legionworld | Earth Field Trip [MOD PLOT]

Entry tags:

Earth Field Trip [MOD PLOT]

Who| Anyone who wants in!
What| A field trip
Where| New Metropolis on Earth
When| After the steampunk pirate meme.
Warnings/Notes| N/A

Earth is the multicultural jewel of the United Planets, a world known for its diversity and culture. It's a place where people can find almost anything: any technology, any food, any style of clothing from any world. It's also a place people can learn about other species, from the planetary cultural centers that can be found there -- where aliens engage in cultural practices from back home and share them with others, to theaters and entertainment venues where music and entertainment events, to stadiums where people can catch alien sports like Magnoball, to museums filled with all different works of art from myriad worlds.

And if there is a city that best represents what Earth has to offer, it's New Metropolis, on the North American continent, where both Earthgov and the UP Council are located.

[ooc: ooc info and requests are here!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It was a moment before Hal answered, a moment he spent taking a good, long look at the first of the two statues, a smile settling in on his features. Not quite the same full-out, unabashed grin he'd gotten when they'd passed through the Flash exhibit earlier, but this display clearly struck a note.

"Yeah, you could say that. Clark - Superman, sorry - is kind of the golden standard. People call him the big blue boy scout for a reason." He tilted his head to indicate the other statue. "Superboy's a good kid, too, but I've never had the chance to know him as well."

"Lemme guess -- one of those truth, justice, and the American way types?" Rich asked, his own face breaking into a wide smile. "'Cause we got one of those back home, too."

Cap was maybe flawed in some ways -- that Civil War nonsense definitely showed that he and Stark had some major issues. But Rich was of the firm belief that Cap'd had the right idea more than Iron Man had.

And after the heroes back home had gotten a little lost for a while, it was Cap coming back that helped them finally start to find their way again.

"You know: the gold standard."

Rich wondered if he'd gotten some big statue after he kicked it and decided that he probably had.

Then he wondered if that meant he himself was anything like this man that a whole world -- a whole galaxy -- apparently looked up to. He decided that he probably wasn't -- not knowing that a hundred worlds had taken time to mourn his passing.

"Makes me wonder if every reality has one. Someone's got to set the good example, right?"

It sure as hell wasn't going to be Hal setting it, that was for sure.

"Yeah," said Rich. "Ours sure as hell walks the walk. His name's Captain America. Got his powers from a government program trying to create supersoldiers, and fought the Nazis in World War II. He went down in a plane over the North Atlantic and got frozen. They found him decades later, thawed him out, and he's been hanging around the present ever since."

Only in worlds like theirs was something that crazy possible. Nazi-fighting crusaders in red, white, and blue.

"The man's a living legend. One of the first superheroes. He was already famous for his part in the war when he disappeared. And the thing with him is he's the humblest guy you could ever meet, even with the whole wrapping himself in the flag thing he's all about what the country should be."

Truth, justice, equality, all that good stuff.

"Whenever the rest of the world goes crazy, whenever people've lost their way, whenever even the government is doing something shady, he's the guy that puts his foot down, stands up in front of the little guy -- in front of whoever needs to be protected -- and refuses to budge. He's the one we all look to."

Which was why the world had gone to hell while he was gone after Civil War and why it hadn't gone to rights again until he was back. And Rich was still convinced he'd been right about that registration thing, too.

"And in our world, it does go crazy all the time. In the last few years, it's been hero against hero and all this registration nonsense and every time I went home, it just wasn't home anymore. Not until he helped everyone put it to rights."

Hal didn't bat an eyelash at the description of a World War II era hero who'd gotten himself frozen and thawed out in the twenty-first century, because that just sounded like a day ending in -y, really.

Their worlds, man. Their worlds.

"Sounds like he and Superman would hit it off. Clark's about as midwestern old-fashioned values as they come. Not in the politicized way, just the...compassion for everyone, taking care of everyone way."

The craziness, on the other hand, gave him pause. Not the idea of the world going crazy in and of itself, because something was always going crazy. That was how things just went, for people like them and worlds like theirs, he was fairly sure. Hero versus hero wasn't an everyday thing, but that happened now and again, sure. But then...

"So what's the registration nonsense?"

Rich leaned his elbows against the rail that separated people from the Superman and Superboy statue. He was silent for a moment.

"Something happened while I was away, fighting in the war," he finally said. "See, it all started with my old superteam, the New Warriors. We did this reality TV show for a while; we'd tool around in this giant RV and they'd film our superfights."

He shook his head.

"It was stupid, but Thrash's company had taken a hit. Pretty sure he didn't have the money to bankroll the team anymore, but he refused to admit it. And we did some good -- hit all these little towns with big problems. The people that waited months for teams like the Avengers and Fantastic Four to get back to them about their meta criminals. All the money we got went towards keeping us on the road anyway -- it's not like we got rich off it or nothing. And it was fun."

He pushed a hand through his hair.

"I left halfway through the second season -- got called up to space because the war was brewing. After I left the team, my friends..." This was the part that was tough to talk about. "They ran into some escaped cons in Stamford, Connecticut. One of them was Nitro, a guy who could blow himself up. The explosions were supposed to be small, like the size of a car. Supposed to be. But for some reason he was more powerful than usual."

He made a little explosive gesture with his hand.

"When he went up, it took out a chunk of residential neighborhood. And a school." A pause. "And my friends. The only one that survived was the toothpick -- my friend Speedball. Robbie's kinetic energy powers protected him. But six hundred and twelve people died, including three of my friends and a bunch of kids."

It was a hard story to tell and it never really got much easier in the telling.

"And afterward, they passed this law, making all heroes unmask, register, and get trained. Which...had everyone going at each other's throats -- the people who supported the law against the people rebelling against it."

"...God."

It wasn't an easy story just to listen to, even if he knew that telling it had to be infinitely more difficult.

And it was easy to picture a law like that tearing the caped community apart. The benefits were obvious - as a cop, Hal had no trouble understanding the desire for accountability. He'd been asked once, somewhat incredulously, if he really didn't have a problem with the ring recording all of his actions; honestly, he didn't, because he always figured if he didn't do anything wrong, he didn't have anything to fear from it.

But.

Hal was somewhat more flexible about secret identities than most heroes could afford to be; in space, among the Green Lanterns, nobody cared. It was just like being any other kind of law enforcement. But on Earth, it wasn't so simple, and anonymity was the most important defense a superhero had - and the most important defense for everyone important to them.

"How'd it end?"

"Hell of a thing," Rich said, not really able to find any other words about the tragedy itself.

What else could he say about a tragedy like that? All that lost life, all those people grieving their loved ones -- their children. It was a sad thing, but he didn't dwell, couldn't dwell. He'd had to train himself out of thinking about the tragedies he hadn't been there to prevent, because of the war. If he thought about all the worlds devoured by the Wave while he was somewhere else, he'd have gone crazy.

"Basically, from what I heard after I came back a looong while after, the villains got in charge of things eventually. Naturally. Iron Man, the guy who spearheaded the registration business went on the run with the database of secret IDs in his head to keep it safe. Somehow they got rid of it, I have no clue how. Norman Osborn, the head honcho villain that got in charge of everything got exposed for...something and taken out."

Man, he really was out of the loop. He never stayed on Earth long enough to get everything explained properly.

"Thank God. Word was he'd once tossed an innocent girl off a bridge. Possibly someone close to Spider-Man, a close pal of mine. They hated each other. Archenemies."

Which made the fact Osborn had gained power mindblowing in its stupidity.

"Anyway, good ol' Cap, who'd been dead for a while, or lost in time, or something -- I never got that explained to me straight -- came back and led everyone to victory against all the villains."

He still had no idea what the hell that'd been about. Death? Time travel? Both?

"Then they got the law tossed out, decided a better way to deal with it all was training the young heroes better, and formed more superhero schools -- like they should've done in the first place," he said tartly, thinking of how the Avengers hadn't given the New Warriors the time of day back in the day, back when maybe they could've used a little guidance. "Robbie and my friend Justice, another former New Warrior, were teaching at one, last I talked to them."

He paused.

"Robbie said he wanted to teach the kids to not make his same mistakes. He was still blaming himself."

He hated that.

Edited 2016-03-24 01:44 (UTC)

A huge mess, that resolved into slightly less of a mess, then.

There was something a little different in Rich's tone when he mentioned Robbie again - not blatant, but enough to give Hal pause, because that was clearly going from a difficult story (still told from a distance) back to something closer, more personal.

"After something like that, I can't say I'm surprised. There's a long road from knowing something rationally isn't your fault and actually feeling it."

Hal still wasn't sure how far up that road he was, himself. Farther than Robbie sounded to be, for sure. Sometimes he almost felt like he was there, but sometimes it felt like he never would be. (Did anyone ever get there? Or was it always just a few more steps ahead, no matter how far you kept going? He wasn't sure, and he wasn't about to let himself think about it that way, because Hal didn't believe in giving power to anything by considering it out of reach.)

"You know the worst part? See, me and you, we're grown ass men. Been through some stuff, survived some stuff. Got all that life experience to fall back on to cope -- but the Toothpick was only eighteen when it all went down. A pain-in-the-ass little small fry, barely old enough to buy cigarettes."

That was the worst of it. Being confronted by one of his best friends in that creepy suit, Robbie saying that Robbie Baldwin was dead, that Speedball was dead, asking him to hunt down other heroes. When Robbie was still a teenager and should've been worrying about college and asking out that cute girl in college comp I.

"They were calling Robbie 'the most hated man in America' for a while." Rich shook his head. "You should've seen him when we first formed the team. His powers distorted how he looked so he looked older. The first time he ever powered down in front of us we realized we'd accidentally picked ourselves up a kid brother. Rest of us were mostly college age and older -- he was the team baby. This twiggy, fifteen-year-old runt."

Rich finally figured out what he wanted to articulate.

"You can never really go home again. That's the thing it made me realize. Even Cap couldn't wave his shield around like a magic wand and set it all to rights." He looked up at the Superman statue. "I dunno, he looks like he could, though. Something in the jawline."

He grinned and looked down at the floor.

"Sometimes I think I should've been that guy. That grabbed both sides and shook 'em hard enough for the stupid to fall out. You ever worry about that? Like you're just not doing enough? Or not doing the decentest thing you should do? That one perfect thing." He gestured at Superman. "I can never figure it out but sometimes I wanna be him. Or Cap. Or better'n Cap. Not so everyone looks up to me -- been there, done that, in the war -- but I hate seeing it all go wrong like that and seeing that even Cap dropped the ball in some respects."

Because he had. Fighting things in an open conflict like that. Cap'd helped fix it later, thank God, but even he'd lost his way a little bit.

Clark did have a magnificent jawline, Hal had to admit as he looked up at the statue again.

"Everyone thinks that way about Clark. That if anyone can make everything okay, it's him. And even he can't do everything, but I think that's what people need - to think that it's possible."

Like you're just not doing enough. Or not doing the decentest thing you should do.

That one perfect thing.

"But I know I'm a long way from that." And he knew exactly what his problem was. "Too angry. I was always too angry. Half my family died not wanting to look at me because I was too angry to fix things with them. Parallax got into me through fear, but what I did - that was just him taking me angry and taking off the emergency brake."

And even now, after he'd realized those problems, come a long way towards overcoming them - even now, he knew anger was still a problem. When he arrested Sinestro on Earth, he'd known in his gut that if there was any danger left to his family, he would kill him on the spot. When Sinestro had killed Laira, and Hal had again been an inch from killing him, when the red ring had locked straight onto him.

(Really, when Atrocitus pointed out your anger management problems, you were at some kind of low.)

"...you know, when I came back? Back to life, back from Parallax - Superman never held it against me. Batman, though...it was a long time before Bats got past looking at me like he was expecting me to bug out and try to destroy the timestream again. And as much as I wanted to punch him for it -"

(Well, had, technically.)

"It made more sense to me. I don't know how Clark does it." Slow exhale. "But God, does knowing him make me feel like I have to try."

Rich didn't know what to say about Hal's family or what to ask. 'What the hell happened to your family?' was one possible (blunt) thing, but was it right to ask? Was it something Hal even wanted to get into? Did he even need to ask to really understand? So he took it all in, figuring he'd bring it back to his family later, if it seemed like he wanted to talk about it. Without asking, all he could give was the sympathy in the expression on his face, reflexive and unconscious.

And then when Hal got to the rest, he smiled.

"Oh no, now see that -- that I get," he said, looking around a little more at some of the pictures and video of Superman in action, somewhat in awe the more he looked.

Cap had these ways of taking your breath away, sure, but this man flying above, swooping in like some kind of caped angel, it really made him think. Made him wonder about the differences in their worlds. About that symbol on his chest that apparently others had worn, because maybe it meant something a little like Cap's shield but something a little different, too. There was definitely something larger than life about the man that was very Cap-like -- and yet different. Something in the way he carried himself.

"Like I said before, I run with a rough crowd back home and they got things like 'the destroyer' and 'the deadliest woman in the galaxy' and 'the accuser' as titles. They've definitely done some bad things. Even Starlord, my right hand man -- and my best friend up there -- he destroyed a whole colony taking out an entity that would've taken down a star system. Killed 350,000 people to save millions and then turned himself right into prison after. Hated himself for a long time for it."

Rich gestured wildly with his hands, spreading them out to show something more expansive. He twirled around a little as he did it, looking at all the little brightly colored images around him.

"But when it all goes to hell, when the entire universe is dying, they're there, ready to scream in death's face. And when Annihilus was destroying worlds, they were out there on the front lines, fighting, sacrificing, pulling my ass out of the fire, trying to minimize casualties, doing every single thing they could. And maybe some of it was survival and some of it was practicality and some of it was for their own goals, but still, sometimes they'd be the last ones off the battlefield, covering everyone else's exit, when they didn't need to be. Sometimes they'd wander out past enemy lines to scrape what was left of me off the ground after an orbital bombardment, so the medicos could regrow all the bits I'd lost. When everyone else would've left me for dead -- just like I'd ordered them to."

He turned back to Hal.

"Nobody can tell me there's no good in them. It's in most people, even some of the ones roughest around the edges, even the ones that've done lots of things wrong." Like Gamora. He would never stop believing there was good in her -- even if she couldn't seem to. He leaned against back one of the railings around one of the exhibits -- a recovered golden chunk of the globe that had once been on the Daily Planet.

Then he grinned. "Seeing that good ain't the hard part. Convincing people like that to stab the right things and to not get too stabby when when nothing needs stabbing? That's the hard part."

Rich pointed to Hal.

"Now, you. All it took was a few conversations and I can tell you're almost exploding out of your skin with how much you wanna keep getting out there again, being the hero that thing wouldn't let you be. Grimlord Edgebat must be blind if he can't see it. Too much time skulking in the dark."

"I won't argue that he spends too much time in the dark," Hal laughed quietly. "I lost count of how many times I pissed him off on missions with that - I don't do it here, but at full power, back home? I glow - force field's part of the package. I think you can guess how thrilled his stealthy ass was every time he had to team up with the six-foot-two lightning bug."

His expression sobered a bit, though, before he went on. "But that's what he's seeing. The dark. He spends more time staring into the darkness than any of us; Gotham's a magnet for that shit. And that's how he fights back - fire with fire. Or fear with fear, more like." He ran a hand through his hair absently - the right, the one that would've been wearing the Green Lantern ring, if it were here. The one now wearing the Legion flight ring instead. "A ring tried to choose him for a Yellow Lantern, once. He rejected it, thank God, but that's their criteria - the ability to instill great fear."

To be fair, if he had to trust anyone with a yellow ring, Bruce definitely would've been higher on the list than Jonathan Crane, but Hal was far from thrilled at the idea of anyone important to him wielding a color that wasn't green. He'd seen - felt - what the rest of the spectrum could do to your judgment.

"There were seven of us, when we founded the Justice League. Bruce and I were the normal ones, you could say. We had aliens and an Atlantean and an Amazon, and Flash may have started human, but if you get him talking about what it's like to perceive things in attoseconds or touch the Speed Force, you get pretty fast that he's not really seeing things the same way as the rest of the world, not anymore."

Hal rested his elbows on the railing in front of the statue, leaning forward. "You look at Clark, you see what we want humanity to be. How high we want to climb. That's easy. Everyone sees it. But after everything..." He shook his head. "You go that high, you've got a long way to fall. And humans are good at slipping. I think that's what he's been seeing."

And he couldn't say he didn't understand it. Hal might've built his life around rejecting fear, but that just meant it struck that much harder when it caught up to him, and after spending years wrapped in it, breathing it, being it, a reaction like that made far more sense to him than it once would've, as much as he'd like to simply dismiss it.

Rich grinned at Hal's description of himself as a lightning bug. He wasn't exactly built for stealth, either. Nobody rocketed into a situation shooting yellow energy out of their ass without getting spotted. That was part of why speed was important for him. He and his new Novas had once cleared a hostage situation with no casualties in 1.86 seconds.

Law enforcement at rocket speed.

"You can't get by in life looking at how far down the ground is, is what I think. People gotta keep looking up to see how high they can go. And if they do that, they're not fixating on who's fallen, and not worrying about who's going to fall next, and not expecting the people who've fallen to never get back up in the air again."

He stood next to him and leaned against the railing, too.

"Even Thrash figured that out eventually, for all his dark armor and rocket skateboards and angst over his dead parents. He had us and he wanted to see us rise to the top. Even that stupid show was about that to him, I think. It was a mistake, in the long run, because everyone started to get hooked on the attention and it got all about image. But he wanted to keep us in the air, and wanted to reach out to the people that needed someone, and wanted us to be seen the way he looked at us, when we'd kinda been a joke for a long time. And I think he wanted the world to see that they couldn't just kick people around and keep getting away with it because the Avengers' answering machine was full."

He shook his head.

"Weeks, they had to wait sometimes. Months. While those creeps were hurting people." He shrugged. "It didn't work out. But I don't think that's what Thrash had intended, for it to be about attention. I think he wanted it to be, like...a symbol. I guess. Looking around this museum and how some of your guys look, it seems like that they have that bit down."

That S seemed to be a legacy. It seemed to be something that gave people hope.

"The thing about seeing people as symbols is it's static. They can only be one thing, either good or bad. But people change and grow and they fail but they also reform. I kinda think people're more like movies. You know, there's a whatsitcalled -- a diegesis."

Congrats, Hal, with this conversation, you've coaxed him into using one of the biggest words he knows.

Edited 2016-03-25 05:00 (UTC)

He was nodding along with all of that, because Rich's way of seeing it was a lot closer to how Hal thought, until they got to diegesis and his brain threw on the brakes and screeched to a halt.

"A what?"

"Oh. Uh, it's a term in filmmaking. Diegesis is the word for the world in the movie, like both what you see and don't see, that has its own internal logic and gives the movie depth. It also has to do with a style of storytelling that shows an interior view of a world, and in that, the details about the world itself and the experiences of the characters are revealed by showing rather than direct narration. If it's that way, it's diegetic storytelling."

A pause.

"Basically, it's the background depth behind the main narrative in a movie."

Depth, see? People were like movies with depth in the background.

He looked a little awkward now, like he thought he'd overstepped his bounds in trying to sound smart. What if he was using that wrong? Maybe it was a stupid comparison. It was probably a stupid comparison.

"I was a film major in college before I dropped out," Rich said awkwardly. "That's probably one of the only bits I even remember, mostly 'cause the example the professor always gave was the worldbuilding in Star Trek."

His cheeks even went a little pink, but there was probably never going to be a time that he didn't feel awkward when talking about school. When he didn't know something because he wasn't the book-learning type and had sucked at school, he got embarrassed. When he did know something, he also got embarrassed because he felt like he was probably using what he knew wrong. It made him feel like a fraud, if he tried to sound smart.

"I picked up a thing here and there but I wasn't ever the book learning type. You can shove something in my face like 'hey, you have to learn all this war strategy or the universe will die' and I'll learn it, but other than that, I'm not so bright."

Edited 2016-03-26 06:33 (UTC)

Hal seemed utterly oblivious to Rich's embarrassment - or perhaps he did notice and just didn't care. He might be confused as hell by the word, but he got the explanation well enough, and he wasn't passing any judgment on Rich for actually knowing it.

"Is that what you wanted to do, if not for the whole space cop thing? Film?"

"Not really. Mostly I just picked it 'cause my parents wanted me to go to school for at least something and I figured something where I could watch movies would be easier than something where I had to read a lot of books. Or play with beakers in a lab. Or memorize laws."

He shrugged awkwardly, shrinking on himself, in way that many people found surprising when he did it. Especially when he was such a large and intimidating man. Not that Rich knew it, but it was something his friends had always hated, because it was what he did whenever he was down on himself.

And he was. Big damn hero space general, but he'd still never shaken away that doubt and self-consciousness. Not completely. It went away when he needed it to, when he had to step up, but the D-student sad sack inside him that felt stupid and useless had never really gone away entirely.

Over the years, he'd just learned to tuck it away when other people needed him to, when he had a job to do.

"My brother, he's the smart one in the family. The MIT genius. He bought my parents a house with some crazy patents on...I don't even know what it was. Computer programs, I think? He was one of my first new Novas and goddamn was he talented. Worldmind said she hadn't seen anyone manipulate gravity fields with that much finesse in six generations."

There was no bitterness in his voice, despite him feeling like his brother outshined him. Only pride.

"Like I said, unless lives are on the line, I'm not really that bright. Dropped out of high school, due to being up in space for the Xandar-Skrull war, and I guess I never really caught up. Eventually I got my GED and went to college but I flunked out of that. Truth is, being a supehero's all I've ever been good for. I don't really have a life back on Earth."

He smiled a little, and it was equal parts amused and embarrassed. He laughed a little, even if he was slightly embarrassed talking about this. He held up a finger.

"The funniest part of it, though, was I had --" he had to stop talking to laugh for a second "--I had these hoity toity generals and hardcore Kree soldiers and powerful warriors and kings and emperors and all that pledging allegiance to me --"

He did a little flourish of his hand and a little bow.

"They're pledging their undying allegiance and following me into battle, and the whole time I'm just thinking 'please nobody ask me what I used to do on Earth,' because it would've felt wrong not being honest -- and then they'd all have found out their big fancy head general flipped a mean burger."

He laughed some more.

"Sometimes -- sometimes they'd ask me for something, like, a supply convoy, and I'm just -- in the back of my head where I can't help it, I'm thinking, 'do you want fries with that'?"

Hal laughed, too - with Rich, not at him, because for all that he was a brilliant pilot and had that to turn to on Earth, he'd scraped the gutter a few times himself. Making your way in one life was hard. Trying to live two at once...well, some people seemed to balance it well enough, but Hal had never been one of them, and the fact that he couldn't just set things down in between nightly patrols to go pretend he was a normally functioning adult on Earth had a lot to do with that, he knew.

And it was nice to hear someone else straight-up say what a problem that was, honestly. His friends in the League might be sympathetic ears if he needed to gripe, they could share in some of the headaches of living a double life, but at the end of the day, they were still on the same planet, and when they dropped out of sight to be dead or whatever for a while, it was more of a big event than a constant pattern of calls to other corners of the galaxy that might take days or weeks at a time to resolve.

"Sometimes I think not having a life on Earth would make things a hell of a lot easier."

General Stone had found out about his identity, which had turned out not to be too bad - because it meant someone was covering for his absences; he surely would've been discharged long ago if not for that, and while Carol had offered to take him back, Hal couldn't help but feel that it was better not to take it. Things always got complicated when he and Carol were too close to each other.

That was the opposite of making things easier.

Rich shrugged.

"It does and then it doesn't. There is nothing more amazing than spending most of your days just cruising through the stars. I really get it now, how some of the more nomadic species love it." The ones that were nomadic by choice, at least, not the ones that were nomadic because war or other hardships had destroyed their homes. "And it means I don't have to worry about maintaining a job or paying the bills or any of those responsibilities. No responsibilities other than the job itself."

Which was...freeing.

"But you miss people. You scare people. My parents were always terrified that each time I went up it was the last time they'd see me, that I'd die alone, away from my family on some alien world, near some distant star..." He shook his head. "And I did. Even if whatever brought us here somehow brought me back. And it's a little different than dying on Earth. You know, because at least I could've spent more time with them. It was the distance than hurt them, too."

It was more than just his parents, though.

"And you just -- you miss so much. You're not there when people need you. You're not there when the world goes to hell and friends -- friends maybe you could've protected -- go and die. Or when they suffer and maybe you could've been the one to hold out your hand and pull them out of the pit they were in. You're not there when people make their stupid choices that maybe you could've talked people out of. And most of all, you don't even have a chance at the normal things. It's hard when you split your attention, it really is, but when you spend at least some time on Earth, there's at least a chance, you know?"

There would've been a chance he could've made a new life with Nita after pulling her out of the Fault, out of time itself, if he'd been able to settle, just a bit.

"You know what my biggest regret was, when I was dying? That I never got to have kids. I want some rugrats. I want, like, my own small army," he said with a little laugh. "I always had this picture in my head -- no idea if it'd ever come true or if that's what they'd look like or anything, but a bunch of little light-haired rugrats with wings on their feet like Nita -- because I always, always pictured it with her -- just running around and tearing up the place with superstrength, making our hair go gray early."

It was perfect in how imperfect it was, his little fantasy. To him, it seemed like a kind of chaos he could bask in for the rest of his life.

"But that's never gonna happen if I don't settle on Earth for good or find a way to split my time. That's what you lose. You get all those stars and you get to help people in big, big ways, but you lose everything else. All those little Earth things, all that time with family and friends -- and whatever future you could've built with them. It doesn't make it more simple or easier -- it's a trade. An exchange."

Edited 2016-03-27 05:03 (UTC)

Hal was quiet for a good, long moment, turning that over in his head, because as much as it was something he tried to avoid thinking about, it struck home, hard.

You're not there when the world goes to hell and friends -- friends maybe you could've protected -- go and die.

Friends. Cities.

There was no proverbial gutter in his life that would ever compare to coming back and finding a crater where Coast City used to be, except, perhaps, the gutter that was everything that came after.

"I was never there when my family needed me before I had powers." He'd been too wrapped up in running from his own grief to consider what the rest of his family was going through. Missed chance after missed chance, and then finally he'd realized he was out of chances to fix anything. "All going to space ever changed was the scale. Being too late for seven million people instead of just one."

And even if he'd learned from all of it, tried to do better, fixed his relationship with his younger brother - that was better and worse. It felt good having an actual relationship with his family again, but then he considered the pure terror he'd felt when Sinestro told him Parallax was in Coast City with his family, for the millisecond before rage took over, and he thought of how many times he'd have to multiply that by, if he let himself get close to other people...of how impossible it would be to watch over everyone at once.

That was fear. He hated admitting it to himself, but he knew he had to. He'd spent so much of his life trying to convince himself that he wasn't afraid of anything, but he'd really just been chasing cheap thrills and pointless risks because that was easier to confront than the deeper fear that had wrapped itself around him since he watched his father's plane go down. He was afraid of losing people. Losing people wouldn't hurt you if you didn't get too close to them to begin with. And not being so closely associated with a superhero would mean less risk likely to wander into their paths, anyway. Safer for them, he'd told himself, because that was easier than admitting the core of the problem.

"Seven million?" Rich asked.

That was a lot. Not the most he'd ever seen die, not when the count was in the billions and billions. But a lot.

Just like eight million -- the population of New York City, give or take -- was a lot. His home city.

"It was after Superman died. He came back later, but I think you can imagine how chaotic things get when one of the pillars falls. I was cleaning up a few messes in space...and I got back to find my city nuked by Mongul."

He pushed himself up on his elbows, just far enough to grip the railing instead of leaning on it.

"...I still couldn't tell you for sure, because from my perspective, it always felt like me and not something else, but I think that's when Parallax started edging into the driver's seat."

Now it was Rich's turn to be gobsmacked.

"God."

Seven million. Almost the population of New York. Seven million. Even if he worked on a scale of billions that was huge.

"I'm sorry."

Edited 2016-03-27 06:51 (UTC)

"We're kind of damned if we do, damned if we don't, aren't we?"

Hal exhaled slowly. He knew perfectly damned well that if he'd been there, other people would've died elsewhere. Even a Green Lantern couldn't be everywhere.

"Don't take the ring, and sure, I would've been there. Dead with everyone else, still wouldn't be able to do anything. Taking it means having the power to do something...but there's too many somethings that need you to do them, and never enough of you to be everywhere."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject