Chapter Text
He feels the start of a tickle in his throat when Barry doesn’t stop him from shooting Lewis.
As Barry takes the gun from his hand, Len has to control the need to clear his throat.
“He broke my sister’s heart,” he says roughly. “Only fair I break his.” Barry looks down at him, a sad look that pisses Len off as much as it makes Len want Barry to never look like that again.
He holds it together until the police show up and Barry leaves. Then, he starts compulsively clearing his throat and gets himself a dirty look from one of the officers.
He starts to panic slightly, and he must have quite the look on his face because as soon as he starts actually coughing, an officer releases a cuff to allow him to breathe easier, to cover his mouth. He coughs harder and harder until he can feel his stomach start to turn.
Finally, he feels something making its way up his throat. He coughs and coughs, disgustingly and so fucking hard, until it makes its way out. He gags around it and reaches into his mouth to pull out whatever the fuck he just coughed up.
It’s soft. Delicate.
He blinks around the tears that had appeared at some point during his struggle and he can’t tell what the object is.
“Huh,” says the officer to his left. Len squints at him, trying to see the cop's expression through his blurred vision.
He looks down at the object in his hand. He can see now what it is; a flower with delicate ridges and overlapping petals. It’s slightly wilted from saliva and, Len thinks, from being coughed up.
“The flower for justice. Ain’t that the height of irony, huh, Snart?” The officers laugh and Len drops the bud on the ground. “I’d wonder why you ate the damn thing in the first place, but I’ve seen perps throw up worse.”
As he’s in the precinct, waiting to the processed, he can’t help but remember one of the stories his mother would tell him as she put him to bed. Or, his favorite, to entertain him while she did her hair. A story that, as an anxious child, made him worry and worry for the characters, almost to the point of tears.
No matter how anxious the stories made him, his favorite part was always the look of joy on his mother’s face as she got to the happy ending.
On the drive over to prison for holding, he coughs up a single ruffled petal.
When Barry shows up, it gets harder to breathe. It feels like he’s breathing through a chest cold. He ends their conversation when he can feel another coughing fit wanting to start.
He coughs up a few petals a day and hides them when and where he can until fucking Mark Mardon snatches him up.
The first thing he does after hearing Mr. Stormy Weather monologue is to look up the damn flower. Searches and searches until he finds the flower that matches the bud he coughed up months ago.
He throws himself into a coughing fit when he takes a deep, harsh, angry breath as he reads the meaning behind the begonia.
He rips up the next petal he coughs up and wishes, for the first time, that he never fucking met the Flash.