Chapter Text
Dinah Lance had just switched on the TV when the doorbell rang. Confused she switched the TV off again and stood up to find out who would want to visit her so late in the evening.
Looking through the spy hole she was pleasantly surprised to see her daughter, even though Sara's very punk-looking outfit was not what one would be expected to be wearing when visiting their mother.
But Dinah smiled anyways seeing her little girl with a for once carefree smile and opened the door.
"Hey mom, I like your sweater!", Sara called out a bit too loud as she entered.
Dinah looked down at her clothes. She was pretty sure she had owned that sweater since before Sara went off on the Gambit.
As Sara walked by Dinah took a sniff "Hi Sara, are you drunk?"
Sara turned towards her mother. "Just a teensy bit maybe." She brought her thumb and pointer finger together to show how little drunk she was and in the process she almost fell over the coffee table in Dinah's living room.
"Alright", Dinah chuckled. "How about we sit down for a bit, and you tell me what you are doing here in your barely drunk state? Can I get you something to drink?" She turned towards the kitchen. "Something non-alcoholic maybe."
"Water's good." Still smiling Sara plopped onto the couch and started flicking through a magazine.
A few moments later Dinah returned with two glasses of water she put on the coffee table. "So, what brings you here?"
"I need the ring", Sara said without any preamble.
"Wait, what?" Had Dinah been drinking something right now, it would probably not have stayed in her mouth. "You mean the wedding ring that you would use to propose to someone, should you someday want to? That ring?"
"Yup, the exact one."
"Sara, are you even dating anyone? Since when? Are you drunker than you thought? Is there some time-travel-related mental condition you could have? Was it the first of April where you just came from?"
Sara laughed loudly and again way more carefree than Dinah had experienced her in a long time. But Sara claiming to want to marry someone still concerned her.
"Oh yeah, you haven't actually met Ava yet." Sara stared at the wall for a moment, as if lost in thought. "I think you haven't met her yet. It's a bit hard to keep the old and new universe straight. Hah, straight." Sara chuckled.
Dinah was even more confused now. "What? Old, new universe?"
"Long story", Sara said while her expression grew somber. "That was when Oliver died. We created a new universe after the old one was destroyed. But we changed quite a bit. Haven't had time to find out what exactly. Too many dead tyrants getting reborn."
She seemed to think that this explanation would help her mother in any way, but Dinah's confusion was still growing.
But before Dinah was able to form any next question Sara already seemed to want to leave. "So anyways, the ring?"
"Sara, stop!" Dinah almost shouted "That was not an explanation in any way. What exactly happened in the last years of your life? If you have a time machine, you should be able to visit me once in a while to talk a bit and arrive back to where you were not five minutes later? Who is this Ava I've never heard about and why do you need to propose to her so urgently?"
Her daughter seemed to sober up a bit at her mother's outburst. "I... You're right, I'm sorry, mum. I just, I was blind for a few weeks, I died, again, I defeated one of the Fates. And when I could see again, I saw my usually strait-laced girlfriend being a wild party animal. She is so ... I want to get married to her so badly."
Dinah smiled at her little girl's sappy grin. "How come you haven't yet introduced us? How long have you been dating?"
"There is just always so much going on. We hardly get time to take a breath. How long have we been dating?" Sara laughed "All the time-traveling does not help keeping track of that. Maybe two, three years? We broke up two times during that."
Silence engulfed the two Lance women while Dinah seemed to be looking for the next question of hundreds of possible questions to ask. "I wish you'd visit more often. Tell me more about your life", Dinah said instead.
"I'm so sorry, mom." Sara put her arms around her mother in a hug. "It's so hard to remember I had a life outside of the Waverider. It seems like every time we fix one mess, we inevitably created the next one that we must fix as well. You know what? We're just celebrating defeating the fates and as of yet we don't seem to have caused the next disaster. We could spend some time now if you want. And Ava isn't here with right now, but I have the next best thing." Sara reached inside of one of her coat's pockets and pulled out her phone. "I have pictures."
Dinah glanced at a nearby clock. It was already midnight, but she shrugged. "Tomorrow is a Saturday. I'd like to hear that."
"So, where should I start?" Sara unlocked her phone and from just glancing at it Dinah realized that her PIN was Laurel's birthday.
"At the beginning. I don't even really know how you came to be a time traveler to begin with."
For a second a guilty look crossed Sara's face before she dove into her tale of a British man in a Tibetan bar, superheroes, villains, sorrows, joy, the past and future, magic and giant Beebo.
When Sara was finished it was three hours and a bottle of wine later, that Dinah had fetched halfway through Sara's retelling of her last few years.
"Wow", Dinah exclaimed, still looking through the pictures on Sara's phone. She stopped on a group photo. From the constellation of people in the photo it must have been taken somewhere during the Legend's first adventure. Dinah's eyes seemed to be stuck on the man in the beige trench coat, Rip Hunter. He seemed oddly familiar. Nevertheless, she put the phone down and turned to her daughter. "You really love that woman."
"Seriously, that was all you got from that?"
Dinah laughed at Sara's outrage. "Oh Sara, ever since you came back after the Gambit, I knew you would never again have an ordinary life. I admit, all of the craziness you told me about still has to sink in but you wanting to, well not settle down exactly but some version of it, is something I would have never expected from the girl running off after her sister's boyfriend."
After a short silence where mother and daughter reminisced for themselves, Dinah stood up from her seat on the couch. "I'll make you a deal."
Sara looked up.
"I'll search you the ring and at next opportunity you will actually introduce me to Ava. And promise me that you'll visit more often."
Instead of answering immediately, Sara jumped up, swaying a bit, before hugging her mother. "I promise, thank you, thank you."
"Alright, sweetheart. I haven't even found it yet. I'm pretty sure I know where I put it, but I could be wrong." Dinah left the embrace and went indeterminately towards her bedroom. Sara trailed behind her, reminding Dinah of a lost puppy.
Even though Dinah had not been confident in knowing where she put the ring, she found it almost immediately in the second drawer she tried. "Here it is!" After looking into the little ring box, she handed it to Sara.
"This is not the ring dad gave you, is it?"
"No" Dinah shook her head and seemed to try to recall something before answering. "My mom gave it to me." For some reason she sounded unsure.
Before she could add anything more, Dinah yawned and looked at her alarm clock. "Oh my, look how late it's gotten. And I'm sure you'll want to get back to your party and your girl."
Sara smiled at the mention of Ava and nodded. "Yeah, I really do."
Dinah hugged her once more. "You'll tell me what she says and introduce her. As soon as possible."
"I promise", Sara said, sinking the hug.
After a few moments she left the embrace and, instead of leaving the bedroom and going through the front door Dinah would have expected, she pressed a button on what looked like a wristwatch and a portal to grimy looking back alley opened. With a "See you soon, mom" she turned towards the portal and stepped through.
"Incredible", Dinah whispered into her now very empty feeling home.
For a short moment she considered going straight to bed but decided to at least put the wine glasses into the dishwasher. As she picked up the glasses Dinah noticed that Sara had left her phone.
‚Oh well, it's not like that would actually be useful in most of history', she thought. ‚Sara will get it when she realizes that it's missing.
Dinah was not sure what possessed her to sit back down on the couch after taking the glasses to the kitchen instead of going to bed. She picked up the phone and tried the combination she had observed Sara using to unlock it.
"For a former assassin I would have expected you to be more careful", Dinah said into the empty room as the phone did indeed unlock and the pictures app opened back up on the group photo Dinah had looked at before.
She zoomed in on Rip Hunter, studying his get-up which probably could be described as space-cowboy. No wonder if the trench coat was given to him by an actual cowboy.
"From where do I know you?" Dinah kept staring at the screen. It could not have been that he just passed her by on the street. In addition to his memorable fashion sense, he would not just have taken a stroll in the twenty-first century. Maybe there was someone who just looked a lot like him, Dinah reasoned. Yeah, that was probably it. Perhaps even an ancestor, who knew?
Putting the phone back down, Dinah finally got going with her nightly routine and a few minutes later she was already asleep in her bed.
But it seemed that the strange British man would not leave her alone, even in unconsciousness. When Dinah woke up the next day, she could clearly remember her dream. That in itself was strange as she hardly ever remembered her dreams. Rip Hunter, or at least someone looking like Rip Hunter, featured prominently in it. But there was also a tall woman with red hair and a man in a suit. They were in some kind of park, Dinah recalled as she made her breakfast. There were statues, one depicting something that looked a bit like an angel. It must have been some modern art thing as it was not portrayed in a benevolent way but rather malevolent. A bit frightening. There was also a tall blue box that stood out on the green grass. Probably part of the modern art exhibition as well.
But suddenly Rip Hunter had disappeared, and the woman and the man were screaming, just before the woman disappeared as well.
Dinah shook her head as she scrolled mindlessly through the news on her phone.
"Maybe it's some time travel thing", Dinah thought aloud. She would ask Sara the next time she visits. IF she visits. Regardless of Sara's promises she was not so sure Sara would not simply forget or never find the time. "There's to hoping."
Dinah's following few weeks were not very different from all those weeks before. On the weekdays she would drive to university, hold lectures, grade papers and exams and talk to her colleges and students. She would come home, make dinner, watch TV or read a book and then go to bed. Only two things had changed. First was the growing feeling of resignation that Sara would not uphold her promise and visit soon. Dinah imagined that her daughter could have just time traveled from where and whenever to the following day of their last meeting and wondered why she did not.
Apart from that were the dreams. Where before she could recall a dream maybe once a month, now Dinah seemed to be able to do that almost daily. Most of those dreams featured the man who looked like Rip Hunter but some of them only had the man in the suit, that she had dreamed about the night after Sara had visited. That was also the dream she had repeatedly. It had changed a bit over time as things seemed to become clearer. What she had identified as some sort of park was more likely a graveyard and Rip Hunter and woman only seemed to disappear if they got too close to the scary angel sculpture.
By now Dinah was pretty sure that something was wrong with her and in addition to simply wanting to see her daughter again she was getting more desperate to let the Waverider's AI check her brain for some ... temporal zone virus? ... that Sara might have unwittingly passed onto her.