Green Lantern Corps. General. 013. Yellow.
Title: Beyond
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Guy Gardner, Hal Jordan
Prompt: 013 - Yellow
Word Count: 6009
Rating: R
Summary: Kyle has trouble letting go.
Author's Notes: The thread of the narrative runs from the end of Rebirth through the Rann-Thanagar War, Recharge, and Infinite Crisis. Directly follows and is the same AU as Prodigal Son.
For the fifteenth time in less than an hour, Kyle Rayner cursed the lack of locks on the doors and reinforced the construct holding it shut. The door shuddered again against the weight of a full-grown man hurled against it at breakneck speeds, but it held.
“I don’t know what has you so damn worked up,” he called through the door. “I’m the one under stress here. You’re just dead.”
Mindless snarling and another crash was his only answer. Kyle slid down to the floor, back against the door and constructs solidly there, and contemplated the path that had led to a real live - undead, he corrected himself - zombie housepet in his basement.
* * *
Afterwards, he couldn’t really say why he’d done it. There had been no real reason for him, once he’d reached the surface of the moon, to go back inside the Watchtower and claim Hal Jordan’s body. No one had really asked him why he was taking it, not even Batman. It had apparently been assumed that he was taking it to Oa for burial at the home of the Green Lantern Corps.
Truth be told, Kyle wasn’t entirely sure himself why he’d gone to the trouble of hauling the coffin through several hundred sectors; it slowed him down considerably. Furthermore, upon his arrival at the Corps headquarters, he’d hidden the coffin and the body before reporting for duty. He’d gotten his assignment and instructions - the Guardians, matured now and with their memories fully restored - were not only rebuilding the Corps but doubling its size to allow for two Lanterns per sector. It was a gargantuan task, finding nearly eight thousand individuals with the capacity to serve as Green Lanterns. Finding the members wouldn’t be Kyle’s job, though. He would be training them.
Guy Gardner had already dropped by to say hello and bitched about the job, but as much as he hated the idea of babysitting, even he recognized the necessity of having the thousands of recruits ready when Parallax and Sinestro returned. Kyle got the feeling that if they hadn’t actually seen the two escape, Guy would have told the Guardians to fuck off and screw the consequences.
Regardless of Guy’s take on the situation, Kyle was determined to give the Corps everything he had. They wouldn’t be able to take Sinestro on their own, and even if that hadn’t been an issue, Kyle had seen first-hand what happened when no Green Lanterns were around to keep the peace. While he wasn’t sure he had the right skills to train rookies - after all, he’d never been trained, not properly - he wasn’t about to back down. “You would do this so much better.” Sitting on the floor of the basement in a two-floor apartment on Oa, ridiculously far away from Earth - again - and talking to a coffin was not quite how he’d pictured his return to civilization. It had been incredibly difficult to get the casket into his apartment without anyone noticing and asking awkward questions, but somehow just having Hal there in some form made things easier.
Kilowog had dropped by, too. Apparently Kyle had spent several days unconscious in the Watchtower after the fight with Sinestro, and the rest of the human Lanterns had had a head start on him. Kilowog had wanted to give him advice; most of it was good, but Kyle suspected some of it would work better if the person shouting had the advantage of physically dwarfing the recruits. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal of the coffin and resolutely did not open it to look inside. “I can do this, Hal. I can.”
* * *
In retrospect, no matter how much peace of mind he’d gotten initially, bringing the corpse had been a bad idea. On the other hand, there was absolutely no way Kyle could have predicted that Hal would stand up and start shuffling around. The fact that the residual energy from both Parallax and the Central Battery kept his body uncorrupted only made things creepier. It wasn’t that Kyle would have preferred a properly rotting corpse shambling around his basement, or that he wanted to see Hal decay, it was just that with the perfectly preserved face, he kept expecting that Hal had somehow resurrected and was alive.
Every time his heart gave that little leap, though, the undead travesty that had once been the greatest Green Lantern and then the downfall of the Corps tried, again, to eat Kyle alive, and the tiny flicker of hope died.
* * *
I’m sorry I haven’t been down here lately. Things have been kind of busy. There are over four thousand recruits on Oa, Hal. At first, it was just John and Kilowog and Guy and me trying to get them trained. Some of them have progressed fast enough to start leading their own divisions. I know the Corps doesn’t really - isn’t supposed to have divisions and a chain of command and we’re all supposed to be off in our own sectors, but that’s not working right now.
Then Kilowog and three of our most advanced rookies got shipped off to Rann, or Thanagar, or somewhere in between the two. There’s a war going on out there, and the Guardians don’t want the Lanterns involved. But something has to be done to protect the ones caught in the crossfire. Kilowog made it back. The three rookies didn’t. They restored Thanagar’s atmosphere before - you know, I don’t even know how they died. I wish I did, but I have too much here to keep track of, Hal. Too much. The war isn’t over, either, but I have to think about the Corps first.
John’s the most organized one of us here; I’d have gotten so lost if he hadn’t worked out a structure and stuck us to it. Guy complains a lot, but he works as hard or harder than anyone else. The rookies are really turning out well, Hal, you’d be proud. Some of them know who you are, who you were. They…
After the first week, Kyle had grown tired of the white walls in the basement. Not that Hal could see them, but Kyle imagined that if he had nothing else to look at for days on end, it would probably drive him a little mad. He set about trying to recreate something that Hal would find pleasant to look at; if nothing else, it would give his hands something to do while he talked. Kyle had always been able to think more clearly with a paintbrush in his hands.
Finding paint on Oa was not an easy task. It did not, in fact, exist on Oa. Kyle had to go across over a dozen sectors. He’d found it in the end, though. Everything else he needed could be constructed with the ring, but the paint was trickier. He wanted colors other than green.
Sky blue arced over the ceiling, perfectly mimicking the cloudless bowl of infinity capping the deserts of the American Southwest. Reds and yellows, browns, grays, oranges all blended into sand and rock, the desert spotted by bits of dusty greens. Kyle spent hours getting every grain right, painting the white sun shining mercilessly down and casting sharp-edged shadows and even the insects lurking in the relative cool, speaking as he created.
There was an explosion in the barracks this week, Hal. Did that ever happen while you were here? Kilowog said he trained you, way back when you first started, but I don’t remember hearing stories like that. One of the rookies was trying something fancy and got distracted at exactly the wrong moment. No one got hurt, but the rookie in question was expelled.
Yeah, I think it’s a little harsh, but there’s a storm coming. A war. Sinestro’s out there, with Parallax, and we have to be ready. You’re the only one I can say this to, Hal, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what they’re planning, afraid of what they might do. I can’t tell anyone else. I have to stand there and teach these recruits to be fearless while I’m not sure I can face Parallax again. Help me, Hal. How do I do it?
The jets were the hardest to get right, but his audience of one had a very discerning eye. Kyle painted and repainted, trying to account for every detail. He wanted the planes Hal had flown, the ones his father had flown. Hal loved those planes, and Kyle was going to make sure that he wouldn’t go without them. The fact that Hal still could not actually see them was the one detail that Kyle pushed to the back of his mind. He’d gotten photos from Earth, had sacrificed a night’s sleep to go there and back. The pictures had to be perfect, correct in every detail, no artistic license taken.
Sun glinted off the canopies, glittering spiderwebs concealing the barely-seen figures in the cockpits. Wings jutted proudly, dark against the light, leading smoke trails across the perfect blue sky. He wouldn’t move on before each line, each angle, each shadow against the earth below was without flaw.
There are black holes sucking some of our more advanced recruits in. I can’t deal with this, Hal. We don’t have enough trained Lanterns for them to be dying already. The war between Rann and Thanagar, it’s spreading out far enough that it might affect us here. How are we supposed to keep order in the universe? We can’t even keep our own troops in line!
…I’m sorry, Hal. It’s not that bad. It’s just that you’re the only one I can talk to. Some of our Lanterns are missing, and Guy and I are going after them. The recruits who are farthest along here will be training the rest of them while we take off.
John’s been dividing his time between Earth and here. I don’t know how he does it. He missed a couple of days of training here dealing with something there, and the Guardians nearly took his head off. Somehow he worked it out. It’s amazing. I wish you were here. We could really use you. I need you.
The last jet - the replica of the one Hal’s father had flown and died in - was nearly impossible. Each brushstroke seemed to take hours, carefully considered and reconsidered. The cockpit was the hardest, but in the end no one would have mistaken the man in the painting for anyone other than Hal Jordan. It was Kyle’s final tribute to his predecessor, a mute apology for not being able to let go. The casket in the center of the room was, as always, uncharacteristically silent in the face of everything offered it.
I’m sorry I haven’t been here, Hal, it has been a very very very long week. Remember the black holes? And the missing Lanterns? Remember the Spider Guild? They’re yellow. Do you know how many of our rookies still can’t deal with yellow? Parallax isn’t in the battery, it’s purely psychological, and yet over half of them couldn’t touch the spiders. They came out of our sun, attacked Oa, and most of us with experience were somewhere else. Mogo was in trouble, and we nearly didn’t make it back in time. Too many rookies died. Too many Lanterns. We aren’t going to be ready in time, Hal.
* * *
Kyle thought perhaps that if he could figure out why it was that Hal was upright and moving instead of behaving as a corpse should, it would help him reverse this inexplicable transformation before anyone else found out. He was reaching the point of desperation - he knew his rookies weren’t learning as well as they should have, knew that was on his shoulders, but he couldn’t spare the energy to worry about it. He’d done as well as he had because he had been able to talk to Hal. Now, his only means of support had been replaced with just another source of stress.
“I can do it. I can.” He was talking to himself now, never a good sign. “Shut up, Kyle. Fix the mistake and everything will be fine. Not mistake. It’s not your fault. Except it might be. Fix it. Put Hal back in the ground, or at least the casket, and everything will be fine.”
It would have been a great deal easier to study Hal’s condition if the corpse hadn’t kept trying to bite him. At least it wasn’t aiming for his skull.
* * *
Kyle set down the paintbrush, finally satisfied. The desert sky over his head and the illusion of sand and rocks beneath his feet matched Earth; he felt at home here, and if Hal had been able to see it, Kyle felt confident that he would have approved. The dark coffin in the center of the room was the only sign of incongruity. It was spattered with paint, and as he made sure the rest of the room would dry without smudging, Kyle cleaned it off. “Do you like it, Hal?”
“Hey, Kyle!” The obnoxious voice shouting from upstairs belonged to none other than Guy Gardner. Kyle bounded frantically up the stairs, killing the lights and closing the door behind him.
“What’s up?”
Guy had opened Kyle’s door - there were no locks anywhere on Oa that didn’t house the Guardians, a concept that Kyle had found disconcerting - but he hadn’t actually come in. “Next batch of 1200’s graduating. You’re supposed to talk. Go talk.”
“That’s now?”
“Try an hour ago.” Guy physically pushed him out the door. “They’re waitin’.”
“They waited an hour? And no one called me?” He’d thought the ceremony was the next day. It was entirely possible that he’d gotten caught up in painting and just forgotten to sleep.
“It’s a joke, kid. Ten minutes and I did call you.”
“Right.” Kyle had forgotten about the graduation ceremony; it was the third in two weeks, which he supposed meant that the new Corps was going fairly well. He’d spoken at each one; he had no idea what he’d said at any of them, but apparently it was appropriate. Half the sectors had their Lanterns now, and hundreds more were training recruits before being sent out on their own. Focusing on his flight path, he missed Guy’s worried expression.
The ceremony went off without too many problems; the rookies - Lanterns, now, with the symbol on their uniforms - were given their assignments and sent either to their respective sectors or to finish training the remaining recruits. Kyle made his escape as soon as he could; he didn’t have any other assignments directly following the ceremony, and getting some sleep would probably be a good thing. He would talk to Hal first, though, and maybe just sleep downstairs again. Hal as the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was oddly comforting.
Nothing seemed out of place when Kyle opened the door to his apartment. He ringed a lock onto it, making it permanent enough that it would stay there while he was asleep. It was only after he turned to look at the door to the basement that he realized it was open. Panic flooded Kyle’s mind, and he raced down the stairs to make sure Hal was still there.
He wasn’t.
The coffin was open and empty, the lid half-overturned and leaning against the box itself. The clear hard coating Kyle had put over the paint to keep it pristine was scuffed, particularly around the door, he noted in the one corner of his mind not overwhelmed by horror. Who… Someone must have found out, he reasoned, but why hadn’t they contacted him?
The sound of footsteps coming from upstairs gave him the only possible answer. Whoever had found Hal was waiting for him. There was something they wanted, or… or… his brain failed him at this point, and he darted up the stairs in something that he very firmly denied was panic.
“Who’s there?”
The footsteps were coming from the second room off the main living space, behind the swinging door. Kyle dramatically flung it open to confront the body snatcher on the other side. A very familiar face turned to look at him, mouth slack and eyes empty. With an inarticulate groan, Hal Jordan shuffled towards him with his hands stretched out.
Kyle threw himself backwards instinctively before Hal could touch him. There was no question in his mind that Hal was still dead; how the man could be a corpse and still walking around was a problem to be tackled later. Right now, Kyle was fully occupied with scrambling away from the thing reaching for him. He hit the door and lost his balance, rolling to the side and barely evading the thing’s hands. The same part of his mind that had noted the scuffs on the paint catalogued the uncoordinated movements and the total lack of decay on the part of the walking corpse. It was still wearing Parallax’s armor, and he didn’t know if that made it more or less obscene.
“Hal!” he said, a little desperately, scooting away from it in a sort of crabwalk. The thing paused and cocked its head to the side, and Kyle used the opportunity to haul himself to his feet. “Hal?”
It charged towards him and Kyle barely dodged in time. He finally thought to contain it with his ring, and let Hal’s walking corpse throw itself against the glowing green walls. With some difficulty, he wrestled it into the basement and back into the coffin, slamming the lid closed and binding the entire casket with a construct. Only one thought reverberated through his mind.
“What the hell do I do now?”
* * *
The question of the zombie in the basement had to be shelved, at least temporarily, by reports of a massive anomaly, and an interdimensional war. Before shipping out, Kyle expended the energy needed to keep Hal locked in his coffin, hoping that Hal wasn’t actually in his body, and that the construct would hold until he got back. There was always the possibility he’d end up dead, he thought sardonically, in which case Hal would become someone else’s problem.
When Kyle returned, days later, it was without a ring. He hosted the energy of Ion, now, drawing his power directly from the Central Battery. Heroes were dead and the Corps was responsible for holding an incredibly dangerous madman prisoner around a red sun. Their rookies - new Lanterns - had performed admirably in the face of certain doom, and Kyle thought that just maybe he hadn’t failed them in their training. But even the success of the new Corps wasn’t enough to take away the pain of watching yet another lover die; during the struggle to contain the spatial anomaly, Jennie Hayden - daughter of Alan Scott - had given her life to protect Kyle’s. She’d placed herself between him and an electromagnetic discharge, saving him before he even knew he was in danger.
“If I’d been just a little quicker, Hal,” Kyle whispered to the outer door. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, reluctant to go inside. Despite their successes, the Corps still wasn’t ready to take on Sinestro, still wasn’t ready for Parallax. Too many Lanterns still had trouble with the color yellow, too many still made rookie mistakes. Kyle couldn’t shake the feeling that Sinestro was building an army, and he needed to be ready to face it. The Corps needed to be ready. It was his fault Sinestro had gotten away, his failure to capture the renegade that had put them in this position. Sinestro had been right there, and had Kyle done his job, he would have stopped him from escaping.
“Something wrong with the door?” Guy asked from less than six inches away, and Kyle suppressed a violent start.
“No,” he said, because Guy looked like he wanted an answer. “No problem with the door.” This was true, so far as it went. It was what was possibly on the other side of the door that could be problematic. Kyle took a deep breath, trying to be unobtrusive about it.
“Uh huh,” Guy said, giving him a speculative look. Kyle was suddenly reminded that Guy was not actually as dumb as he looked, or acted, and was in fact a very observant and intelligent individual. It was not comfortable at all to be on the receiving end of Guy’s scrutiny.
“I’m going inside now,” Kyle told him. Nearly unlimited energy at his disposal, but he still had no idea whether or not a walking corpse was waiting on the other side. Although logic said that if the door was closed, Hal probably hadn’t escaped. Even dead, Hal could probably manage to open a door. Kyle dragged his train of thought back to the doorknob, turned it, and slipped in before Guy said anything else.
The front room was a Hal-free zone. So was the rest of the first floor. Nothing appeared out of place, nothing appeared chewed on, no dents in the walls. Kyle eyed the basement door apprehensively, but it didn’t look like it had taken several days worth of excessive beatings and was apparently sitting securely on its hinges. He crept up to it, listening for any sound that might indicate movement. There was nothing. Kyle put an ear to the door, half expecting a fist to punch a hole through the door and into his skull, but that didn’t happen either. There was dead silence coming from the basement. Kyle barricaded the outer door as an afterthought and slowly pushed the basement door open.
The stairs were also a Hal-free zone. Kyle ringed a light and sent it ahead of him, but the room looked perfectly normal, if one counted a photorealistic painting of the Nevada desert normal. Kyle stopped worrying that Hal was lurking inside his apartment and started worrying that Hal had escaped and was roaming the streets of Oa. He eased his way down the stairs, as quietly as he could, on the off-chance that Hal was lurking behind a wall. That hadn’t happened, either. The casket was still in the center of the room, surrounded by a construct that was as permanent as Kyle could make it without it actually being permanent. Kyle checked the rest of the basement anyway, but Hal was apparently still in the coffin.
Maybe he got out without disturbing the construct, or maybe he got out and then put the construct back, said a paranoid little voice in the back of Kyle’s mind. He told it to shut the hell up. A vague sense of relief that Hal was still safe settled over him even as the knowledge that he had to fix this gnawed at his guts. He shoved both of them aside and sat cross-legged on the floor. He needed to talk to someone about what had happened, and Hal was the only one who would listen.
“The world didn’t end, Hal. The world didn’t end, but so many people died. Not just the Corps. Not just Jennie. She’s in me now. She made me Ion again. All this power and I couldn’t do anything. How can I protect anyone when I can’t help the people I care about?” Kyle pushed himself to his feet, suddenly exhausted beyond the physical, and laid a hand on top of the casket. At his touch, the box shuddered slightly, and Kyle stepped back. It shook again, visibly, as something started pounding from the inside. “Hal?” Kyle said tentatively, and the pounding got louder. Warily, he dissolved the constructs, standing well back from the casket, and lifted the lid.
For a very brief moment, Kyle was sure Hal had somehow resurrected and that he’d done a horrible thing by trapping him in a box for days on end. Then Hal swung around to face him, and Kyle knew that he was still dead.
“I… I can’t, not now. I can’t fix this now. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t just shove Hal back into the box, not now that he was looking the shell of the man in the face. Backing away slowly, Kyle ringed chains and locked them in place, restraining his predecessor’s body to a small open area. Once he was sure the construct would hold, he fled Hal’s empty gaze and sat with his back to the closed basement door, head on his knees, mind as blank as he could make it.
As much as he tried to avoid it, time passed outside his apartment and eventually Kyle had to get up. The light shining in his windows stretched along the floor, brushing his toes and telling him that he would be late if he didn’t start moving right now. Roughly half the Corps was trained and ready for duty, which still put them at seriously undermanned. “Training. Teach the rookies what to do.”
“Lantern Rayner.”
That the Guardians’ voices now apparently came out of nowhere instead of from his ring still made him jump. “Yes?” he answered after a moment of shoving his racing heart out of his throat and back down where it belonged.
“Report to the Citadel immediately.”
“I have -“ he started to protest.
“Immediately.”
“Understood.” It was the only answer he could give, really. No one ignored a direct order from the Guardians; oh, some people - Hal - argued, or wiggled around them - John - or told the Guardians to fuck off altogether - Guy - but ignoring them wasn’t really a good idea. Kyle scrubbed his fingers through his hair and made sure his door was properly closed, and that Hal’s restraints weren’t about to dissolve.
When he reached the citadel, though, it wasn’t the Guardians with whom he spoke. Salaak was waiting for him, two of his four arms crossed in a very human gesture. Kyle wondered, irreverently, if he’d learned it from Guy. “Lantern Rayner,” he said tightly.
“I have drill,” Kyle said by way of greeting. Courtesy just wasn’t high on his list of priorities this morning.
“Your instructions have changed,” Salaak told him. If he had had a tail, it would have been lashing. Kyle tried to erase the mental image before it made him grin, or worse, laugh.
“Changed?” he said instead.
“Given the recent alteration in your physiology and abilities, the Guardians believe you would best be used in performing reconnaissance. Your instructions are to search out any sign of Sinestro or Parallax and report back here.”
Bad idea, the little voice in the back of his head said. Kyle told it to shut up and not tell him things he already knew.
“Do you have any information on their possible whereabouts?” he asked, trying to stall for time.
“There has been no sighting of either individual since the date of the reports filed by yourself and Lanterns Gardner, Kilowog, and Stewart.”
Kyle had forgotten that Guy, John, and ‘Wog had driven Parallax out of Ganthet on the same day that Sinestro had escaped. “Are you sure I wouldn’t be more useful protecting Oa?” Given that Oa was the center of the known universe, it only made sense that any attack from Sinestro would be focused there, or on Earth, but Earth had more than enough superheroes to hold the line until the Corps could deal with their renegade.
“Are you questioning the Guardians, Lantern Rayner?” Salaak fixed him with one beady eye and frowned.
Yes, he was questioning the Guardians, Kyle wanted to say. They were sending him on a wild goose chase; Sinestro wouldn’t be found unless he wanted to be. Kyle had learned nothing if not that, in all the time he’d spent roaming around off-world. “No,” he said, resigned. “When do I leave?”
“Tomorrow.” Salaak handed him a slim sheaf of papers. “Information extracted from past encounters.” Kyle took the folder, not pointing out that he was the resident expert on Parallax, except for the Guardians and Hal Jordan, and that Parallax’s presence in the game meant it would probably play out far differently than it had in the past. Sinestro couldn’t be counted on to make the same mistakes, play by the same rules.
“Thank you,” he said simply, and headed back to his quarters. He had until tomorrow to find out what was wrong with Hal and fix it.
* * *
Zombies, apparently, were not particularly cooperative. Kyle couldn’t get close to the thing wearing Hal’s face without it trying to swing around and take a mouthful out of him. He kept trying to scan the body itself for something out of the ordinary - besides the obvious - but it wouldn’t stand still. That he was still getting used to not needing a ring didn’t help matters either. Hal’s teeth, currently buried in Kyle’s left forearm, didn’t even bear thinking about. Kyle set his jaw and pried Hal loose, resisting the urge to curse. Blood ran freely down his wrist, and he let it. If nothing else, it would help clean the bite, and it wasn’t that deep anyway. He took a deep breath and gagged Hal.
Nothing seemed odd about Hal’s body, other than the moving and walking around part. As far as Kyle could tell, the heart was beating - slowly and irregularly - but the higher brain functions were just gone. That didn’t explain how the body could survive without food or water - particularly the latter - and it didn’t help Kyle fix it. The one thing he was fairly sure he had managed to ascertain was that Hal was most definitely not in there.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and standing well back. He didn’t know enough about anything other than basic anatomy to be able to tell what was screwy. Something clicked suddenly, and his half-focused gaze caught sight of what looked like a yellow thread. It vanished as soon as he turned his vision directly toward it, and he wondered if he’d been imagining things. Letting his eyes drift, he tried to regain the same looking/not-looking that had shown him the thread in the first place.
Not just a yellow thread, but a thin yellow aura surrounded Hal. The thread pulsed ever so faintly. Kyle tried to look deeper, but he lost the half-focus at the wave of sudden disorientation that swept through him. The energy he had as Ion, coming as it did directly from the Central Battery, should have been enough to counteract physical fatigue, but when he tried to draw on it, the dizziness only got worse. At least he had a handle on whatever was going screwy, he thought. Early in the morning was plenty of time to track it to its source. He made it as far as the door at the top of the stairs before he had to stop to catch his breath, closing the door and leaning on it.
“Something… not right,” he choked out, not sure why or even if he was speaking aloud, and then the floor tiles filled his vision and faded away.
When Kyle tried to piece together the fractured memories of the next few hours - days? - he had very few clear images to work with. The sensation of pain had been constant, and was no help whatsoever. He knew Guy had pounded on his door fit to wake the dead, and Kyle had been able to hear but not respond. Guy had turned him over and checked whether or not Kyle was still alive. In the process, he’d pulled Kyle away from the door. The thing inhabiting Hal’s body had broken through the door now that it was no longer blocked. Kyle had a vague memory of a priceless expression of shock on Guy’s face.
A Korugarian face hovering over him, looking oddly familiar, and using words with way too many syllables (mutating, pathogen, reanimation, and more that he’d never heard) was almost as strong in his memory.
An image of a corridor, flying through Oa’s upper atmosphere, and the cool fire of the Central Battery were all there, disjointed and fuzzy around the edges. So was Earth, but Kyle thought that was probably his overactive imagination. Maybe the rest of it was, too. It was entirely possible that the last few weeks had been nothing more than a vivid hallucination, but he had no ring on his finger and the construct rolling off his hand belied this vague hope.
“Yer awake.”
Oh, joy. Kyle blinked, but the level of light in the room didn’t change. It was dark and fuzzy, and there was a shadow off to his right that looked like it might be someone sitting in a chair.
“It’s dark,” he said tentatively.
“The light ain’t on,” said the shadow, confirming that it was indeed Guy.
“What…” Kyle paused, not sure exactly which question he wanted to ask. He got the distinct impression Guy was staring at him, which didn’t make things any easier. “What happened to Hal?” he asked.
“The walking corpse formerly chained up in your basement?” Guy asked, and then continued without waiting for an answer. “Got the bug out of him. Burned the body. Standard procedure, now.”
“Bug? There was a yellow thread…”
“Some kind o’ virus. Kept mutatin’. Near as we can tell, it was pullin’ energy directly from Parallax.”
“He’s here?” Kyle bolted upright, or tried. It was harder than it should have been.
“He ain’t here. Some kind o’ long distance connection.” Guy shifted his weight. “Near as we can tell, he was meant to be contagious.”
“He bit me,” Kyle remembered, and then a horrifying thought struck him. “Guy, am I -“
“You ain’t gonna turn into a zombie, if that’s what yer worried about. Natu got the bug out of you.”
That was why the face had seemed familiar - Natu was Korugarian, the replacement for Katma Tui and from the same planet as Sinestro. She’d been a doctor on Korugar. “Wait, meant to be contagious?”
“Yeah, well, you were tryin’ to bite everyone as came close enough. If Hal hadn’t’ve been in your apartment, he might’ve gotten to a shitload of Lanterns before someone found him, and if everyone went as quick as you, the virus would’ve spread real fast.” If that was Guy’s version of reassuring, it wasn’t helping. “Course, if he wasn’t in your basement, Patient Zero might’ve been someone else, but using Hal like that was probably a real kick.” Real anger burned in Guy’s voice, and Kyle thought he knew who had planned the plague.
“Sinestro,” he said.
“Welcome to the conversation,” Guy said, voice hard and cutting, and then sighed. “What were you doing with Hal’s body in your basement, Kyle? Why didn’t you tell someone when it started walkin’ around?”
It was rare that Guy used anyone’s first name without some kind of sarcasm attached. Kyle twisted his hands in the sheet, wondering how to answer. “Which one do you want me to do first?” he said softly, blatantly stalling.
“Fuck, kid, if you -“ Guy flung himself out of his chair and paced to the door and back. “You ain’t alone out here, okay?”
“I…” Kyle couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even look at Guy.
“You’re goin’ back to Earth for a week, get yer head on straight. Whatever’s goin’ on, kid, fix it. Ion’s the only reason the Guardians didn’t toss you back the second they knew you weren’t gonna infect anyone else. They think they’re gonna need you too bad to get rid of you, but they ain’t gonna use you if they think yer gonna break.” Guy left, closing the door behind him, and leaving Kyle to the soft beeps of machinery.
For a moment, the only thing he could focus on was the news that Hal had been cremated, that he was gone. With a wrench, he pulled his thoughts away and wondered if he hadn’t already broken beyond repair, and what that might mean.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Guy Gardner, Hal Jordan
Prompt: 013 - Yellow
Word Count: 6009
Rating: R
Summary: Kyle has trouble letting go.
Author's Notes: The thread of the narrative runs from the end of Rebirth through the Rann-Thanagar War, Recharge, and Infinite Crisis. Directly follows and is the same AU as Prodigal Son.
For the fifteenth time in less than an hour, Kyle Rayner cursed the lack of locks on the doors and reinforced the construct holding it shut. The door shuddered again against the weight of a full-grown man hurled against it at breakneck speeds, but it held.
“I don’t know what has you so damn worked up,” he called through the door. “I’m the one under stress here. You’re just dead.”
Mindless snarling and another crash was his only answer. Kyle slid down to the floor, back against the door and constructs solidly there, and contemplated the path that had led to a real live - undead, he corrected himself - zombie housepet in his basement.
* * *
Afterwards, he couldn’t really say why he’d done it. There had been no real reason for him, once he’d reached the surface of the moon, to go back inside the Watchtower and claim Hal Jordan’s body. No one had really asked him why he was taking it, not even Batman. It had apparently been assumed that he was taking it to Oa for burial at the home of the Green Lantern Corps.
Truth be told, Kyle wasn’t entirely sure himself why he’d gone to the trouble of hauling the coffin through several hundred sectors; it slowed him down considerably. Furthermore, upon his arrival at the Corps headquarters, he’d hidden the coffin and the body before reporting for duty. He’d gotten his assignment and instructions - the Guardians, matured now and with their memories fully restored - were not only rebuilding the Corps but doubling its size to allow for two Lanterns per sector. It was a gargantuan task, finding nearly eight thousand individuals with the capacity to serve as Green Lanterns. Finding the members wouldn’t be Kyle’s job, though. He would be training them.
Guy Gardner had already dropped by to say hello and bitched about the job, but as much as he hated the idea of babysitting, even he recognized the necessity of having the thousands of recruits ready when Parallax and Sinestro returned. Kyle got the feeling that if they hadn’t actually seen the two escape, Guy would have told the Guardians to fuck off and screw the consequences.
Regardless of Guy’s take on the situation, Kyle was determined to give the Corps everything he had. They wouldn’t be able to take Sinestro on their own, and even if that hadn’t been an issue, Kyle had seen first-hand what happened when no Green Lanterns were around to keep the peace. While he wasn’t sure he had the right skills to train rookies - after all, he’d never been trained, not properly - he wasn’t about to back down. “You would do this so much better.” Sitting on the floor of the basement in a two-floor apartment on Oa, ridiculously far away from Earth - again - and talking to a coffin was not quite how he’d pictured his return to civilization. It had been incredibly difficult to get the casket into his apartment without anyone noticing and asking awkward questions, but somehow just having Hal there in some form made things easier.
Kilowog had dropped by, too. Apparently Kyle had spent several days unconscious in the Watchtower after the fight with Sinestro, and the rest of the human Lanterns had had a head start on him. Kilowog had wanted to give him advice; most of it was good, but Kyle suspected some of it would work better if the person shouting had the advantage of physically dwarfing the recruits. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal of the coffin and resolutely did not open it to look inside. “I can do this, Hal. I can.”
* * *
In retrospect, no matter how much peace of mind he’d gotten initially, bringing the corpse had been a bad idea. On the other hand, there was absolutely no way Kyle could have predicted that Hal would stand up and start shuffling around. The fact that the residual energy from both Parallax and the Central Battery kept his body uncorrupted only made things creepier. It wasn’t that Kyle would have preferred a properly rotting corpse shambling around his basement, or that he wanted to see Hal decay, it was just that with the perfectly preserved face, he kept expecting that Hal had somehow resurrected and was alive.
Every time his heart gave that little leap, though, the undead travesty that had once been the greatest Green Lantern and then the downfall of the Corps tried, again, to eat Kyle alive, and the tiny flicker of hope died.
* * *
I’m sorry I haven’t been down here lately. Things have been kind of busy. There are over four thousand recruits on Oa, Hal. At first, it was just John and Kilowog and Guy and me trying to get them trained. Some of them have progressed fast enough to start leading their own divisions. I know the Corps doesn’t really - isn’t supposed to have divisions and a chain of command and we’re all supposed to be off in our own sectors, but that’s not working right now.
Then Kilowog and three of our most advanced rookies got shipped off to Rann, or Thanagar, or somewhere in between the two. There’s a war going on out there, and the Guardians don’t want the Lanterns involved. But something has to be done to protect the ones caught in the crossfire. Kilowog made it back. The three rookies didn’t. They restored Thanagar’s atmosphere before - you know, I don’t even know how they died. I wish I did, but I have too much here to keep track of, Hal. Too much. The war isn’t over, either, but I have to think about the Corps first.
John’s the most organized one of us here; I’d have gotten so lost if he hadn’t worked out a structure and stuck us to it. Guy complains a lot, but he works as hard or harder than anyone else. The rookies are really turning out well, Hal, you’d be proud. Some of them know who you are, who you were. They…
After the first week, Kyle had grown tired of the white walls in the basement. Not that Hal could see them, but Kyle imagined that if he had nothing else to look at for days on end, it would probably drive him a little mad. He set about trying to recreate something that Hal would find pleasant to look at; if nothing else, it would give his hands something to do while he talked. Kyle had always been able to think more clearly with a paintbrush in his hands.
Finding paint on Oa was not an easy task. It did not, in fact, exist on Oa. Kyle had to go across over a dozen sectors. He’d found it in the end, though. Everything else he needed could be constructed with the ring, but the paint was trickier. He wanted colors other than green.
Sky blue arced over the ceiling, perfectly mimicking the cloudless bowl of infinity capping the deserts of the American Southwest. Reds and yellows, browns, grays, oranges all blended into sand and rock, the desert spotted by bits of dusty greens. Kyle spent hours getting every grain right, painting the white sun shining mercilessly down and casting sharp-edged shadows and even the insects lurking in the relative cool, speaking as he created.
There was an explosion in the barracks this week, Hal. Did that ever happen while you were here? Kilowog said he trained you, way back when you first started, but I don’t remember hearing stories like that. One of the rookies was trying something fancy and got distracted at exactly the wrong moment. No one got hurt, but the rookie in question was expelled.
Yeah, I think it’s a little harsh, but there’s a storm coming. A war. Sinestro’s out there, with Parallax, and we have to be ready. You’re the only one I can say this to, Hal, but I’m afraid. I’m afraid of what they’re planning, afraid of what they might do. I can’t tell anyone else. I have to stand there and teach these recruits to be fearless while I’m not sure I can face Parallax again. Help me, Hal. How do I do it?
The jets were the hardest to get right, but his audience of one had a very discerning eye. Kyle painted and repainted, trying to account for every detail. He wanted the planes Hal had flown, the ones his father had flown. Hal loved those planes, and Kyle was going to make sure that he wouldn’t go without them. The fact that Hal still could not actually see them was the one detail that Kyle pushed to the back of his mind. He’d gotten photos from Earth, had sacrificed a night’s sleep to go there and back. The pictures had to be perfect, correct in every detail, no artistic license taken.
Sun glinted off the canopies, glittering spiderwebs concealing the barely-seen figures in the cockpits. Wings jutted proudly, dark against the light, leading smoke trails across the perfect blue sky. He wouldn’t move on before each line, each angle, each shadow against the earth below was without flaw.
There are black holes sucking some of our more advanced recruits in. I can’t deal with this, Hal. We don’t have enough trained Lanterns for them to be dying already. The war between Rann and Thanagar, it’s spreading out far enough that it might affect us here. How are we supposed to keep order in the universe? We can’t even keep our own troops in line!
…I’m sorry, Hal. It’s not that bad. It’s just that you’re the only one I can talk to. Some of our Lanterns are missing, and Guy and I are going after them. The recruits who are farthest along here will be training the rest of them while we take off.
John’s been dividing his time between Earth and here. I don’t know how he does it. He missed a couple of days of training here dealing with something there, and the Guardians nearly took his head off. Somehow he worked it out. It’s amazing. I wish you were here. We could really use you. I need you.
The last jet - the replica of the one Hal’s father had flown and died in - was nearly impossible. Each brushstroke seemed to take hours, carefully considered and reconsidered. The cockpit was the hardest, but in the end no one would have mistaken the man in the painting for anyone other than Hal Jordan. It was Kyle’s final tribute to his predecessor, a mute apology for not being able to let go. The casket in the center of the room was, as always, uncharacteristically silent in the face of everything offered it.
I’m sorry I haven’t been here, Hal, it has been a very very very long week. Remember the black holes? And the missing Lanterns? Remember the Spider Guild? They’re yellow. Do you know how many of our rookies still can’t deal with yellow? Parallax isn’t in the battery, it’s purely psychological, and yet over half of them couldn’t touch the spiders. They came out of our sun, attacked Oa, and most of us with experience were somewhere else. Mogo was in trouble, and we nearly didn’t make it back in time. Too many rookies died. Too many Lanterns. We aren’t going to be ready in time, Hal.
* * *
Kyle thought perhaps that if he could figure out why it was that Hal was upright and moving instead of behaving as a corpse should, it would help him reverse this inexplicable transformation before anyone else found out. He was reaching the point of desperation - he knew his rookies weren’t learning as well as they should have, knew that was on his shoulders, but he couldn’t spare the energy to worry about it. He’d done as well as he had because he had been able to talk to Hal. Now, his only means of support had been replaced with just another source of stress.
“I can do it. I can.” He was talking to himself now, never a good sign. “Shut up, Kyle. Fix the mistake and everything will be fine. Not mistake. It’s not your fault. Except it might be. Fix it. Put Hal back in the ground, or at least the casket, and everything will be fine.”
It would have been a great deal easier to study Hal’s condition if the corpse hadn’t kept trying to bite him. At least it wasn’t aiming for his skull.
* * *
Kyle set down the paintbrush, finally satisfied. The desert sky over his head and the illusion of sand and rocks beneath his feet matched Earth; he felt at home here, and if Hal had been able to see it, Kyle felt confident that he would have approved. The dark coffin in the center of the room was the only sign of incongruity. It was spattered with paint, and as he made sure the rest of the room would dry without smudging, Kyle cleaned it off. “Do you like it, Hal?”
“Hey, Kyle!” The obnoxious voice shouting from upstairs belonged to none other than Guy Gardner. Kyle bounded frantically up the stairs, killing the lights and closing the door behind him.
“What’s up?”
Guy had opened Kyle’s door - there were no locks anywhere on Oa that didn’t house the Guardians, a concept that Kyle had found disconcerting - but he hadn’t actually come in. “Next batch of 1200’s graduating. You’re supposed to talk. Go talk.”
“That’s now?”
“Try an hour ago.” Guy physically pushed him out the door. “They’re waitin’.”
“They waited an hour? And no one called me?” He’d thought the ceremony was the next day. It was entirely possible that he’d gotten caught up in painting and just forgotten to sleep.
“It’s a joke, kid. Ten minutes and I did call you.”
“Right.” Kyle had forgotten about the graduation ceremony; it was the third in two weeks, which he supposed meant that the new Corps was going fairly well. He’d spoken at each one; he had no idea what he’d said at any of them, but apparently it was appropriate. Half the sectors had their Lanterns now, and hundreds more were training recruits before being sent out on their own. Focusing on his flight path, he missed Guy’s worried expression.
The ceremony went off without too many problems; the rookies - Lanterns, now, with the symbol on their uniforms - were given their assignments and sent either to their respective sectors or to finish training the remaining recruits. Kyle made his escape as soon as he could; he didn’t have any other assignments directly following the ceremony, and getting some sleep would probably be a good thing. He would talk to Hal first, though, and maybe just sleep downstairs again. Hal as the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was oddly comforting.
Nothing seemed out of place when Kyle opened the door to his apartment. He ringed a lock onto it, making it permanent enough that it would stay there while he was asleep. It was only after he turned to look at the door to the basement that he realized it was open. Panic flooded Kyle’s mind, and he raced down the stairs to make sure Hal was still there.
He wasn’t.
The coffin was open and empty, the lid half-overturned and leaning against the box itself. The clear hard coating Kyle had put over the paint to keep it pristine was scuffed, particularly around the door, he noted in the one corner of his mind not overwhelmed by horror. Who… Someone must have found out, he reasoned, but why hadn’t they contacted him?
The sound of footsteps coming from upstairs gave him the only possible answer. Whoever had found Hal was waiting for him. There was something they wanted, or… or… his brain failed him at this point, and he darted up the stairs in something that he very firmly denied was panic.
“Who’s there?”
The footsteps were coming from the second room off the main living space, behind the swinging door. Kyle dramatically flung it open to confront the body snatcher on the other side. A very familiar face turned to look at him, mouth slack and eyes empty. With an inarticulate groan, Hal Jordan shuffled towards him with his hands stretched out.
Kyle threw himself backwards instinctively before Hal could touch him. There was no question in his mind that Hal was still dead; how the man could be a corpse and still walking around was a problem to be tackled later. Right now, Kyle was fully occupied with scrambling away from the thing reaching for him. He hit the door and lost his balance, rolling to the side and barely evading the thing’s hands. The same part of his mind that had noted the scuffs on the paint catalogued the uncoordinated movements and the total lack of decay on the part of the walking corpse. It was still wearing Parallax’s armor, and he didn’t know if that made it more or less obscene.
“Hal!” he said, a little desperately, scooting away from it in a sort of crabwalk. The thing paused and cocked its head to the side, and Kyle used the opportunity to haul himself to his feet. “Hal?”
It charged towards him and Kyle barely dodged in time. He finally thought to contain it with his ring, and let Hal’s walking corpse throw itself against the glowing green walls. With some difficulty, he wrestled it into the basement and back into the coffin, slamming the lid closed and binding the entire casket with a construct. Only one thought reverberated through his mind.
“What the hell do I do now?”
* * *
The question of the zombie in the basement had to be shelved, at least temporarily, by reports of a massive anomaly, and an interdimensional war. Before shipping out, Kyle expended the energy needed to keep Hal locked in his coffin, hoping that Hal wasn’t actually in his body, and that the construct would hold until he got back. There was always the possibility he’d end up dead, he thought sardonically, in which case Hal would become someone else’s problem.
When Kyle returned, days later, it was without a ring. He hosted the energy of Ion, now, drawing his power directly from the Central Battery. Heroes were dead and the Corps was responsible for holding an incredibly dangerous madman prisoner around a red sun. Their rookies - new Lanterns - had performed admirably in the face of certain doom, and Kyle thought that just maybe he hadn’t failed them in their training. But even the success of the new Corps wasn’t enough to take away the pain of watching yet another lover die; during the struggle to contain the spatial anomaly, Jennie Hayden - daughter of Alan Scott - had given her life to protect Kyle’s. She’d placed herself between him and an electromagnetic discharge, saving him before he even knew he was in danger.
“If I’d been just a little quicker, Hal,” Kyle whispered to the outer door. He stood with his hand on the doorknob, reluctant to go inside. Despite their successes, the Corps still wasn’t ready to take on Sinestro, still wasn’t ready for Parallax. Too many Lanterns still had trouble with the color yellow, too many still made rookie mistakes. Kyle couldn’t shake the feeling that Sinestro was building an army, and he needed to be ready to face it. The Corps needed to be ready. It was his fault Sinestro had gotten away, his failure to capture the renegade that had put them in this position. Sinestro had been right there, and had Kyle done his job, he would have stopped him from escaping.
“Something wrong with the door?” Guy asked from less than six inches away, and Kyle suppressed a violent start.
“No,” he said, because Guy looked like he wanted an answer. “No problem with the door.” This was true, so far as it went. It was what was possibly on the other side of the door that could be problematic. Kyle took a deep breath, trying to be unobtrusive about it.
“Uh huh,” Guy said, giving him a speculative look. Kyle was suddenly reminded that Guy was not actually as dumb as he looked, or acted, and was in fact a very observant and intelligent individual. It was not comfortable at all to be on the receiving end of Guy’s scrutiny.
“I’m going inside now,” Kyle told him. Nearly unlimited energy at his disposal, but he still had no idea whether or not a walking corpse was waiting on the other side. Although logic said that if the door was closed, Hal probably hadn’t escaped. Even dead, Hal could probably manage to open a door. Kyle dragged his train of thought back to the doorknob, turned it, and slipped in before Guy said anything else.
The front room was a Hal-free zone. So was the rest of the first floor. Nothing appeared out of place, nothing appeared chewed on, no dents in the walls. Kyle eyed the basement door apprehensively, but it didn’t look like it had taken several days worth of excessive beatings and was apparently sitting securely on its hinges. He crept up to it, listening for any sound that might indicate movement. There was nothing. Kyle put an ear to the door, half expecting a fist to punch a hole through the door and into his skull, but that didn’t happen either. There was dead silence coming from the basement. Kyle barricaded the outer door as an afterthought and slowly pushed the basement door open.
The stairs were also a Hal-free zone. Kyle ringed a light and sent it ahead of him, but the room looked perfectly normal, if one counted a photorealistic painting of the Nevada desert normal. Kyle stopped worrying that Hal was lurking inside his apartment and started worrying that Hal had escaped and was roaming the streets of Oa. He eased his way down the stairs, as quietly as he could, on the off-chance that Hal was lurking behind a wall. That hadn’t happened, either. The casket was still in the center of the room, surrounded by a construct that was as permanent as Kyle could make it without it actually being permanent. Kyle checked the rest of the basement anyway, but Hal was apparently still in the coffin.
Maybe he got out without disturbing the construct, or maybe he got out and then put the construct back, said a paranoid little voice in the back of Kyle’s mind. He told it to shut the hell up. A vague sense of relief that Hal was still safe settled over him even as the knowledge that he had to fix this gnawed at his guts. He shoved both of them aside and sat cross-legged on the floor. He needed to talk to someone about what had happened, and Hal was the only one who would listen.
“The world didn’t end, Hal. The world didn’t end, but so many people died. Not just the Corps. Not just Jennie. She’s in me now. She made me Ion again. All this power and I couldn’t do anything. How can I protect anyone when I can’t help the people I care about?” Kyle pushed himself to his feet, suddenly exhausted beyond the physical, and laid a hand on top of the casket. At his touch, the box shuddered slightly, and Kyle stepped back. It shook again, visibly, as something started pounding from the inside. “Hal?” Kyle said tentatively, and the pounding got louder. Warily, he dissolved the constructs, standing well back from the casket, and lifted the lid.
For a very brief moment, Kyle was sure Hal had somehow resurrected and that he’d done a horrible thing by trapping him in a box for days on end. Then Hal swung around to face him, and Kyle knew that he was still dead.
“I… I can’t, not now. I can’t fix this now. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t just shove Hal back into the box, not now that he was looking the shell of the man in the face. Backing away slowly, Kyle ringed chains and locked them in place, restraining his predecessor’s body to a small open area. Once he was sure the construct would hold, he fled Hal’s empty gaze and sat with his back to the closed basement door, head on his knees, mind as blank as he could make it.
As much as he tried to avoid it, time passed outside his apartment and eventually Kyle had to get up. The light shining in his windows stretched along the floor, brushing his toes and telling him that he would be late if he didn’t start moving right now. Roughly half the Corps was trained and ready for duty, which still put them at seriously undermanned. “Training. Teach the rookies what to do.”
“Lantern Rayner.”
That the Guardians’ voices now apparently came out of nowhere instead of from his ring still made him jump. “Yes?” he answered after a moment of shoving his racing heart out of his throat and back down where it belonged.
“Report to the Citadel immediately.”
“I have -“ he started to protest.
“Immediately.”
“Understood.” It was the only answer he could give, really. No one ignored a direct order from the Guardians; oh, some people - Hal - argued, or wiggled around them - John - or told the Guardians to fuck off altogether - Guy - but ignoring them wasn’t really a good idea. Kyle scrubbed his fingers through his hair and made sure his door was properly closed, and that Hal’s restraints weren’t about to dissolve.
When he reached the citadel, though, it wasn’t the Guardians with whom he spoke. Salaak was waiting for him, two of his four arms crossed in a very human gesture. Kyle wondered, irreverently, if he’d learned it from Guy. “Lantern Rayner,” he said tightly.
“I have drill,” Kyle said by way of greeting. Courtesy just wasn’t high on his list of priorities this morning.
“Your instructions have changed,” Salaak told him. If he had had a tail, it would have been lashing. Kyle tried to erase the mental image before it made him grin, or worse, laugh.
“Changed?” he said instead.
“Given the recent alteration in your physiology and abilities, the Guardians believe you would best be used in performing reconnaissance. Your instructions are to search out any sign of Sinestro or Parallax and report back here.”
Bad idea, the little voice in the back of his head said. Kyle told it to shut up and not tell him things he already knew.
“Do you have any information on their possible whereabouts?” he asked, trying to stall for time.
“There has been no sighting of either individual since the date of the reports filed by yourself and Lanterns Gardner, Kilowog, and Stewart.”
Kyle had forgotten that Guy, John, and ‘Wog had driven Parallax out of Ganthet on the same day that Sinestro had escaped. “Are you sure I wouldn’t be more useful protecting Oa?” Given that Oa was the center of the known universe, it only made sense that any attack from Sinestro would be focused there, or on Earth, but Earth had more than enough superheroes to hold the line until the Corps could deal with their renegade.
“Are you questioning the Guardians, Lantern Rayner?” Salaak fixed him with one beady eye and frowned.
Yes, he was questioning the Guardians, Kyle wanted to say. They were sending him on a wild goose chase; Sinestro wouldn’t be found unless he wanted to be. Kyle had learned nothing if not that, in all the time he’d spent roaming around off-world. “No,” he said, resigned. “When do I leave?”
“Tomorrow.” Salaak handed him a slim sheaf of papers. “Information extracted from past encounters.” Kyle took the folder, not pointing out that he was the resident expert on Parallax, except for the Guardians and Hal Jordan, and that Parallax’s presence in the game meant it would probably play out far differently than it had in the past. Sinestro couldn’t be counted on to make the same mistakes, play by the same rules.
“Thank you,” he said simply, and headed back to his quarters. He had until tomorrow to find out what was wrong with Hal and fix it.
* * *
Zombies, apparently, were not particularly cooperative. Kyle couldn’t get close to the thing wearing Hal’s face without it trying to swing around and take a mouthful out of him. He kept trying to scan the body itself for something out of the ordinary - besides the obvious - but it wouldn’t stand still. That he was still getting used to not needing a ring didn’t help matters either. Hal’s teeth, currently buried in Kyle’s left forearm, didn’t even bear thinking about. Kyle set his jaw and pried Hal loose, resisting the urge to curse. Blood ran freely down his wrist, and he let it. If nothing else, it would help clean the bite, and it wasn’t that deep anyway. He took a deep breath and gagged Hal.
Nothing seemed odd about Hal’s body, other than the moving and walking around part. As far as Kyle could tell, the heart was beating - slowly and irregularly - but the higher brain functions were just gone. That didn’t explain how the body could survive without food or water - particularly the latter - and it didn’t help Kyle fix it. The one thing he was fairly sure he had managed to ascertain was that Hal was most definitely not in there.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” he muttered, rubbing his eyes and standing well back. He didn’t know enough about anything other than basic anatomy to be able to tell what was screwy. Something clicked suddenly, and his half-focused gaze caught sight of what looked like a yellow thread. It vanished as soon as he turned his vision directly toward it, and he wondered if he’d been imagining things. Letting his eyes drift, he tried to regain the same looking/not-looking that had shown him the thread in the first place.
Not just a yellow thread, but a thin yellow aura surrounded Hal. The thread pulsed ever so faintly. Kyle tried to look deeper, but he lost the half-focus at the wave of sudden disorientation that swept through him. The energy he had as Ion, coming as it did directly from the Central Battery, should have been enough to counteract physical fatigue, but when he tried to draw on it, the dizziness only got worse. At least he had a handle on whatever was going screwy, he thought. Early in the morning was plenty of time to track it to its source. He made it as far as the door at the top of the stairs before he had to stop to catch his breath, closing the door and leaning on it.
“Something… not right,” he choked out, not sure why or even if he was speaking aloud, and then the floor tiles filled his vision and faded away.
When Kyle tried to piece together the fractured memories of the next few hours - days? - he had very few clear images to work with. The sensation of pain had been constant, and was no help whatsoever. He knew Guy had pounded on his door fit to wake the dead, and Kyle had been able to hear but not respond. Guy had turned him over and checked whether or not Kyle was still alive. In the process, he’d pulled Kyle away from the door. The thing inhabiting Hal’s body had broken through the door now that it was no longer blocked. Kyle had a vague memory of a priceless expression of shock on Guy’s face.
A Korugarian face hovering over him, looking oddly familiar, and using words with way too many syllables (mutating, pathogen, reanimation, and more that he’d never heard) was almost as strong in his memory.
An image of a corridor, flying through Oa’s upper atmosphere, and the cool fire of the Central Battery were all there, disjointed and fuzzy around the edges. So was Earth, but Kyle thought that was probably his overactive imagination. Maybe the rest of it was, too. It was entirely possible that the last few weeks had been nothing more than a vivid hallucination, but he had no ring on his finger and the construct rolling off his hand belied this vague hope.
“Yer awake.”
Oh, joy. Kyle blinked, but the level of light in the room didn’t change. It was dark and fuzzy, and there was a shadow off to his right that looked like it might be someone sitting in a chair.
“It’s dark,” he said tentatively.
“The light ain’t on,” said the shadow, confirming that it was indeed Guy.
“What…” Kyle paused, not sure exactly which question he wanted to ask. He got the distinct impression Guy was staring at him, which didn’t make things any easier. “What happened to Hal?” he asked.
“The walking corpse formerly chained up in your basement?” Guy asked, and then continued without waiting for an answer. “Got the bug out of him. Burned the body. Standard procedure, now.”
“Bug? There was a yellow thread…”
“Some kind o’ virus. Kept mutatin’. Near as we can tell, it was pullin’ energy directly from Parallax.”
“He’s here?” Kyle bolted upright, or tried. It was harder than it should have been.
“He ain’t here. Some kind o’ long distance connection.” Guy shifted his weight. “Near as we can tell, he was meant to be contagious.”
“He bit me,” Kyle remembered, and then a horrifying thought struck him. “Guy, am I -“
“You ain’t gonna turn into a zombie, if that’s what yer worried about. Natu got the bug out of you.”
That was why the face had seemed familiar - Natu was Korugarian, the replacement for Katma Tui and from the same planet as Sinestro. She’d been a doctor on Korugar. “Wait, meant to be contagious?”
“Yeah, well, you were tryin’ to bite everyone as came close enough. If Hal hadn’t’ve been in your apartment, he might’ve gotten to a shitload of Lanterns before someone found him, and if everyone went as quick as you, the virus would’ve spread real fast.” If that was Guy’s version of reassuring, it wasn’t helping. “Course, if he wasn’t in your basement, Patient Zero might’ve been someone else, but using Hal like that was probably a real kick.” Real anger burned in Guy’s voice, and Kyle thought he knew who had planned the plague.
“Sinestro,” he said.
“Welcome to the conversation,” Guy said, voice hard and cutting, and then sighed. “What were you doing with Hal’s body in your basement, Kyle? Why didn’t you tell someone when it started walkin’ around?”
It was rare that Guy used anyone’s first name without some kind of sarcasm attached. Kyle twisted his hands in the sheet, wondering how to answer. “Which one do you want me to do first?” he said softly, blatantly stalling.
“Fuck, kid, if you -“ Guy flung himself out of his chair and paced to the door and back. “You ain’t alone out here, okay?”
“I…” Kyle couldn’t speak. He couldn’t even look at Guy.
“You’re goin’ back to Earth for a week, get yer head on straight. Whatever’s goin’ on, kid, fix it. Ion’s the only reason the Guardians didn’t toss you back the second they knew you weren’t gonna infect anyone else. They think they’re gonna need you too bad to get rid of you, but they ain’t gonna use you if they think yer gonna break.” Guy left, closing the door behind him, and leaving Kyle to the soft beeps of machinery.
For a moment, the only thing he could focus on was the news that Hal had been cremated, that he was gone. With a wrench, he pulled his thoughts away and wondered if he hadn’t already broken beyond repair, and what that might mean.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table