Chapter Text
Sara pinches the bridge of her nose and lets out a sigh.
“We could use a little help out here boss!” Mick’s voice roars over the comms, over the sound of his gun being discharged in his hand.
“I’m on my way.” She doesn’t answer with urgency, even if the mission is going to hell out there and she’s already walking briskly towards her room to grab her suit and head out. “But I want to point out you wouldn’t need help if Leonard had stuck to the plan.”
“Captain, when have you ever known me to stick to the plan?”
Sara rolls her eyes, but doesn’t dignify that with a response.
Leonard was returned to them not long after the Crisis. What was interesting about his return was that he wasn’t like their other resurrected allies, who like the rest of the world only had knowledge of the new timeline. He remembers the old timeline, and the old timeline only. Apparently he was never really dead, but rather suspended in the time stream and when they reset everything he was launched out of it, landing in present-day Central City. When they got the call from Team Flash Sara had felt her heart stop in her chest. When they went to pick him up she had felt much the same.
She had also had Ava by her side.
That was months ago, and for reasons that aren’t entirely related to Leonard – but also not entirely unrelated either, if she’s being honest – Ava and her have since broken up. She and Leonard had been quiet around each other before the break up, awkward and avoiding one-another. She had hoped that with Ava gone she might at least be able to find a silver lining in Leonard feeling comfortable being in the same room as her again.
That is not what happened.
They sort of got along for maybe a week, and then the fighting started.
They haven’t had any sort of major blow out. It’s been a series of little things; snide comments, judging remarks, little things to get under one another’s skin in the worst ways possible.
Now dressed in her full White Canary garb Sara grabs her batons and rushes off the ship, shoving her issues with Leonard to the back of her mind and trying to remember that despite it all he has still shown to watch out for her in the field, and she’ll do the same for him.
At the very least, she’ll do it because he’s her teammate and she has to.
They’re in Central City 2020, hunting down their latest encore, who they don’t know anything about aside from the fact that she has magic because the moment John saw her and cursed under his breath she put some kind of silencing spell on him.
The only thing they do know about this witch, or whatever she is, is that her plans somehow involved five kidnapped children. Once they hunted her down to a house here in Central they contacted Team Flash and the original plan was for Barry to run the kids out, but soon as he got into the house he reported all five of them catatonic, and then his comm went dead. The Legends and Ralph were already nearby and prepared to deal with the witch, and when Barry never came out Sara ordered them to fall back.
Instead, Leonard stormed in full force.
Obviously, from there, the rest of the team had no choice but to follow him.
Sara is still grumbling and thinking about the stupidity of that decision as she comes up on the house where the fight is taking place, and right as she gets there she hears a shout of something she can’t quite make out, and then there is a puff of smoke exploding over the other side of the fence that hides the backyard.
Crap.
She runs inside the house, planning to bolt straight through, but she nearly runs smack into an opening door.
She stops short, and finds Leonard starring at her. The door obviously leads to a basement, and that can’t mean anything good.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.” He answers her, looking far too worried for her liking. “Scarlet is in a coma down there, me and the human wad of bubble gum were trying to wake up him and the kids, then we heard an explosion.”
In her mind, Sara snaps that he should damn well know what the explosion was, because the only reason it happened was because he decided to forgo the plan and put everyone in danger. He should’ve at least had the courtesy to be in the battle to deal with it.
But she doesn’t say that aloud, as she has more pressing matters to attend to; like finding out what the explosion was.
She pushes past him, running for the back door of the house and he’s on her heels. She throws the door open, and whoever the team was fighting is gone. At first it looks like the team is gone too, but then Sara looks closer at the kids in the yard.
Oh fuck.
There are three teenagers in the yard. One she’s seen before, way back years ago when they were trying to get their younger selves before The Pilgrim did. The other two are physically similar enough to their adult forms that Sara can recognize them as Zari and Nate.
The next two she sees are kid-kids. Elementary aged. One a little boy with a mess of scraggly blonde hair hanging down in his eyes, and the other a little girl with an overwhelming amount of curls she is currently trying to push out of her face.
“Oi, wad ‘apponed?” The girl nearly screeches out, her voice high and words all slurred together with her young age.
The boy opens his mouth, says nothing, makes a fist, and then before he can do anything with that fist a crying sounds out from the bushes along the fence and Sara just knows what it is.
The three teenagers turn in the direction of the sound, Zari being the first to move. She jogs towards the bushes, and faintly Sara is aware of Leonard’s presence behind her and watching the whole mess unfold, but she can’t be bothered to think about that. Not when she’s watching a teenage Zari go into the bushes, and come out with a baby dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt held to her chest.
They get the help of the rest of Team Flash to move the five comatose kids to the hospital and Barry to S.T.A.R. Labs, and while Cisco and Frost work of solving that mystery the de-aged Legends all get checked up by Gideon in the med-bay of the Waverider.
The first to go into the med-chair is Nate, as he is calm enough to sit still and let Gideon do her thing (unlike Behrad) and patient enough to keep from demanding answers they may not have yet (unlike everyone else).
“According to my scan’s, Dr. Heywood is physiologically fifteen years old.”
Sara rolls her eyes, great. “Any idea how long he’ll stay that way.”
“Inconclusive Captain, sorry.”
She huffs, and looks to Nate.
He looks less like his adult self than Zari does, but more than Mick does. The biggest difference is he’s skinner, lanky, like he hasn’t grown into his body yet. His hair is shorter too, not quite buzzed but nowhere near long enough for his signature swoosh or whatever he calls it.
“Well.” She says, and she can’t think of anything to say beyond that. “Do you know what did this?”
He shrugs, “The witch-”
He stops, both of them wincing a bit, because his voice may as well have just cracked in half. He clears his throat, and Sara isn’t going to point out the shade of red in his cheeks.
“She used some kind of spell.” Sara nods, even if she could’ve figured that much out.
“I’ll ask John about it.” She says, “With any luck he’ll be able to undo it.”
“That might be a problem.” It’s Leonard’s drawling voice that speaks up, bringing Sara’s attention over to the doorway where he has mini John Constantine walking ahead of him with his face set in a scowl.
Like the others, John’s clothes shrunk with him. On the practical side of things that is fortunate, but it also makes it hard to keep from laughing at the sight of a little boy dressed in a loose tie and a trench coat.
“Why is that?” She asks, and she looks down at John, who hold his palms up flat and moves them out sideways from his body before making a series of other strange symbols with his hands.
Sara raises any eyebrow, and looks up to Leonard who huffs with his arms crossed.
“He can’t talk.” He says, something close to pity in his voice. “I’m guessing the whole turning the team into kids spell didn’t cancel out the silencer she had on him.”
At his words John begins nodding aggressively, pointing to Leonard as though for emphasis.
“Great.” Sara huffs, looking down at John again. “I don’t suppose Gary can undo this spell?”
John shakes his head, and then he marches over to the unoccupied chair in the room and climbs up. He stands up on the seat and reaches onto one of the shelves behind it, pulling down a tablet they keep in the med-bay for monitoring purposes. Once he has the tablet he sits back down and begins typing out something.
Sara moves to stand over his shoulder, peering at the words as he types them.
Gary isn’t advanced enough for this. The “witch” is Morgan le Fay, a powerful sorceress. If I had my voice I could try preforming the spell, but she likely put a lock on it so she would be the only one who could undo it.
As Sara finishes reading the paragraph Gideon’s blue scanning light begins roaming over John, to which the little boy looks up indignantly, but at least he doesn’t move.
“According to my scans Captain, Mr. Constantine has been aged down to the eight-years-old.”
She nods, and then John starts typing something else out on the tablet.
Need to fix this soon. Potion I gave you and Ava was temporary for a reason. Spell like this puts a lot of stress on the body if left unchecked. Side effects are a lot like time drift.
She reads the words aloud, quietly, but loud enough to be heard.
“So what he’s saying is, they’re stuck like this?” Leonard asks, and Sara fixes him with a glare.
“That seems to be the consensus. Read it for yourself if you need to.” She replies flippantly, gently taking the tablet from John and passing it over to Leonard.
She is aware of John’s raised eyebrow and Leonard’s irritated scowl as he takes the tablet, but neither of them says anything, and so Sara refocuses on John.
“What about Nora?” She asks, “If there isn’t a lock on the spell, could she undo it?”
John shrugs, and Sara decides even an uncertain answer means it’ll be worth a shot.
“I’ll give her a call. Leonard.” She says, turning for the former thief, who looks up from the tablet. “Since you were so invested in Barry’s wellbeing you blew the mission, why don’t you go into S.T.A.R. Labs and see if they’ve gotten anywhere with the coma patients?”
Leonard frowns, and he looks almost like he is going to say something, something hurtful, but instead he simply hands Constantine back the tablet and then files out the door, leaving Sara there with Nate and John watching between the two of them.
As it turns out, team Flash has gotten somewhere with the coma patients. They’ve all woken up. Barry as well as the kids in the hospital; all of them within an hour of being brought back.
It should be a good thing, Leonard knows. It is a good thing, on some levels.
Those, however, are not the levels he is concerned with.
“So basically, you have nothing helpful.” It is a question, but Leonard says it more than he asks it. The answer has just been told to him, in the form of his discovering Barry awake and Frost reporting that he woke up on his own.
Speaking of the ice-queen who is seeming less than icy these days, personality wise that is, she’s shaking her head and handing him a manila folder of papers.
“Sorry.” She says, “His brain waves were giving off signals similar to dreaming while we were monitoring him, so it wasn’t a coma.”
He raises an eyebrow to her, “We couldn’t get him up.” He says, “Or the kids. They wouldn’t respond to anything.”
Frost shrugs, evidently not overly concerned with this fact. He supposes she doesn’t have much reason to be, considering Barry and all five kids are awake now and all reportedly fine.
“I’m not a witch.” She says, “I don’t know much about magic. Maybe your encore was able to keep them under her spell so long as they were in the house, but once you moved them their brains were able to function normally again?”
He presses his mouth into a thin line, considering that. He doesn’t know shit about magic either, but he knows you can put spells like that over buildings. Maybe that is what happened, which would mean they’re back to square one.
“Thanks.” He says holding up the file, and then he turns to report back to the ship, not looking forward to letting Sara know they’ve got nothing.
“Yeah.” Nora grimaces, shaking out her hand as the magic bounces uselessly off of John and then dissipates into nothingness. “She definitely locked the spell.”
On some level, Sara knew that was going to be the answer. Still she looks around at the others, all either standing or sitting somewhere around the bridge and looking every bit as disappointed as John.
“I don’t suppose she left the silencing spell unlocked?” She asks, and Nora’s expression is anything but confident, but she still sets her sights on John for a second time.
“Ne loquamini loquentes.” She says, sending a blue wave of magic out with her words, but that bounces as well. She growls, and looks back to Sara, not that Sara didn’t just see the answer for herself. “No, sorry.”
Sara nods, “Do you know anything about her?”
“Morgan le Fay?” Nora asks with a furrowed brow, folding her arms. “My father would tell me stories when I was a kid, sometimes he’d mention her. She was an apprentice to Merlin but according to the stories they had a falling out after she tried to kill King Arthur. She disappeared after that.”
It isn’t much, but it is still the most promising lead they’ve gotten all day.
“We know Merlin, we’ll make a jump and see if there’s anything she can tell us.”
Nora’s expression more than mildly impressed and surprised. Under ordinary circumstances Sara might be a little smug about it, but unfortunately these are not normal circumstances and Behrad takes to crying right at that moment.
Zari stands up with him, rocking him and whispering to try and keep him calm. Sara does her best to ignore the sounds, but it does bring forth a very important question.
“John wrote something down about this spell having side effects similar to time drift?”
Nora nods, her hands on her hips and one eye focused nervously on Behrad and Zari.
“Yeah.” She says, “Human brains aren’t fully developed until the age of twenty-five, so when a person is magically aged back to an age before twenty-five, their brain will start feeling the effects after anywhere from a few days to a week and it’ll revert to the same stage the body is at.”
Sara looks over to her team, who all look some extent of terrified. Behrad is still crying, but even he is quieting, like he is trying to show that he still understands. John looks the least afraid, likely because this isn’t news to him. But Sara knows him, and she knows he rarely lets on to how scared he really is.
“The more drastic the change, the quicker the mind will revert.” Nora continues, “So, most likely, Behrad will be first. After that it’ll be John and Charlie. Mick, Zari, and Nate, since you guys are teenagers you probably have close to a month before you start to forget your adult lives.”
“Eye wool Morga turd uths awl ‘iffern achis?” Charlie asks, or Sara thinks it’s a question anyway; Charlie’s accent isn’t doing her any favors now that it’s combined with the vocal pitch of a child.
“Uh…” Nora stammers, “Why would she turn you different ages?”
Charlie nods, and Sara sees the relief in Nora’s eyes. “I don’t know. It could’ve just been that she was casting the spell in a hurry, it sounds like you guys had her outnumbered.”
Before anything else can be asked there is the sound of footsteps coming towards the bridge, and soon Leonard enters through the doorway with a file of some kind clutched loosely in his hand.
“What’s the verdict?” He asks, and Sara crosses her arms.
“We’re taking a trip to Camelot.” She says, “Any luck on your end?”
He shakes his head, much to her disappointment.
“Barry and the kids all woke up on their own. Frost is thinking there was a spell on the house to make sure they stayed under so long as they were there, but we still don’t know why they were there.”
As she takes the file from him he looks around at the team all staring either back at him or at each other, and all very obviously not adults.
“No luck on breaking the spell?”
“Does it look like we had luck with that?” She snorts, flipping through the file, which tells her nothing. “John was right, Morgan locked it. She’s going to have to be the one to undo it.”
There’s a moment of quiet, one during which she keeps her eyes on the useless papers in her hands. It’s better than looking at Leonard, Nora, or the team. She knows they are all watching her, waiting to see how she’ll react to whatever Leonard says next.
“And you think we’re going to find her Camelot?”
He sounds suspicious, doubtful even, but she simply shrugs and hands him back the file.
“Her, or the next best thing.”