft wool.
"I like this. It makes you look like you joined the Navy in 1860."
"I did," said Ava with a small, pleased nod. "There was an anachronism and, well, I think I'm basically an admiral."
"Ma'am," said Sara breathily, pressing close to Ava and looking up through her eyelashes.
Ava laughed, which was definitely one of the top two reactions Sara had been shooting for. Ava was beautiful when she laughed, happier, and so Sara would take it.
Sara arched an eyebrow and tipped her head towards the bed. "D'you want to lie down?" she said, exactly as Ava said, "We need to talk."
Oh.
"Could we sit, maybe?"
"Um, yeah." Sara looked around. There was only one chair in here, but she supposed she could drag one in from the next room.
But Ava had already perched on the edge of Sara's carelessly made bed and was looking at her expectantly.
"Yeah. Okay." Sara sat next to Ava and cleared her throat; she had been the one to break up with Ava in the first place, she could pay her dues and have the feelings talk. "If this is about what I said before you left--"
"Sara, no--"
"Then didn't say in Salvation--"
"It's not about--"
"I meant it, when I said that I loved you." Sara fisted the bedclothes; she was the White Canary, she was a Legend. She had just taken part in a messed up psychic orgy with her five weirdest friends, and defeated a time demon by means of a giant Cuddle-Me-Beebo. She could screw up her courage and tell the same woman that she loved her for the second time in three days. "I love you."
Ava still didn't say it back, but she did kiss Sara, suddenly and entirely.
I guess we're skipping the feelings talk then, thought Sara, dragging Ava close and pushing her hands up and under her coat trying to get hands to skin.
Ava swung her leg around so that she was straddling Sara's lap without breaking their kiss. She divested herself of her coat, which joined Sara's bikini on the floor.
Ava mouthed along Sara's jaw and down the curve of her neck, crowding over her. "I've missed you," she said, tugging Sara's earlobe with her teeth. "I've missed you so much."
Tempting though it was to lose herself in Ava's tender mercies, that wasn't exactly Sara's style. She leaned back and got enough leverage with her hips to roll them onto the bed proper, with Ava underneath her.
Sara sat up and arched her back as she stripped her top off. She had had never gone to bed with anyone, man or woman, who was immune to her abs and cleavage reveal, and Ava was even more susceptible than most. She did that thing where she licked the corner of her mouth, something that Sara somehow found both adorable and almost painfully hot.
"I missed you too," Sara said.
Ava huffed in frustration. "No, not like--"
Ava pulled Sara down to her. She dragged her mouth across her collarbone, caught Sara's bra strap in her teeth and tugged it down over her shoulder; Sara's breast popped out of the cup, which was, of course, when Gideon interrupted them:
"Captain Lance, there's a situation that requires your attention on the bridge."
Ava hissed through her teeth, and Sara groaned dramatically and at least partly for Gideon's benefit.
"Is this a real emergency, Gideon," asked Sara, " or are you still mad at Ava for leaving last time?"
There was the sound of a distant explosion and the Waverider pitched hard enough to nearly toss Sara and Ava off the bed.
"Well, Captain," said Gideon, who obviously had her sarcasm setting turned up to maximum, "the Waverider is currently under attack from time pirates, so you tell me."
Sara grinned apologetically down at Ava. "Hold that thought?"
ii.
Between their earlier interruption, the time it took to straighten out the airlock after Zari vented it to prevent the pirate's ship from docking with them, and to put out the library after Mick set it on fire for reasons that Sara still wasn't entirely clear on, and the fact that fighting pirates with Ava was now apparently kind of a turn on for her by the time they made it back to her room Sara was pretty wound up.
She pushed Ava down onto the bed, tugging her shirt from her pants with enough force to send buttons pinging off around the room. When this didn't prompt any complaints it gave Sara a pretty good idea that Ava was as desperate for this as she was. Sliding her hand into Ava's pants only confirmed it; even through her underwear she could feel how wet Ava was.
Ava groaned, threw her head back, then grabbed Sara's wrist and squeezed hard. "Stop. Wait. I don't want to do this under false pretences."
It took Sara's blood deprived brain a few seconds to catch up to the words under false pretences and she tried to pull her hand out of Ava's pants, but Ava was still holding tight onto her wrist, keeping her in place.
"Um," said Sara. "If you're about to break up with me in the mistaken belief that it's for my own good then you should know that it's recently come to my attention that that would be a super dumb thing to do."
Sara fluttered her fingers against Ava's underwear by way of illustrating her point.
"Sara." Ava bit her lip. "Sara, when Mallus was first released--"
"You know," said Sara, "apparently it's pronounced malice."
"Huh," said Ava. "That... actually makes more sense."
Sara grinned and fluttered her fingers again.
"Sara, hang on-- when Mallus was released the timeline got pretty messed up, and the Legends went missing."
"Wait, what do you mean, missing?"
"No one could find you, not for a really long time. You remember how the Jefferson I brought to Salvation had a wife and a daughter?"
"Ava, I swear to God that if you're about to tell me that you're Jax's baby momma I'm going to have to take my hand out of your pants."
"No. God, no." Ava's gaze slipped sideways and she relaxed her grip on Sara's wrist. "But that day that I walked away from you, the day you told me you loved me, for me that day was almost five years ago."
"Um," said Sara. She pulled her hand free and rolled away onto her back.
She looked over at Ava. Damn, the woman looked good in profile.
"You don't look five years older."
"I have good genes," said Ava, the corner of her mouth twisting up, "it says so in the brochure."
iii.
Sara was hungover and had Ava on the brain.
Nate was having a hard time with Amaya from Earth-2 being on board; Ray didn't drink, and trying to match Rory drink for drink would kill Nate, so it had fallen under Sara's captain-y purview to get him good and drunk and talking about women.
At some point, mostly to stop him telling her any more truly disturbing details about his and their Amaya's sex life Sara had started talking about Ava. She'd told him about 2213, and about the five year time skip, and about how she'd told Ava she loved her and Ava hadn't said it back, at which point Nate had knocked the bottle over making a big kablooey mind-blown gesture, which had been oddly gratifying.
Sara had stopped by the Time Bureau to ask about maybe getting a bit of logistical support; literal demons were technically outside the Bureau's stated mission, but Sara was dating the director, or at least she wasn't not dating the director.
She was waiting for Gideon's hangover cure to kick in and embarrassing things she'd said to Nate last night kept coming back to her in flashes, so Sara put it down to that when she thought she saw Ava stepping out of a cubicle wearing one of those ill-fitting pantsuits that Sara didn't miss, with her hair up in one of those no-nonsense hot for teacher knots that she really kind of did.
But Ava had well and truly escaped cubicle hell and when Sara blinked the look-a-like was gone, so she stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor and the director's office.
Ava was sitting at her desk, frown lines between her eyebrows as she scrutinized her computer screen. She wore her hair down now as matter of course and still dressed like a government stiff, albeit one who could afford to get her suits tailored.
Sara rapped her knuckles against Ava's open office door. "Wanna go make out in a stationary cupboard?"
Ava's head jerked up, she blushed and looked over Sara's shoulder to make sure that none of her Time Bureau ducklings had heard. "That sounds like more fun than the budget meeting I have in - " Ava checked her watch " - five minutes."
Sara slipped inside the office and closed the door behind her. "Yeah, I hate budget meetings on the Waverider, too." The sound Ava made was halfway between a snort and a laugh. "I actually wasn't sure I was going to catch you here, for a hot second I though I saw you downstairs."
"Um, yeah." Ava coughed and shuffled the paperwork on her desk. "That would have been the other Ava."
"Say what?"
"You were right, when you said I needed answers. And Rip wasn't around to give them to me - " Sara felt a twinge somewhere behind her ribs " - so I went back to 2213."
"When did this happen?"
"Two years ago, my time. Most of the clones are basically Siri with my face, but some of them are…it's hard to explain, but they're real people. I get them out and some of them pitch in at the Bureau until we find them somewhere in the time stream to start new lives."
"I--" said Sara. "Wow."
This was what was seemed so different about Ava; not the clothes or the hair, not the way she could talk about being a clone, could joke about it even, but that she seemed comfortable in her own skin.
Five years was a long time. It was long enough to start a witness relocation program for wayward clones. It was long enough to get well and truly over someone you'd dated for three weeks once.
"I'll let you get to your meeting," said Sara, spinning her finger in the air in an about turn motion."
"Sara?"
"Yeah."
Ava pushed her hair behind her ear. "Um, rain check on the make out, okay?"
iv.
Sara had figured that there had to be a date sweet spot somewhere between a stuffy restaurant and kicking the collective butts of the rampaging hoards of Genghis Khan.
There was, and that spot was Netflix and Chill.
She and Ava weren't officially back together; they were hooking up and not talking about their feelings, and Sara should have been over the moon about that but really wasn't.
Inviting Ava to the Legends' movie night had started off well. Sara hadn't even minded that in the name of completion Ray was insisting they watch the Star Wars prequels because she'd been focused on tracing the inseam of Ava's jeans underneath the blanket she'd draped over both of their laps; if her hand crept any higher she could have had a guest spot on a presidential candidate hot mic.
It had all started to go downhill when Sara had forgotten to mention that Constantine was part of her team now; to be fair to Ava it hadn't seemed to be John turning up to movie night that had been the problem, it had been that with John came Gary.
Sara managed to get the movie restarted on the screen in her room, then immediately muted it because the last thing this night needed more of was dialogue courtesy of Jar Jar Binks. She scooted up the bed to join Ava sitting against the pillows.
"So…" she said. "Gary."
"Didn't you ever wonder why he's palling around with Constantine now?"
"I don't spend a lot of time thinking about what John and Gary get up to together." That was a lie, Sara had thought about it a bunch. "I just figured Gary was doing some freelance sidekicking."
"He slept with one of the clones."
"Ah. I--" That mental picture was less horrifying to Sara than it obviously was to Ava, but it was equally obvious how Ava would have taken it as a huge betrayal.
"Bad enough that all of my clones are straight, and their type is Gary." Okay, yeah, Sara could see how that would be a mental hiccup. "But he was my friend, and he knew how long it had taken me to believe that I wasn't interchangeable with the others, and now he's made it weird."
"Hey," Sara bumped Ava's shoulder and hooked their pinkie fingers together, "pinkie promise that I'll never sleep with any of your clones."
Ava laughed and bumped Sara back. "Thanks, I guess."
Date night started to look up after that.
v.
Sara woke up and instantly regretted it. She felt like all her internal organs had been scooped out like ice cream.
Okay. Think. Last thing she remembered clearly was movie night aboard the Waverider. The Phantom Menace which, yeah, was a bad movie, but it's known side-effects didn't include screaming abdominal pain.
Moving on: Ava had stayed the night. Director Sharpe could be surprisingly kinky, especially if you were into taking orders in bed, which Sara never had been, but it turned out that Ava was the exception that proved the rule. But Ava had also cried the first time Sara had made her come. This wasn't bad sex pain; it was having been run through with a construction beam pain.
Also, Ava had stayed the night. Sara let herself sink into the memory like a warm bath. It hadn't been the first time they'd slept together since Mallus, not by a long shot, but it had been the first time that Ava hadn't made an awkward, overly rehearsed excuse to leave after, or kicked Sara out while trying to seem like she wasn't kicking her out; or in the case of the time they'd done it on the chair in Ava's office, proceeded to freak out about defilement of government property.
The pain was creeping in around the edges of whatever Gideon had given her. Sara knew where she was now; only the Waverider's med bay had beds this uncomfortable.
Right. Okay. She and Ava had woken up together, and they'd…and then Gideon had announced an anachronism in London, 1941, which had turned out to be one of Constantine's demons stalking the city during the blitz, attacking people in the blackout with six-inch claws.
Ah. That explained why Sara felt like she'd been recently disemboweled. It was because she'd been recently disemboweled.
Sara became aware that someone was squeezing her hand, hard enough to be noticed over her recent sucking abdominal wound. The same person was talking to her.
"…I know I should have told you, but I didn't want to seem like that person who pined for five years over someone they dated for three weeks, even though I absolutely was that person. I never stopped thinking about you. I love you, and when you wake up I promise that I'll tell you that every day for as long as you want me. I love you, Sara."
"You know," said Sara without opening her eyes, "Gideon usually announces it when someone is starting to come round. I guess she's still really mad at you."
"An oversight only, Captain Lance."
When Sara opened her eyes Ava was hovering over her, her eyes red-rimmed; she pressed her mouth desperately to Sara's hand. "Hey you."
"Luckily for you the captain's decision is final." Sara smiled. "I love you too, Ava."