Legends of Tomorrow - Simple Things Steady In My Heart (gen/team)

Chapter 3

A/N: Continued thanks to unwittingcatalyst for betareading. Also special thanks to SophiaCatherine and Ballycastle_Bat for taking a look at a part of this I was uncertain about and needed some encouragement for.

Content notes: swearing from Charlie, mention of prison, loss of control/identity for Charlie, Rip comes back with neurological/time displacement issues

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Wally doesn't think he has a favorite chore. His favorite bit is the chores being done, so he does them, problem solved. This does not work out well on the Waverider. Turns out people actually kinda like chores, no matter what they say. Some of them at least. He gets to learning which he should leave for who.

It's still so new to have chores be a choice. He got so used to doing so much growing up, taking the strain off his mom. She worked so hard and he made sure things got done when they needed to get done so the time they had together at home could be the best. At his dad's house somehow he already kept things ship shape in between all the meta-humans of the week. Wally didn't have anything to do there, except food shopping and the dishes – those were more to do with managing the appetite and consequences of being a speedster. It seemed fair to do those, no matter what his dad could have said. Wally never asked, just did it, worried his responsibilities would get dismissed in an overeagerness to make him feel at home and yet unpressured.

Now, there are more people to go round than he's ever experienced. It's weird to not have to do at least half of it. It's weird because he could do all of it. His favorite thing becomes letting others do some of it, having a rest. Sitting down and letting himself be, just like he'd been learning before Rip came to recruit him. He still blitzes through all the chores from time to time but he strikes a balance between not being taken for granted and not taking it all away from the others either. Limiting himself to once in a while, when people are super busy seems to work out okay and earns him grateful smiles. His favorite thing is being appreciated and with the Legends, he can get that.

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When she first comes aboard it's hard for Amaya to see the Waverider as a potential home, borne out of pain and loss as her mission there starts. The demands on her attention she finds difficult to get used to too – the strange noises, the bright flashing lights. These far succeed the technology of her time, beyond even most of the predictions of the pulpiest sci-fi magazines, and it takes time to feel comfortable operating under the control (the care, she may correct in future) of a computer. Calling upon a well of calm within her, she reimagines it as merely background noise, inconsequential, and so blocks it out. Later, she learns what it means, how to read this foreign environment, but all she can hear then it what it is not.

She misses the sounds of the savannah. The villagers going about their lives around her. The chatter in her native language soothingly familiar. The flutter of fireflies at night. The wind in the grasses. The subtle movements of the animals keeping their distance, whose presence is known to her, touching on her senses extended with the totem. She misses the heat too, the burn of the sun unlike that of other times and places they visit. But she's missed these for longer than her time on this ship. She traded them for the urban sprawl of America and heroics of the Justice Society and deep down she knows that can only be temporary in either case. Zambesi is her home, her destiny – anywhere else she is a tourist, counting down the days until she returns. How can she see this ship as anything more than transport, awaiting the final call to take her to a home it cannot be?

However alien the ship seems initially, she does learn to think of it as simply another ecosystem, one with larger, more complicated animals. The sounds of the ship become soothing in their own way, if simply to reassure everything is going smoothly. She stops blocking them out, decides she must pay attention the same she would in any other environment. Visiting Axl, if Mick doesn't mind her intruding, helps to ground her when there is no earth immediately in her reach but there is something missing still.