legionworld | another time, another place

Entry tags:

another time, another place

Who| Hal Jordan and whoever wanders in
What| That good old new arrival confusion.
Where| Observation deck.
When| After Whistling in the Dark.
Warnings/Notes|

Hal thought he'd been having a bad day. Week. Month. Whenever the last time he'd been able to take his ring off and not think that the world was going to end if he tried to get a catnap. When trying to keep Larfleeze out of trouble in Las Vegas was the easiest task on the to-do, that was never a good sign. And yet now he'd take a hundred Larfleezes in as many capitals of rampant debauchery, because that had still made a lot more sense than finding himself in what was, apparently, a good ten centuries ahead of his own time, with no idea how it had happened or when he was going to be able to get back and get the job done.

It was the things that were familiar, not the things that weren't, that made it all so awkward.

Half of what he'd heard so far had been in one ear and out the other - probably not really helped by the fact that he should've taken a little longer to sleep off the concussion, but when Hal Jordan decided he was done staying in bed, good luck keeping him in one place. He needed to think, and he needed to not do it there - so he'd made his way out, wandered the corridors, and when he'd spotted a sign marking the way to the observation deck, he'd taken it.

Stars changed, he knew. But not as fast as everything else, and not so dramatically that he could look at the sky in front of him and know what was wrong, unlike everything else in this picture. The second question he'd gotten out was where are the other Lanterns?

(The first, of course, had been did I win?)

And the answer only brought more questions - questions that needed to be asked, whether he was going to like the answers or not. The words were on the tip of his tongue to just ask his ring before he caught himself, sighed, and pulled the omnicom out of his jacket pocket. There was still a ring on his finger, but he wasn't sure he was going to be able to start thinking of that Legion flight ring as his ring.

Only one ring got that title, and it was gone.

"Where's Oa?"

The voice that answered him from the information network wasn't the one he was trained into expecting, either. Wrong pitch. Different tone. Not right.

"No current data. Last recorded entry on planet Oa dates to..."

A long damned time ago was all he could really hear in those numbers. Heavy sigh. He slumped against the rail, eyes still on the stars.

"Okay. Let's try something easier. Where's the best place around here to get a beer?"

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Rich just kept grinning mischievously, leaning against the railing and looking down at the planet.

"Hey, you're the one that said it, not me." Don't pin the stupid joke on him! There were plenty of other Beyonce lyrics he could've been talking about. "Must be one hell of a woman for it to get that complicated."

Just like Namorita. Not that he and Nita had broken up that many times, but, well. They'd broken up almost as many. It had gotten kinda complicated like that -- and even more complicated still after he saved her during that thing with the Sphinx.

"She is."

Where Rich's gaze went down to the planet, Hal's went up, to the stars.

"But trying to hold anything down when I never know when I'm going to be called off-planet for a month or three? That's just a headache." If General Stone weren't well aware that Hal was Green Lantern, he was pretty sure he'd have been discharged from the Air Force long ago.

(There were definitely issues at work other than "life is uncertain," but Hal was very good at pretending that wasn't it at all.)

"There's the rub, isn't?" said Rich. "You could go back home. But if you do, everything in space goes all to hell. Back before this, I barely ever had time to go back to Earth anymore."

A pause.

"I barely ever had time to even slow down. At one point after the Annihilation war, I was getting distress calls in the tens of thousands. Most of them 8X8s -- planetary distress calls. And I was the only one around to answer 'em."

He looked upward, racking his brain to measure the time. He didn't have Worldmind in his head anymore to instantly calculate things for him.

"I was away a solid year dealing with it all." He snorted. "It worked the same in reverse, naturally. I left all that time, came back, and it was Earth that'd all gone to hell. It's always no-win."

"Kyle was stuck with the entire universe for a while, before the Corps was restored. I don't envy anyone that."

He still felt pretty bad about that, honestly. Considering Kyle had been the only Lantern watching over the universe entirely because of Hal's own actions. Parallax was an explanation, not an excuse.

Rich's shoulders drooped a little hearing that. Subtly, but noticeably.

"S'good it got restored at least." Because the alternative -- that a similar corps was taken out -- was a disheartening thought. His shoulders might've drooped even more if he'd heard that it wasn't restored. "I was trying to recruit when I...well. When I died."

His eyes rolled upward, as if to imply that death was just so ridiculous.

"Not that it stuck. There's a team called the X-Men that seems to have people dying and reviving every other year. Whenever someone else like me comes back we joke that they must've left the door to the afterlife open."

Off that subject now. Little did he know he was accidentally tripping over another sensitive subject instead.

"What brought it down? Your corps?"

Hal's posture didn't change an iota at the discussion of death's revolving door, nor did his expression - because that was old hat, and with the Blackest Night having happened so recently, it just felt like an extension of every discussion he'd been having in the last few weeks. As he'd told Barry, things had changed. Gotten more dangerous. Death - whether it stuck or not - had become part of the daily reality now.

The question, on the other hand, caused him to tense up noticeably, his posture stiffening and closing inward a bit and his jaw tightening.

"I did."

There was a definite flatness to his tone, but not the flatness of indifference - more like the flatness of overcompensation, as if he didn't trust himself to let too much out and was overdoing his attempt to keep his voice even. If he didn't clamp down on anything that was trying to work its way out, he'd wind up letting out everything.

Rich stood there in silence for a moment, processing that.

"There's two ways this conversation is going to go from here," he said, and his voice was perfectly calm -- still friendly even. It was all said very matter-of-factly, as if he was just following some kind of procedure by rote.

It was an "Officer Friendly" sort of voice.

"And which way it goes depends on you. Either you're going to tell me you were possessed or something like that and things'll be fine. Or you're going to tell me you're actually a supervillain -- like still. And then I'll have to do the threatening you to keep you in line act. Maybe belt you one, I dunno. Depends on how awkward and aggro this gets."

Because there was some simmering anger under the surface. Maybe it was another world, maybe it was another corps, but seriously, fuuuuck that. It made him angry, knowing another universe had suffered the same, another corps of space police -- probably just trying to serve -- had been mowed down. Even if they'd been rebuilt.

And if Hal was genuinely still a supervillain there were kids on this little team they'd found themselves on. Real young teens. And there had to be some lines drawn in the sand. Possibly violently. Rich wasn't entirely above that. He policed a very different universe back home.

"So, which one?"

"First one."

That was the easy part of it, at least.

In as much as anything about this story could be called the easy part.

"It took a damned long time before anyone figured out that was what was going on, though. It started subtle. It was in me for years." He rubbed his temples. "I didn't know that wasn't me until I was climbing back out of the grave and the Spectre helped me pry my soul loose. It felt like it all made perfect sense to me when I was doing it."

Rich paused again as he thought about that, and then a visible shudder ran through his body and he briefly closed his eyes.

"We're good then," he finally said, turning to look at him. Then he quickly looked away, his jaw setting. It felt wrong to leave Hal hanging like that, though. Here he'd gone and talked about something that intense, put it all out there, with Rich's threats hanging over his head.

"For me it was the Phalanx," he offered. A peace offering, really. He shrugged one shoulder haplessly. "The Corps was already gone then so I didn't terrorize them. I just terrorized everyone else. Think, uh --"

He tapped his temple.

"Like Star Trek, you know? 'Resistance is futile.' Except they let their 'Select' still keep some personality. You weren't a drone, you were all Locutus-ed. You thought you were yourself. You were yourself. Sort of. At least the 'yourself' that would slave away to work for them, to infect more people, to --"

To kill.

The rebels. The resistance. The civilians herded into chambers where they were torn apart on a molecular level for energy to power the Phalanx spires.

"Lost my first new Nova that way. I thank God every day that I at least wasn't the one that dealt the final blow; I just helped. That was Gamora -- she got taken, too. She was the one that infected me." He rested his hands on the railing. Didn't clench them, didn't show any sign of tension by clenching it or anything, but it took will to do that. "She was good people. Ko-rel. She had a kid."

He finally looked back at Hal again.

"We're good," he repeated. "It happens. In our line of work. And then you claw your way out and get to breathe again."

"Thanks." Some of the tension went out of Hal's posture, although he didn't look up. "I haven't heard that much."

Not that he blamed anyone who didn't trust him, after all of that. For so long, there'd been no way of knowing. And he'd done a lot of damage that couldn't be made up for. But even as accustomed as Hal was to disregarding the opinions of everyone around him and just pushing forward anyway - that didn't make it any less unpleasant to know just how much faith from his comrades he'd lost.

At the end of the day, Hal feared being left alone. Had since he'd suffered his first real loss when he was ten years old. That fear gave Parallax an opening to sink its hooks into him, and every day he'd been under its influence, he'd taken another step towards bringing it down on himself.

"It's called Parallax." Rich hadn't asked, but he didn't want to leave it only half finished. "The sentient embodiment of pure fear - there's one of those for every color on the emotional spectrum, too. There's no killing something like that; it's always going to exist."

The dark side of Skittles.

"The Guardians figured if they locked it up and didn't leave records, that was as close as they'd ever get. So when something like that gets let out, and nobody remembers it even exists -" He shook his head. "Nobody realized it. Every Lantern who wasn't on Oa when I destroyed the Central Power Battery, everyone in the caped community back on Earth - they all just figured I'd completely lost my shit. Why wouldn't they? Nobody knew. Kyle and Ganthet didn't figure out what had happened until after I was dead, and plenty of people still aren't sure if they really believe it or not."

Rich let out a low whistle. That really did sound like a whole lot of terrible.

There was only one thing he could think of to say.

"That's rough, buddy."

It was a little more unloading than he'd meant to do, but he'd had a lot of reasons to be thinking about Parallax lately, to be fair.

"I think I just made myself need that beer even more. Up for a field trip?"

Rich smiled.

"Let's go give that Silverale a try, huh?"

This wasn't something he'd expected, finding someone else who did the space cop thing, something else that got it.

But hey, this alternate universe thing seemed to be full of surprises.

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