//.//

"Any luck?" Sara asked Jax, sitting beside Callie as she placed a cold cloth against her head. The Merlyn girl was only getting more uncomfortable as time went on, and the pain was becoming more unbearable too. She was constantly drifting in and out of consciousness, her body barely running due to the blood loss she had just suffered. While Mick sealing her wound had stopped any further loss, she could already feel the infection that was beginning to happen on the wound.

"You asked me that five minutes ago," Jax said, slightly annoyed but one look at Callie made him soften his voice slightly. "You know, it's not easy trying to get a 21st century radio to communicate with a 22nd century time ship."

Sara nodded, accepting his answer as she turned in her seat to look at Mick. The man was examining his gun for any damage that might have been caused during the shuffle back at Starlabs, but he was mostly trying to keep his head wrapped around everything that was happening because of him.

"Thawne never told you what he did with Rip?" Sara asked him, her eyes narrowed as she looked at the man. While she knew he had done what he thought was best, she couldn't help but feel slight anger at him for getting them all into this situation. Especially now that one of their dead was dead, another was never going to see them again and one had lost a limb.

"No, we weren't close like that."

Everyone fell back into a tense silence as Jax and Ray continued to try and work out exactly what had happened to Rip. Callie's soft groans could be heard from the couch and Sara turned to look at Nate as he took over with the cloth against the girl's head.

"How you holding up?"

"Better than Amaya," Nate grumbled, trying not to think about what had happened to his unofficial girlfriend only hours before. He moved the damp cloth into his other hand, pushing a few loose strands of hair away from Callie's face.

"I never knew about you guys," Sara muttered, a sympathetic look on her face as she looked down at the man. She had known what it was like to lose someone you loved, and she couldn't even begin to imagine what she would do if she lost her father or Callie.

"It's nothing to know. We were just, you know, figuring it out."

"I figured it out!" Ray interrupted, a grin breaking across his face as he turned to look at Jax. "We've been assuming that Waverider's broadcasting - using a quantum frequency, but..."

"But only if the quad band antenna array was in alignment. Ray, you are a genius!"

Everyone else shared confused looks as the two engineers bantered between each other. Sara stood up from where she was crouched beside Callie and walked back over to the two men. She was Callie's girlfriend, but she was also this team's captain.

"So can you communicate with Rip or what?"

"Sara? Sara, is that you?"

"Good job, guys. Good job."

"We didn't do anything yet. Rip?" Ray asked, confused as to how Rip was suddenly able to communicate with them. They all looked over to the boys as they tried to figure out how the man was speaking to them so clearly.

"Yes, Dr. Palmer, I've honed in on your location."

Jax snorted, looking back at Callie who was on the couch. "Well haul ass over here and come pick us up! Callie needs the med bay!"

There was a slight hesitation in Rip's voice before he slowly spoke back to them. "There may be one small problem with that." Everyone turned around as the Waverider appeared in the room, but with one alteration. It was the size of a desk model now, and there was certainly no way that anyone would be boarding it anytime soon.

"Look, it's the teeny, weenie Englishman!" Mick yelled, grabbing on to the small floating ship and shaking it slightly. Everyone tried to hold in slight laughter as Rip's yells of terror as he was flung about the ship echoed through the basement room.

"Mr. Rory, will you please stop?"

"Why would Thawne use the Spear of Destiny to shrink you?" Ray asked, confused as to why the legion had just made Rip smaller instead of doing anything to change his life like they had the rest of the team.

"Uh, I don't believe he did. I'm assuming that he used Dr. Palmer's exosuit."

A collective sigh spread across the room before a new voice entered the mix.

"Well then, he must still have it in his lab, you better get a move on," Callie murmured, her voice raspy and dry from her groans of pain. Her eyes were kept squeezed shut, but it was clear that the girl had no energy to even try to open them.

The waverider spun around in the air as Rip finally got to see the girl for the first time. At first he couldn't quite tell what was wrong until Nate moved from adjusting the bandages that they had wrapped around her shoulder. His stomach flipped as he noticed her arm, or rather, the lack of it.

"We gotta steal it back and then we can unshrink the ship," Ray said, knowing that now was no time to pause even if Callie had spoke for the first time in a while.

"And then what?" Rip asked, causing Sara and Jax to share a look for a second.

"Rip, we have a plan to put reality back as it was. But you're not gonna like it."

___

Callie groaned as she tried to push herself up slightly in the metal chair, her eyes opening as she found herself slumping more as she tried to get used to only have use of one arm. The girl groaned slightly as she stumbled to her feet, trying to figure out how to balance now.

A steady pair of arms wrapped themselves around her, allowing her to find her footing for a second. Callie smiled at the man, knowing that while they hadn't always seen eye-to-eye she probably wouldn't be alive if it hadn't been for him and his ship.

She noticed that the blood soaked bandages had been replaced with thicker, navy ones that seemed to keep the pain slightly away as she moved to adjust to the feeling of not having an appendage. The man slowly released his grip on her, allowing the girl to cautiously try to walk around. While it was remarkably hard anyway, Callie was certain that all of her time training with the league was the only reason that she was able to walk so quickly.

"I never got to thank you for keeping Sara safe," Callie told the man sincerly, knowing that he had been a major part of the bloodlust that was inside of her being retracted. The Brit simply brushed her off, lightly placing a hand on her good shoulder as he smiled at her.

"You've done a better job than I did," he told her honestly. Callie scoffed, but she knew that Rip wasn't talking about when she had tried to kill her under the brain manipulation. He was talking about her and Sara connecting in the way they had.

As Callie looked back down to where her arm used to be, she lightly grabbed on to Rip's wrist just before they left the medical bay. The man turned to look at her, his eyebrows furrowed as he waited on what she was about to say.

"If anything happens to me out there, don't let her die for me," Callie begged him, her voice dropping to a whisper as she thought about how likely it was for something to happen to her especially as she now was at a disadvantage if they found themselves with the Legion at all.

Rip paused as he suddenly found it hard to swallow. He nodded, his eyes shinning slightly as a tear gathered in them. "I promise."

___

"We have returned to the Battle of the Somme - in the year 1916."

"And apparently, we're ready to destroy time itself by interfering in events that we've already participated in," Rip murmured annoyed, pushing the seat restraint off himself as the rest of the team mirrored his actions. Callie tried to do it with one hand, but Mick stepped in and lifted it before she even had the chance.

The girl knew that the man was hiding the hurt he was feeling, so she simply smiled slightly as a thanks before tuning back into the conversation that was occurring around them. Standing next to Sara, Callie allowed herself to lean against her for support and balance. The rest of the team noticed the action but knew it was best to not say anything.

"If that's what it takes to save Amaya, count me in," Nate said, Callie nodding along in agreement. Jax nodded too, his eyes drifting over Callie as he felt the pang in his chest at the thought of his partner in crime.

"Yeah, there's no way I'm letting Grey go out as one of Thawne's lackeys," he told them all, his blue suit still looking ridiculous on his body as he stared across the desk at them all. Sara nodded, looking around once more before addressing them as the captain again.

"We can't allow Doomworld to continue - no matter what the risk."

Rip ran a hand over his face as he groaned, but at this point he knew she was right. They had literally ran out of all their options and this was the best they could do.

"Well, look, like time, reality needs to set. Essentially, we're in a race. Not against time, but from a reality wave initiating from 2017."

Callie nodded, looking her teammates in the eye as she spoke. "All the more reason to get moving."

There was a slight silence before Rip turned to the girl with a grimace on his face. She knew what was about to be said before it even left the man's lips. She was a liability.

"Miss Merlyn, I think it would be best if you avoid any conflict," he started, but she cut him off by nodding. The team were surprised because while she knew it was the best option they had been expecting her to argue back about wanting to somehow help them all out.

"At the very least, we need to mitigate the scope of the time paradox by avoiding contact with our former selves at all costs. So all we have to do is help us I mean, them Destroy the Spear without them knowing that we're helping."

"Kinda like Secret Santa. We already know where the Blood of Christ is," Ray joked while Rip continued the plan.

"So me, you and Ray, we go back to the Church of Amiens and we leave the Blood for our former selves to find," Jax told Nate and Ray.

"I got a question. What happens to us when our former selves destroy the Spear?"

"Well, we cease to exist. Because we never would have existed if the Legion hadn't gotten the Spear."

"You're saying we're the Aberrations."

"In order to save the world, we have to erase ourselves."