Green Lantern Corps. General. 075. Shade.
Title: Road of Nowhere
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner
Prompt: 75 - Shade
Word Count: 3039
Rating: PG-13
Summary: ‘Do Not Enter The Light-Draining Anomaly’ should be a rule of thumb, and yet.
Author's Notes: Set post-Ion, pre-Sinestro. A bit slashy.
“Each and every sector of space has a highly detailed map. These maps are stored on Oa, with access available to any ring at any time. There is no reason for 2815 to get lost.” Hal frowned. “And where is his partner?”
“You’re asking me as if I have information you don’t,” Kyle said, somewhat peevishly. He didn’t want to be out there to begin with. Lost or not, unless there was something really strange going on, no one Lantern needed a team of three for search and rescue; there was a reason the Guardians had expanded the Corps to place two Lanterns in each sector.
“Ah, quit bitching.”
“I am not bitching,” Kyle said, glaring at Guy. He’d volunteered to go on this rescue mission; given the recent turmoil in his private life, the Guardians were pretty much leaving him alone unless there was a massive emergency. After a couple of weeks of that, he was ready to go stir-crazy. Well, that and Hal trying his best to be a supportive boyfriend. Kyle appreciated the effort, but it was barely short of smothering. Flighty playboy Hal’s other setting, he supposed, no such thing as a happy medium.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Guy replied. Hal very pointedly ignored what could only be called a smirk. “Least, not just you.”
“Shut up and fly,” Kyle tried to say, but suddenly everything around him went completely black. He stopped in confusion, or tried to; he couldn’t tell whether or not he was still moving, or in what direction. A flickering pale construct grabbed him and pulled him straight down, and Kyle found himself completely disoriented for a moment as he was once again hovering next to the other two. Hal’s ring flickered once and faded, the construct dissolving.
“Thanks,” Kyle said, and looked back at the cloud he’d just flown into.
It was a massive wall of darkness, extending almost as far as he could see in all directions. According to the ring, nothing emanated from inside. It simply did not exist. The map showed what should have been there, but there was no confirmation whatsoever.
“He’s in there? How big is it?”
“Shoulda brought John,” Guy muttered. “That’s a lotta space to search.”
“Afraid?” Hal apparently couldn’t resist saying as Kyle said, “You know why we left him back in 2814” in an attempt to drown Hal out.
Guy didn’t take the hint. “Fuck off, Jordan.”
“Both of you knock it off.” Fortunately for Kyle’s sanity, while the spat didn’t quite resolve itself (Guy and Hal were never going to stop arguing), it subsided. A construct sent into the shadow faded almost immediately, but Kyle remembered that he’d been well out of sight when Hal’s construct had pulled him back, and he had the almost limitless energy of Ion to work with.
“We should set up a standard search pattern,” Hal said. “Circular, spiraling inwards.”
“Someone needs to stay outside as an anchor,” Kyle said. “Run a line back so that we don’t get lost, too.”
“Like any of us are going to get lost in the dark,” Guy said, but he didn’t argue. “Who stays?”
“Hal,” Kyle said, as Hal said, “Guy.”
“Now, look here -“ Guy started, right over the top of Hal’s “Wait a minute.”
Kyle fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’ll stay.” It was easy to spin a construct out linking to both Hal’s and Guy’s rings - it felt almost like touching two different streams and knowing that they were from the same source. “Thread for the maze,” he said, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan at the identical looks of incomprehension he got from both of them.
Guy vanished into the darkness almost immediately, the line flickering feebly behind him. Hal stayed for a moment, giving Kyle’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before he headed in the opposite direction. Both of them knew the standard three-dimensional search pattern, and it was just a matter of simple calculation to adjust for the low visibility. Kyle watched Hal until he, too, had vanished before closing his eyes and concentrating on getting a report back from their rings.
Information flowed back in fits and spurts, also affected by whatever was sucking the light out of the region, but Kyle could get a fairly clear picture of both of them. Guy wasn’t watching where he was going so much as simply making sure that 2815.2 was nowhere to be seen. Kyle looked where Guy didn’t, noting that as far as the borders of this anomaly went, it encompassed no stars and no planets. Several comets should have been inside, but no other significant bodies of matter. Guy should have come across one of the comets within his first five minutes inside, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps forty minutes into the search, Kyle started to notice inordinate amounts of dust and ice littered the part of the anomaly Hal was searching; he shouldn’t have come across a comet, but Kyle wasn’t sure this was the remains of something so mundane. The dust had high concentrations of radioactive elements which did not occur in nature.
“Hal, you might want to come back,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s only been five minutes,” Hal replied. Even if the radiation hadn’t been good reason, time dilation definitely counted as strange enough to call off the search in Kyle’s book.
“Hal, get out here now.” Kyle gave a tug to the construct line, but it snapped. He could feel the recoil all the way down. Something like that just wasn’t possible, not with a construct. “Hal!”
“Kyle, the line broke.” Hal sounded remarkably calm, but then again, he didn’t know what Kyle did.
“Stay there,” Kyle said, trying very hard not to let his voice shake. “Don’t move, Hal.”
“I’m going to keep searching. There’s enough debris for me to keep a fix on my trajectory.” Hal sounded confident, but Kyle had never known him to ever exhibit anything but confidence.
“Don’t!” he all but shouted. “Please, Hal, just stay where you are.”
“-Kyle?” Guy’s voice interrupted, sounding both irritated and worried. “Dammit, you’ve been off the line for hours.”
“Guy?”
“Who else?” Guy snapped. “There’s a planet at the center of this thing and it shouldn’t be here.”
“Did you find the Lantern?” Kyle asked more out of a sense of obligation than worry about the missing Lantern; it was more important to him that his friends get out of this thing as soon as possible.
“No sign of him.”
“Guy, I’m going to fix a construct holding the guide rope. Follow it back. Now. Please.” This time, his voice did shake. Guy, to his credit, didn’t argue, but moments later, Kyle felt that rope break, too.
“I’m heading straight out,” Guy said, and Kyle nearly screamed in frustration.
“Stay,” he said. “Both of you.”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Guy replied, and Kyle realized that he hadn’t heard anything from Hal for several minutes.
“Hal?” There was nothing. Kyle squeezed his eyes shut and reconstructed the map of where Hal should be, and where he might be if he’d continued on his search pattern, and tried not to think about the time dilation effects of the anomaly throwing his calculations all to hell. He made what was one more hard decision in a string of hard decisions. “Guy, please stay where you are. I’m coming in after both of you. You first.”
“And what makes you think you can find your way out of here any better?” Guy was still talking to him, and Kyle knew he was still alive. That made Guy the priority.
“Second time around?” he offered lightly, trying for humor that he didn’t feel. What he actually had, though, was a permanent spatial sense of where the Central Battery on Oa was; as Ion he was linked directly to it. He was hoping that awareness would be enough to let him navigate the anomaly without getting as lost as everyone else.
“I ain’t moving,” Guy told him. “But there’s some weird shit on that planet, and I don’t have to get close to it to see that.”
“I’ll check in every five minutes,” Kyle said, and plunged into the anomaly.
The darkness was every bit as disorienting as it had been the first time around, but this time he concentrated on his link with the Central Battery. It was to the left of where his sense of spatial awareness said it should be, but he made himself adjust to the link. The remnants of his snapped and dissolving construct were barely visible, no matter how much he concentrated on reading the energy, but he could follow it. Space seemed to twist oddly around him, and he had to constantly focus on his link with the Battery as well; it was as if he was looking at it through rippling water and it was never quite where he expected it to be.
Guy wasn’t where Kyle expected him to be, either. He made the first check-in at as close to five minutes as he could manage, at which point Guy said he hadn’t moved and that Kyle was late.
“There’s something wrong with this,” Kyle said.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” It wasn’t like Guy to use that particular brand of sarcasm.
“Time, it’s strange.” Kyle tried to move faster, but he wasn’t sure enough of his bearings.
“I’ll try not to panic if you’re late again,” Guy said drily, and Kyle signed off. The second check-in went much the same way. Kyle thought he was nearly there, but Guy didn’t feel the approaching energy.
“I think I can almost see you,” Kyle said. “Are you sure you haven’t moved?”
“I’m sure,” Guy said. “That damn planet is right at the edge of my range, and I’m between it and you.”
“There you are,” Kyle said. He could see Guy, hovering below him. It was like moving through treacle to change his course, though, and he was suddenly dizzy. He shook his head to clear it, and Guy had vanished. “Guy?”
“Where the hell have you been?” Someone grabbed his wrist, and Kyle jerked away automatically. The hand kept hold of him, though, and he finally recognized Guy through the darkness.
“I… just a minute ago,” Kyle started, and Guy’s voice came out of his ring.
“I don’t see you,” it said. “Kyle?” There was a pause and then a string of profanity.
“That was hours ago,” Guy said, holding a firm grasp on Kyle’s wrist.”
The blood drained from Kyle’s face. If something had happened to Guy, he would have come straight in, continued talking to him. “I was talking to a ghost,” he said, and Guy shook him hard.
“Let’s get Hal and get the hell out of here.” Guy kept a firm grip on the back of Kyle’s wrist; it wasn’t quite hand-holding, but Kyle wasn’t about to tell him to knock it off, either. He centered himself against where the Central Battery should have been, but it was gone. He fought off panic for a brief moment and finally found it, in exactly the opposite direction. He aligned himself again, and brought up the map of where Hal might be.
“This way.”
The planet loomed out of the darkness to their left, and Kyle shuddered. It was darker than the abyss around it, somehow, and yet not. It was more substantial, and he knew that he wanted nothing to do with it. Guy trailed behind him, ring sparking against the darkness. It was absurdly comforting, even though Kyle knew that should anything show up, he stood the better chance of defeating it. The planet fell behind them and was gone in what Kyle thought was a matter of minutes, but his link to the Central Battery was twisting more weirdly than ever, and he had to keep stopping to regain his sense of direction.
“What is it?” Guy asked when the pause lasted for more than a couple of minutes.
“Hal should be here,” Kyle said. He’d lost contact with Hal somewhere very near here, he was sure of it. The energy signature from his construct was still there, faint but readable. “Don’t you see that?” He could tell where it had been snapped.
“I don’t read anything,” Guy said, voice doubtful.
Kyle shook his head. “He’s that way.” He could see a trace of Hal’s ring, now, and he could follow it. The trail led deeper into the anomaly, not quite back the way they’d come. Kyle took a deep breath and followed it down.
“We’re heading in the wrong direction,” Guy said.
“No, no, the signature’s getting stronger,” Kyle replied distractedly.
“What signature? You’re not following anything!”
Kyle had to assume that his power as Ion was letting him see something that Guy’s ring couldn’t; the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. “He has to be close,” he said instead, and the grip on his wrist vanished.
“Guy!”
While looking backwards, Kyle ran straight into a green bubble. It was solid for a moment and then it pulled him inside. Hal was holding it together, face pale and sweat dotting his skin. Kyle nearly tripped over Guy, sprawled unconscious at the bottom of Hal’s construct.
“He was just -“ Kyle said.
“He led me to you,” Hal said, teeth gritted and sounding as if he was fighting for every syllable. “He was arguing with you over my ring’s energy signature and you vanished.”
“Just now, it just happened,” Kyle said, knowing that Hal’s perception wouldn’t match.
“I’ve been inside this bubble for two days,” Hal said. “I found Guy yesterday, but he’s in pretty bad shape.”
Kyle closed his eyes again, recentered himself against the Battery, and reinforced Hal’s bubble. “Straight that way.”
“You found the missing Lantern?” Hal asked.
Kyle had completely forgotten about the missing Lantern. “No,” he said. “I’m getting you two out of here.”
It was a mark of how drained the anomaly had left Hal that he didn’t argue. Kyle might have called it as discretion being the better part of valor, and vaunted Lantern fearlessness be damned, if Hal had argued. He wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and when he saw stars, it was as if a vise had been released. The connection to the Central Battery resurged as soon as the bubble cleared the edge of the anomaly, and a wave of disorientation peaked before subsiding, with the Battery once again not quite where it should be. The bubble weakened as Kyle regained his bearings, and he automatically strengthened it before turning to see Hal collapse.
“Lanterns of 2814,” said a strange voice. The speaker wore a Green Lantern uniform, and was accompanied by a silent partner. Both of them were of the same species, not one with which Kyle was familiar, but they had a vaguely bipedal shape.
“2815,” Kyle guessed. “Both of you.”
“Indeed,” replied the Lantern who had spoken before. “We received the distress call and came to investigate.”
“But we were investigating your distress call,” Kyle started. Suddenly all too conscious of the anomaly behind him, he inched the bubble away. Somehow it felt as if the anomaly was reaching out for him, trying to draw him back inside. “No one is to go in there. No one. Not under any circumstances.”
“Understood,” the no-longer-silent partner said, and Kyle felt a brief surge of gratitude that both of them were relative rookies who wouldn’t argue with the Torchbearer. Spinning a construct out from beyond what had been Hal’s bubble, Kyle wove a net around the anomaly and tied it tightly. As huge as the anomaly was, he would be able to tell if it shifted.
“Keep your distance from it,” he added. “I’ll make the report to the Guardians.”
The anomaly remained stable while Kyle flew his unconscious partners back to Earth, remained stable while both of them were treated for exhaustion, exposure, and dehydration, remained stable while Guy bitched his way off the IV and into Kyle’s living room. It remained stable while he reported it to the Guardians, and it remained stable as they told him to simply monitor the situation.
Hal, from inside a blanket on his own couch (he hadn’t bitched any less than Guy, but Kyle didn’t mind it quite as much, which was why he was here instead of at his own place), reached up and pulled Kyle down beside him. “Don’t worry so much about it,” he said, stroking Kyle’s hair.
“You were the one stuck in there,” Kyle said. The thought that he might have lost Hal forever simply wouldn’t go away. He knew that it was paranoid, knew where it came from, knew that none of the deaths around him were his fault, but it didn’t help the emotional gut reaction. He felt that he was putting Hal in danger simply by being near him, and that all the power of Ion wouldn’t be able to protect the man who was becoming more and more important to him.
“These things happen. We’re Green Lanterns.” Hal wouldn’t be in shape to do much of anything until he slept off the anomaly, and the touches of his hands showed it, but he was trying to be reassuring. Kyle squeezed his hand in answer. “Is it changing?” Hal asked.
“No,” Kyle said, but as he did, he felt the anomaly vanish. He again reported it to the Guardians, who sent 2815.1 and 2815.2 to investigate. Both of them reported back that Kyle’s construct was still in place but that the space inside appeared perfectly normal and matched up to the maps as far as they could tell.
“See? It’s gone.” Hal wrapped his arms around Kyle and kissed his neck gently. “Nothing to worry about.”
Kyle couldn’t shake the feeling that there was indeed something, and that nothing that big would appear and then vanish without a reason, without an unseen hand behind it, but for now he simply left his construct where it was and turned his attention to Hal. Space could wait.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table.
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Hal Jordan, Guy Gardner, Kyle Rayner
Prompt: 75 - Shade
Word Count: 3039
Rating: PG-13
Summary: ‘Do Not Enter The Light-Draining Anomaly’ should be a rule of thumb, and yet.
Author's Notes: Set post-Ion, pre-Sinestro. A bit slashy.
“Each and every sector of space has a highly detailed map. These maps are stored on Oa, with access available to any ring at any time. There is no reason for 2815 to get lost.” Hal frowned. “And where is his partner?”
“You’re asking me as if I have information you don’t,” Kyle said, somewhat peevishly. He didn’t want to be out there to begin with. Lost or not, unless there was something really strange going on, no one Lantern needed a team of three for search and rescue; there was a reason the Guardians had expanded the Corps to place two Lanterns in each sector.
“Ah, quit bitching.”
“I am not bitching,” Kyle said, glaring at Guy. He’d volunteered to go on this rescue mission; given the recent turmoil in his private life, the Guardians were pretty much leaving him alone unless there was a massive emergency. After a couple of weeks of that, he was ready to go stir-crazy. Well, that and Hal trying his best to be a supportive boyfriend. Kyle appreciated the effort, but it was barely short of smothering. Flighty playboy Hal’s other setting, he supposed, no such thing as a happy medium.
“Wasn’t talking to you,” Guy replied. Hal very pointedly ignored what could only be called a smirk. “Least, not just you.”
“Shut up and fly,” Kyle tried to say, but suddenly everything around him went completely black. He stopped in confusion, or tried to; he couldn’t tell whether or not he was still moving, or in what direction. A flickering pale construct grabbed him and pulled him straight down, and Kyle found himself completely disoriented for a moment as he was once again hovering next to the other two. Hal’s ring flickered once and faded, the construct dissolving.
“Thanks,” Kyle said, and looked back at the cloud he’d just flown into.
It was a massive wall of darkness, extending almost as far as he could see in all directions. According to the ring, nothing emanated from inside. It simply did not exist. The map showed what should have been there, but there was no confirmation whatsoever.
“He’s in there? How big is it?”
“Shoulda brought John,” Guy muttered. “That’s a lotta space to search.”
“Afraid?” Hal apparently couldn’t resist saying as Kyle said, “You know why we left him back in 2814” in an attempt to drown Hal out.
Guy didn’t take the hint. “Fuck off, Jordan.”
“Both of you knock it off.” Fortunately for Kyle’s sanity, while the spat didn’t quite resolve itself (Guy and Hal were never going to stop arguing), it subsided. A construct sent into the shadow faded almost immediately, but Kyle remembered that he’d been well out of sight when Hal’s construct had pulled him back, and he had the almost limitless energy of Ion to work with.
“We should set up a standard search pattern,” Hal said. “Circular, spiraling inwards.”
“Someone needs to stay outside as an anchor,” Kyle said. “Run a line back so that we don’t get lost, too.”
“Like any of us are going to get lost in the dark,” Guy said, but he didn’t argue. “Who stays?”
“Hal,” Kyle said, as Hal said, “Guy.”
“Now, look here -“ Guy started, right over the top of Hal’s “Wait a minute.”
Kyle fought the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’ll stay.” It was easy to spin a construct out linking to both Hal’s and Guy’s rings - it felt almost like touching two different streams and knowing that they were from the same source. “Thread for the maze,” he said, and wasn’t sure whether to laugh or groan at the identical looks of incomprehension he got from both of them.
Guy vanished into the darkness almost immediately, the line flickering feebly behind him. Hal stayed for a moment, giving Kyle’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before he headed in the opposite direction. Both of them knew the standard three-dimensional search pattern, and it was just a matter of simple calculation to adjust for the low visibility. Kyle watched Hal until he, too, had vanished before closing his eyes and concentrating on getting a report back from their rings.
Information flowed back in fits and spurts, also affected by whatever was sucking the light out of the region, but Kyle could get a fairly clear picture of both of them. Guy wasn’t watching where he was going so much as simply making sure that 2815.2 was nowhere to be seen. Kyle looked where Guy didn’t, noting that as far as the borders of this anomaly went, it encompassed no stars and no planets. Several comets should have been inside, but no other significant bodies of matter. Guy should have come across one of the comets within his first five minutes inside, but it was nowhere to be seen.
Perhaps forty minutes into the search, Kyle started to notice inordinate amounts of dust and ice littered the part of the anomaly Hal was searching; he shouldn’t have come across a comet, but Kyle wasn’t sure this was the remains of something so mundane. The dust had high concentrations of radioactive elements which did not occur in nature.
“Hal, you might want to come back,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s only been five minutes,” Hal replied. Even if the radiation hadn’t been good reason, time dilation definitely counted as strange enough to call off the search in Kyle’s book.
“Hal, get out here now.” Kyle gave a tug to the construct line, but it snapped. He could feel the recoil all the way down. Something like that just wasn’t possible, not with a construct. “Hal!”
“Kyle, the line broke.” Hal sounded remarkably calm, but then again, he didn’t know what Kyle did.
“Stay there,” Kyle said, trying very hard not to let his voice shake. “Don’t move, Hal.”
“I’m going to keep searching. There’s enough debris for me to keep a fix on my trajectory.” Hal sounded confident, but Kyle had never known him to ever exhibit anything but confidence.
“Don’t!” he all but shouted. “Please, Hal, just stay where you are.”
“-Kyle?” Guy’s voice interrupted, sounding both irritated and worried. “Dammit, you’ve been off the line for hours.”
“Guy?”
“Who else?” Guy snapped. “There’s a planet at the center of this thing and it shouldn’t be here.”
“Did you find the Lantern?” Kyle asked more out of a sense of obligation than worry about the missing Lantern; it was more important to him that his friends get out of this thing as soon as possible.
“No sign of him.”
“Guy, I’m going to fix a construct holding the guide rope. Follow it back. Now. Please.” This time, his voice did shake. Guy, to his credit, didn’t argue, but moments later, Kyle felt that rope break, too.
“I’m heading straight out,” Guy said, and Kyle nearly screamed in frustration.
“Stay,” he said. “Both of you.”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Guy replied, and Kyle realized that he hadn’t heard anything from Hal for several minutes.
“Hal?” There was nothing. Kyle squeezed his eyes shut and reconstructed the map of where Hal should be, and where he might be if he’d continued on his search pattern, and tried not to think about the time dilation effects of the anomaly throwing his calculations all to hell. He made what was one more hard decision in a string of hard decisions. “Guy, please stay where you are. I’m coming in after both of you. You first.”
“And what makes you think you can find your way out of here any better?” Guy was still talking to him, and Kyle knew he was still alive. That made Guy the priority.
“Second time around?” he offered lightly, trying for humor that he didn’t feel. What he actually had, though, was a permanent spatial sense of where the Central Battery on Oa was; as Ion he was linked directly to it. He was hoping that awareness would be enough to let him navigate the anomaly without getting as lost as everyone else.
“I ain’t moving,” Guy told him. “But there’s some weird shit on that planet, and I don’t have to get close to it to see that.”
“I’ll check in every five minutes,” Kyle said, and plunged into the anomaly.
The darkness was every bit as disorienting as it had been the first time around, but this time he concentrated on his link with the Central Battery. It was to the left of where his sense of spatial awareness said it should be, but he made himself adjust to the link. The remnants of his snapped and dissolving construct were barely visible, no matter how much he concentrated on reading the energy, but he could follow it. Space seemed to twist oddly around him, and he had to constantly focus on his link with the Battery as well; it was as if he was looking at it through rippling water and it was never quite where he expected it to be.
Guy wasn’t where Kyle expected him to be, either. He made the first check-in at as close to five minutes as he could manage, at which point Guy said he hadn’t moved and that Kyle was late.
“There’s something wrong with this,” Kyle said.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious.” It wasn’t like Guy to use that particular brand of sarcasm.
“Time, it’s strange.” Kyle tried to move faster, but he wasn’t sure enough of his bearings.
“I’ll try not to panic if you’re late again,” Guy said drily, and Kyle signed off. The second check-in went much the same way. Kyle thought he was nearly there, but Guy didn’t feel the approaching energy.
“I think I can almost see you,” Kyle said. “Are you sure you haven’t moved?”
“I’m sure,” Guy said. “That damn planet is right at the edge of my range, and I’m between it and you.”
“There you are,” Kyle said. He could see Guy, hovering below him. It was like moving through treacle to change his course, though, and he was suddenly dizzy. He shook his head to clear it, and Guy had vanished. “Guy?”
“Where the hell have you been?” Someone grabbed his wrist, and Kyle jerked away automatically. The hand kept hold of him, though, and he finally recognized Guy through the darkness.
“I… just a minute ago,” Kyle started, and Guy’s voice came out of his ring.
“I don’t see you,” it said. “Kyle?” There was a pause and then a string of profanity.
“That was hours ago,” Guy said, holding a firm grasp on Kyle’s wrist.”
The blood drained from Kyle’s face. If something had happened to Guy, he would have come straight in, continued talking to him. “I was talking to a ghost,” he said, and Guy shook him hard.
“Let’s get Hal and get the hell out of here.” Guy kept a firm grip on the back of Kyle’s wrist; it wasn’t quite hand-holding, but Kyle wasn’t about to tell him to knock it off, either. He centered himself against where the Central Battery should have been, but it was gone. He fought off panic for a brief moment and finally found it, in exactly the opposite direction. He aligned himself again, and brought up the map of where Hal might be.
“This way.”
The planet loomed out of the darkness to their left, and Kyle shuddered. It was darker than the abyss around it, somehow, and yet not. It was more substantial, and he knew that he wanted nothing to do with it. Guy trailed behind him, ring sparking against the darkness. It was absurdly comforting, even though Kyle knew that should anything show up, he stood the better chance of defeating it. The planet fell behind them and was gone in what Kyle thought was a matter of minutes, but his link to the Central Battery was twisting more weirdly than ever, and he had to keep stopping to regain his sense of direction.
“What is it?” Guy asked when the pause lasted for more than a couple of minutes.
“Hal should be here,” Kyle said. He’d lost contact with Hal somewhere very near here, he was sure of it. The energy signature from his construct was still there, faint but readable. “Don’t you see that?” He could tell where it had been snapped.
“I don’t read anything,” Guy said, voice doubtful.
Kyle shook his head. “He’s that way.” He could see a trace of Hal’s ring, now, and he could follow it. The trail led deeper into the anomaly, not quite back the way they’d come. Kyle took a deep breath and followed it down.
“We’re heading in the wrong direction,” Guy said.
“No, no, the signature’s getting stronger,” Kyle replied distractedly.
“What signature? You’re not following anything!”
Kyle had to assume that his power as Ion was letting him see something that Guy’s ring couldn’t; the alternative didn’t bear thinking about. “He has to be close,” he said instead, and the grip on his wrist vanished.
“Guy!”
While looking backwards, Kyle ran straight into a green bubble. It was solid for a moment and then it pulled him inside. Hal was holding it together, face pale and sweat dotting his skin. Kyle nearly tripped over Guy, sprawled unconscious at the bottom of Hal’s construct.
“He was just -“ Kyle said.
“He led me to you,” Hal said, teeth gritted and sounding as if he was fighting for every syllable. “He was arguing with you over my ring’s energy signature and you vanished.”
“Just now, it just happened,” Kyle said, knowing that Hal’s perception wouldn’t match.
“I’ve been inside this bubble for two days,” Hal said. “I found Guy yesterday, but he’s in pretty bad shape.”
Kyle closed his eyes again, recentered himself against the Battery, and reinforced Hal’s bubble. “Straight that way.”
“You found the missing Lantern?” Hal asked.
Kyle had completely forgotten about the missing Lantern. “No,” he said. “I’m getting you two out of here.”
It was a mark of how drained the anomaly had left Hal that he didn’t argue. Kyle might have called it as discretion being the better part of valor, and vaunted Lantern fearlessness be damned, if Hal had argued. He wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and when he saw stars, it was as if a vise had been released. The connection to the Central Battery resurged as soon as the bubble cleared the edge of the anomaly, and a wave of disorientation peaked before subsiding, with the Battery once again not quite where it should be. The bubble weakened as Kyle regained his bearings, and he automatically strengthened it before turning to see Hal collapse.
“Lanterns of 2814,” said a strange voice. The speaker wore a Green Lantern uniform, and was accompanied by a silent partner. Both of them were of the same species, not one with which Kyle was familiar, but they had a vaguely bipedal shape.
“2815,” Kyle guessed. “Both of you.”
“Indeed,” replied the Lantern who had spoken before. “We received the distress call and came to investigate.”
“But we were investigating your distress call,” Kyle started. Suddenly all too conscious of the anomaly behind him, he inched the bubble away. Somehow it felt as if the anomaly was reaching out for him, trying to draw him back inside. “No one is to go in there. No one. Not under any circumstances.”
“Understood,” the no-longer-silent partner said, and Kyle felt a brief surge of gratitude that both of them were relative rookies who wouldn’t argue with the Torchbearer. Spinning a construct out from beyond what had been Hal’s bubble, Kyle wove a net around the anomaly and tied it tightly. As huge as the anomaly was, he would be able to tell if it shifted.
“Keep your distance from it,” he added. “I’ll make the report to the Guardians.”
The anomaly remained stable while Kyle flew his unconscious partners back to Earth, remained stable while both of them were treated for exhaustion, exposure, and dehydration, remained stable while Guy bitched his way off the IV and into Kyle’s living room. It remained stable while he reported it to the Guardians, and it remained stable as they told him to simply monitor the situation.
Hal, from inside a blanket on his own couch (he hadn’t bitched any less than Guy, but Kyle didn’t mind it quite as much, which was why he was here instead of at his own place), reached up and pulled Kyle down beside him. “Don’t worry so much about it,” he said, stroking Kyle’s hair.
“You were the one stuck in there,” Kyle said. The thought that he might have lost Hal forever simply wouldn’t go away. He knew that it was paranoid, knew where it came from, knew that none of the deaths around him were his fault, but it didn’t help the emotional gut reaction. He felt that he was putting Hal in danger simply by being near him, and that all the power of Ion wouldn’t be able to protect the man who was becoming more and more important to him.
“These things happen. We’re Green Lanterns.” Hal wouldn’t be in shape to do much of anything until he slept off the anomaly, and the touches of his hands showed it, but he was trying to be reassuring. Kyle squeezed his hand in answer. “Is it changing?” Hal asked.
“No,” Kyle said, but as he did, he felt the anomaly vanish. He again reported it to the Guardians, who sent 2815.1 and 2815.2 to investigate. Both of them reported back that Kyle’s construct was still in place but that the space inside appeared perfectly normal and matched up to the maps as far as they could tell.
“See? It’s gone.” Hal wrapped his arms around Kyle and kissed his neck gently. “Nothing to worry about.”
Kyle couldn’t shake the feeling that there was indeed something, and that nothing that big would appear and then vanish without a reason, without an unseen hand behind it, but for now he simply left his construct where it was and turned his attention to Hal. Space could wait.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table.