Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When Hal strolled into the Central City Police Force’s Forensics Department – or, as he preferred to think of it, the Nerd Box – he did so right on time, the large analogue clock ticking over to 1300 hours just as he opened the office door with a vigorous push on the kick-board. He felt for a moment like a substitute-teacher, as his entrance coincided with the mass scramble of hunched-over geeks abandoning their desks for a prime spot in the cafeteria line. It was as though the laminated visitor-badge on his breast granted him some field of invisibility as the tide of white-coated scientists and technicians streamed past him; the only salve for Hal’s pride was the appreciate once-over he received from a curly-haired woman who went so far as to move her protective goggles to the top of her head, which Hal had to assume was some form of second base amongst the intelligentsia. He ran his hand through his hair and winked.

“Looking for an electron, handsome?”

“Beg pardon?” Hal blinked.

“Oh, I just figured you lost one,” the woman said, unhooking her mask and snapping off her nitrile gloves, “On account of you being so attractive and all.”

Okay, so make that third base.

“Clearly we’ve got chemistry,” Hal replied, trying for a suave lean on a nearby desk.

The woman sighed. “Clearly a waste of a physics line,” she said mournfully, ready to push by him.

Ouch. Swing and a miss, Jordan. Hal winced.

“Alright, hold on a sec, uh,” he checked the embroidery on her jacket, “Miss Baker-,”

“Dr. Baker.”

Aaand you’re out.

“Dr. Baker – don’t suppose you’ve seen an electron by the name of Barry Allen around, have you?” He hefted the bag of take-out he was carrying, the food already beginning its drop in temperature from ‘tolerable’ to ‘undigestible’.

Baker hesitated, before shooting her thumb over her shoulder.

“Lab 3 – and close the door behind you.”

Now that was a command Hal Jordan was well familiar with and he gave her a casual salute as she vanished into the hoard of the hungry, making a mental note to see if Barry had any physics themed pick-up lines he could crib. Hal made a face as he pushed through the fire-safety doors, trying to imagine Barry Allen of all people flirting, science-based or otherwise. Maybe when he was in college…

The idea of a younger, more awkward Barry, no doubt fashionably attired in some sort of awful sweater-vest, trying out his moves on his co-eds fuelled a fond fire in his chest and he found himself grinning as he ambled up to the correct door, giving it only a perfunctory knock before entering.

Immediately he understood Miss- sorry, Dr.– Baker’s compulsion; a wall of freezing air slammed into him, making his eyes water and causing a stinging pain to zing up his nostrils. Could ice burn off nostril hairs? Hal winced, sniffling as his skin burst into goose-bumps, automatically shrinking back into the thick padding of his G-1. When he breathed, the vapour came out as a fog.

To add insult to injury, the only sound in the room was the radio burbling out some sort of plunky jazz. A quick, slightly watery, glance around revealed the small room to contain all the science-y stuff Hal had expected. He wasn’t a dumb guy, but he didn’t spend his days learning the difference between a chromatograph and a spectrograph; kinda pointless if you have a space ring to do all the analysis for you, and so when he failed to be able to identify the miniature urbanscape of microscopes, pipette-stands and centrifuges that had spread themselves out over the desks around the lab, he didn’t let that discomfort him. As long as nothing looked ready to blow him up, poison him or knock him over, he was happy to let CCCL keep its mysteries.

The only mystery he was interested in in that moment was the figure standing by one of the computers, wrapped up in a thick down coat and scarf and paying no attention to Hal’s entry, too busy flipping through a binder of plastic sleeves at such speeds that Hal was surprised they hadn’t melted into one vinyl blob. Clearly the computer wasn’t keeping up with demand, as the figure would occasionally let out a frustrated click of the tongue and a huff of white fog.

A green glowing hand floated over to the radio and clicked it off.

“When you said the Forensics Department was underfunded I didn’t realise it was so bad they’ve had to put you on ice.”

Barry turned around, blue eyes widening and then crinkling with delight.

“GL!” he exclaimed, voice somewhat muffled both by the scarf and the blue mask beneath it.

“Surprise,” Hal said, grinning, waggling his free hand in the air. “I come bearing gifts and, even better, food. Since you don’t seem keen to join your fellow lab-coats in the mess.”

“I didn’t know you were planetside.” A small wave of hot air blasted past Hal as his friend appeared before him. “Sugar,” Barry winced, brushing small sparks off his jacket and giving Hal an abashed smile. “Supposed to keep the lab at a cool 20 Fahrenheit, but, well…force of habit.”

“Now you know what it’s like for us mortal men to schlepp out feet around all day,” Hal laughed, clapping Barry on the back. “At least we don’t go around turning every room into a toaster oven. Anyway, I didn’t even know I’d be here until about, oh, five or so hours ago, so I figured I’d drop by to hang out with by superfriend.”

“Not the ‘superfriends’ again,” Barry groaned. “Besides, you know you can’t just bring food in here, Hal, there’s sterile zones all over the place.”

“Is this one of ‘em?”

“Well, no-,”

“Then give it a rest, Bar; for a man who burns 20,000 calories on an easy day and can almost literally be in three places at once, you’re the worst at eating like a regular person. Hell, I’d take irregular at this point. How you don’t starve when I’m not here I don’t know.”

Barr’s eyebrows shot into the stratosphere, which might have had a stronger effect if he wasn’t still wrapped up in enough layers to render even Larfleeze cute.

Maybe that was pushing it.

“That’s rich, pal; how you don’t starve when you’re planetside is a mystery. The amount of times you ‘forget’ your wallet when we hang out is a statistic improbability.”

“What can I say, I’m an improbable kinda guy.”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“Just eat your food.”

“My hero,” Barry drawled, but took the bag with a quirk of his lips.

“Some of that’s mine, Mr. Snackhole,” Hal warned, then grimaced as he felt the temperature of the food. True, there was no such thing as ‘undigestible’ to Hal Jordan, at least on earth – once you’ve been forced to branch out into alien cuisine, everything on your home planet somehow becomes more palatable – but that didn’t mean he enjoyed his burgers room temperature and dropping.

He wasn’t sure the burgers actually touched the inside of Barry’s mouth on the way down.

Lucky you, he thought, before taking a bite of his own congealing reconstituted ‘meat’.

“Sho what’re you working on in here?” he asked through a mouth of soggy bun and wilted lettuce.

“Have a look yourself,” Barry said, beckoning him to a device that looked like two large microscopes engaging in R-rated content. Two packs of large fries, by now limp, vanished. When Barry indicated to the eye-piece sitting atop the optical bridge joining the two microscopes, Hal peered into it, watching two split magnifications come into view.

“The one on the left is a snowflake,” Barry explained. “There’s a reason everyone talks about their uniqueness – each natural snowflake passes through the atmosphere at different rates and configurations. Now the one on the right is one of Captain Cold’s snowflakes.”

“…Still look different to me.”

“Artificial snowflakes are different to one another to a certain degree, but they do repeat after a while. Snart makes adjustments to his Cold Gun every now and then but they stay more or less the same through each iteration, something to do with the hyperdecelerant mixture he uses in the tank. Now these-,” and here the right sample disappeared and a new slide fell into place, “are flakes we picked up from the last sub-zero crime scene. It’s an empty plot of land right now, but it’s set to become the Kanigher Plant; nuclear power, y’know. Central’s big on renewable energy.”

“The snowflakes are identical.”

“Not completely, but practically so,” Barry agreed, sounding perturbed. When Hal raised his head, he saw a furrow in his friend’s brow, even as he was making his way through a cream-cheese filled jalapeno.

“So? Cold’s made an upgrade.”

“Director Singh would agree with you,” Barry said, a tone of frustration in his voice, “but I’m not sure. Snart’s on parole and looks to be behaving himself. If he’s being good, I don’t want a suspicion – technically it’s profiling - to ruin that.”

“Look, man, I get that you’re Blue Lantern material,” Hal said, reaching over and stealing a jalapeno, “but c’mon, you don’t really believe Snart’s ever going to stay reformed?”

“We can’t just give up on them – even criminals have a right to a new leaf.”

“The guy’s had enough new leaves to make a whole new forest. What makes you think this wasn’t Snart?”

“A…hunch. Look, the new sample has all the hallmarks of cryotine supersaturation. The last time Snart came into contact with cryotine the CCPD had to arrest him in the emergency room. He has an allergy to the stuff.”

“So he wore gloves.”

“Maybe. I don’t know, something feels off about this, Hal. I just want firm evidence one way or another, whether this was actually Cold or a copycat.”

“That one’s easy to solve – was the guy on the other end of the gun Leonard Snart? ‘Cause then it was probably Leonard Snart.”
“Har, har,” Barry said dryly, folding the wrapper from his burger into a precise rectangle, then square, then triangle. It was kind of hypnotising to watch. “Lucky your ring works on willpower and not intelligence, huh?” He teased. “Anyway, it wasn’t a gun, it was a mine.”

“A mine?”

“A cold mine. Can you believe it actually hurt worse than being hit with the sub-zero beam? If that had struck a construction team and not me, I don’t know what it would have done to them.”

“The hell did you run into a mine for?”

“Obviously it wasn’t intentional. I might have been, uh, a little distracted to notice the trap until after I sprung it.” Barry flushed and patted his stomach absently.

“Huh. Lucky the CCPD hires based on number of bow-ties owned and not intelligence, huh?” Hal smirked, crumpling up his own wrapper and throwing it at Barry, unsurprised when it ended up in a bio-hazard labelled waste-bin in a shower of sparks. “What happened to keeping the lab cold?”

“What happened to respecting my civilian identity’s 9-to-5?” Barry shot back without heat.

“Speaking of- I’m actually here to kidnap you. Within the next few hours or so, anyway.”

“Can’t do it.”

“Not sure people usually get a choice in being kidnapped, actually.”

“Well I do, and I’m saying ‘no’. Unless it’s world-ending, I can’t.”

“How about we just fast-forward ten minutes to where you inevitably give into me, because we both know you can’t actually say ‘no’ to this face,” Hal said, laying the jet pilot charm on thick. Surely this time his suave lean would yield better results.

The look Barry sent him was pained and Hal finally took in the dark bags under his eyes and the faint slump to his shoulders. He swiped a gloved hand over his face.

“Hal, I really wish I could, pal. Truly-,”

“’Truly’? Forsooth, milord,” Hal joked.

“-but we have a potential suspect for these crimes apprehended on evidence that is really stretching the absolute limits of ‘circumstantial’, so I have,” he glanced towards the clock on the wall, “about eight hours left to run up something admissible before Singh gives the cops the go-ahead to release him and starts pointing fingers at Cold. After that, who knows how quickly he’ll be in the wind.”

“So you’ll catch him again. You can search the city in like, a day.”

Now Barry was beginning to get irritated and Hal thought it extremely unfair that his best friend could still look so- so- cute? Handsome? Whatever a guy can call his guy friend - even when he was getting annoyed with him.

“Well, yes, I could but have you ever heard of entry without a warrant? I’m not just going to poke into people’s private abodes-,”

“Abodes, milord?”

“-stop that – without strong reasons to. And again, day job – I’d rather not spend my few hours between here and…my other job searching every cockroach-infested warehouse this side of the Miss River. It might seem like it takes a second for you, but I feel every one of those things crawling on me in relative time, you know.”

He shuddered.

“Let me guess – that’s a Flash Fact?”

“Wish it wasn’t.”

“I get that you’re a crime lab wiz, but seriously, the place isn’t gonna fall apart just because you’re not here for a liiiittle bit,” Hal said, now also beginning to feel his frustrations. Two large green hands pinched their fingers together in emphasis. “C’mon, man, I’m not asking for the galaxy here – not even the earth! Two days, three, four max on the Green Lantern Express and you’ll be back in time for your Louis Thereaux re-runs.”

“Listen to my words, Harold,” Barry snapped. “I can’t just take off.”

“Sure you can, it’s called delegation (or so I hear). There’s other nerdomancers banging around in here, give ‘em your work, let ‘em run free. Put in your PTO. Live a little.”

“It’s clearly been too long since your last real job-,”

“Hey, being a space cop is a real job!”

“-if you think PTO is going to be approved day-of. Besides, I need to save my days off for League Business, for fam-,” he stuttered suddenly and winced, blurring a little around the edges in agitation, before clearing his throat to continue. “Point is, I’ve already used up-,”

“So you’ll save up your PTO for everyone but me. I get it.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“You do me so dirty, Barrence. All I ask is for a quick trip with my best bud and you’re shooting me down without even considering it!” Sure, Hal felt a bit like a whiny kid in the moment, but he had a point, damnit!

Barry was growing in his impatience and pulled his hood down and scarf off, the air around him getting warm and sticky like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm. Had Hal looked towards the microscopes, he might have seen the snowflakes disappearing into droplets of squished water between their glass panes. A stray spark jumped from the red coat to the monitor, causing the digital display to blink erratically.

“I have considered it. You don’t know how long I’ve considered it in relative time.”

“Pah, relative-shmelative,” Hal rolled his eyes, if only to see Barry flush. “Y’know relative time is becoming your quantum flux; it can’t be your answer for everything.” He gestured to the now empty paper bag. “I brought you Big Belly!”

“And I appreciate it!” Barry cried out before taking a deep, deliberate breath and continuing in a calmer voice. “I do appreciate it, Hal. But you can’t bribe me to ditch school with you. You haven’t even told me where we’d be going and knowing you, two, three, four days – even if I could spare them, which I can’t – would turn into two, three, four weeks and I’d be shot at, imprisoned and probably covered in some kind of unpleasant, if scientifically fascinating, alien slime!”

“Covered in slime, eh?” Hal waggled his eyebrow.

“Harold!”

“Fine! Fine. See if I do anything nice for you ever again.”

“Come on-,”

Screw this. Hal shoved himself off from the desk and began his walk towards the lab door, only turning back to Barry when he had his face back in control enough to present a careless smirk to his friend.

“I’m busy too, actually. Got things to do, galaxy, nay, universe saving things, in fact.”

“Did you just say ‘nay’?”

Hal threw his hands up.

“Would you look at that, I have to go save some kittens from an exploding star. If you even care.”

And then he walked out – he couldn’t quite stop himself from counting and hoping that, in the few minutes it took to get from the forensics department to the front door of the police station, Barry might change his mind; in relative time, a few minutes of regret must surely feel like a few days. But it was no use and by the time he stepped out of swinging doors of the building and into the pouring rain with no last second, speed-mangled conciliatory text buzzing away in his pocket, Hal already knew his next port of call.

*

No matter how often Hal saw it, the staggering magnificence of the universe never ceased to awe him. The vast infinity of space, dotted all over with the red-blue-white glitter of stars, some in the process of being born, some just a distant corpse-light, calling across the light-years to the ghosts of the future, singing mournfully ‘Once, I too was alive’.

Tyluria Zen spun lazily beneath his feet, a dense blanet surrounded by its own coronet of dust and debris. The outer ring, already unstable outside the limits of the Roche radius, had begun to drift off, the celestial band and its minor moon, Tyluria Carr, pulled in towards the distant, invisible black hole the planet orbited. Normally, TZ presented itself as a fairly unimpressive ball of rock and glass, sustaining no lifeforms, no party-life, no alcohol and no brawls, which generally eliminated any interest Green Lanterns of Earth tended to have in alien environments. Hell, even Thaal Sinestro had never set his yellowed sights upon it, which really said it all.

Now, however, the planet had become something akin to a turbine fan, extrapolated into a spherical array; great grey towers, organic and asymmetrical in nature, had sprung up from the surface of the body and grown so tall as to penetrate the exosphere and where they approached one another, they seemed to experience attraction, winding and joining to form intricate plaits of imperfect honeycombs. It was only with the help of the power ring that the visitors floating above the planet could hear the most extraordinary part of this event – ‘The Song of the Garden’ its celestial neighbours had called it; a ringing carillon of endless overlapping bells as the towers sent sound bouncing between them and, thanks to the gift of the Green Lantern Battery, up to their audience.

“You, uh, sure this thing is sturdy?” Oliver Queen muttered, tapping at the sphere of emerald energy surrounding him.

“Hasn’t popped yet,” Hal replied, shrugging, digging into his bucket of popcorn and leaning back in his own construct, which had by then taken on the form of a beach chair.

“Guess it’s a bit late to be questioning it now, at any rate.”

“A bit.”

There was a beat of silence between the two humans as they gazed down upon the artistry of the cosmos.

“Remind me…what are we looking at again?” Oliver asked, scratching his blond beard.

A green brochure popped up in Hal’s hands.

“Every trillion or so years, give or take a millennia, the atmosphere of Tyluria Zen collides with…something which overproduces a chemical called,” he floundered over the complex chain of syllables, “man, I hate Kokorran chemistry. I’m gonna call it PVS – PVS stimulates volcanic activity which jettisons, uh, han- hanoric? Whatever that means – hanoric pillars into the air, which crystallise and rebounds sound waves in…I don’t even know. Special patterns of some sort.”

“Huh…looks like a bunch of gray rocks to me.”

“Yeah, but it’s scientifically fascinating,” Hal said, almost desperately, the pamphlet vanishing in a verdant sparkle.

Ollie scrunched his nose and shifted around in his own beach chair. Where the light of the far distant sun struck the round field about him, it cast his shorts and Hawaiian shirt in an almost fluorescent glow.

“Look, pal, not that I’m not flattered you wanted to whisk me off on an interstellar date night but – and I can’t believe I’m saying this since I still think the guy’s the biggest tool this side of the galaxy and possibly further – why didn’t you ask Flash to see this? Seems more up his tightly-clenched alley; hell, for you, he might even remove the stick first.”

A beat of silence.

“You did ask him!” Ollie accused.

“He was busy.”

“Ha!”

“He’s always busy! The guy can run faster than the speed of light and yet he’s always up to something!” Now Hal was really on a roll. “I only have limited downtime myself, and he can’t even take a little time off for his old buddy?”

Ollie threw up his hands. “Hey, you’re preaching to the choir here, Hal. Allen sucks.”

Hal didn’t seem to hear him.

“I mean, I buy him food, I pick out a fun event, I’m even the transport – and he says no! Like I need – or want, even – for him to hang out with me!”

“…You done? Great. Look, Hal, and again, I can’t believe I, Green Arrow, famous Flash disliker, have to be the bearer of these words, but whatever this is between you and Allen? You gotta sort it out, man, ‘cause this? This is pathetic,” Ollie drawled, waving at Hal, who was doing a rather professional job at appearing about thirty years younger than his actual age. Now, he shot Ollie a betrayed look.

“Pathetic? You, Oliver Queen, do not get to call me pathetic when I’ve consumed a Kegorian ofernal’s worth of Irish coffee listening to you mope about Dinah.”

“Ah, but that was coffee well drunk since she’s my wife now.”

“Yeah, well Barry’s my-,” Hal stopped abruptly. “Barry is…”

If there was such a thing as a floor in space, it would have dropped out from under Hal’s feet in that moment. He felt dizzy, breathless, turned inside out, as though some asteroid had collided with him and knocked him out of an orbit he had been following all his life. A furball of snapshots whirled around his brain in that split second of horrifying realisation, all of them of Barry Allen.

Barry buying him food. Barry letting him crash at his house. Barry hurt and burning like a neutron star as Hal supported him. Catching him a thousand times in his green constructs, saving Barry. Barry saving him, speeding him across the country fast enough to take his breath away, the same pulse of adrenaline thrilling through him as when a jet engine roars to life under his feet. Barry reluctantly cracking a smile when Hal makes fun of Batman behind his back. Barry embarrassing himself in front of Superman because he’s somehow an even bigger nerd than Clark Kent, Daily Planet reporter.

Barry, heartbroken and world-weary, darkness behind his eyes as Thawne unravels his world, his history, over and over again.

Sometimes, Hal thought he might hate the Reverse-Flash more than even Mongul.

“Oh my G-d,” he croaked, feeling the awful crawl of hot redness up his neck. “Oh my G-d, Ollie.”

“Oookay, is this Hal Jordan having a Revelation? ‘Cause otherwise we have to get you to whatever alien hospital is out here before you pop, man.”

“I like Barry.”

“I mean anyone liking that guy is shocking, but out of all your bad decisions you looked like you were owning that one.”

“I like Barry.”

The ring flickered out – only for a few seconds, but enough for Ollie’s sharp cry to snap Hal out of his trance and will the sphere to reform instantaneously, leaving Ollie panting and tense on the bottom of the ball.

“Christ alive, Jordan, what the hell is the matter with you!” he yelled.

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” Hal said dismissively, mind already wandering.

“Fine. He says I’m fine. I won’t be fine when I die of a fucking embolism ‘cause you gave me the bends!”

“You’re already complaining, you’re good, right?”

“When we get back to Star City, I’m siccing Dinah on you,” Ollie threatened, slowly beginning to regain his composure. “And Roy. And Emi.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And all this because you’re got a hard-on for the Flash of all people. We work with Superman for crying out loud. Wonder Woman. Hell, Batman. And it’s gotta be Mr. By-the-Book?”

“Y’know, I think if you two stopped yelling at each other long enough to hear the other speak, I think you’d find you have more in common than you think,” Hal said absently.

“Not likely.”

The Song of the Garden floated up to them, enveloping them in a complex harmony. As Hal stared down at the planet, the song seemed, impossibly, to become sadder.

“I can’t be in- I can’t like Barry, Ollie. I- I can’t,” Hal murmured; it felt like he’d swallowed a rock, a lump of trepidation forcing its way down his throat and now sitting heavy and malicious in his stomach.

Deciding that he was for the moment no longer in danger of being masticated by the jaws of deep space, Oliver, now devoid of his chair, sprawled himself on the green surface below him with a grunt and a hand on his coccyx.

“Is this some gay freak-out? Because I thought you’d kinda get over that with being in space and everything. Frankly, I thought it’d be all tentacles and, I don’t know, alien cloacas or whatever.”

“Come on, man.”

“Hey, you have a vibe.”

“That’s my vibe? But- no. No, this isn’t a ‘gay-freakout’. It’s just…”

“It’s Barry?”

“Yeah,” Hal croaked.

“Okay. Okay. I don’t like him but it’s not like he’s the worst guy in the world. If you want to shackle yourself to a man who dreams of suburban white picket-fences-,”

“I’m going to fuck it up. Shit. Shit. I am- when have I ever managed to keep a relationship going, Ollie? I’m going to make it weird, I’m going to absolutely pile drive our friendship into the ground.”

“Hey, Hal, deep breaths! You are not breaking my sphere again, okay? Keep it together, GL,” Oliver snapped. The field around him had begun to tremble a little.

Hal ran his hands through his hair, gripping it in frustration. The grand expanse of space around him now felt inverted, heading towards a Big Crunch with him at the centre.

“I can’t lose him, I can’t.”

“You’re not going to. You’re not going to fuck anything up, Hal, okay? You’re a great guy-,”

“I’m unreliable, Carol always said I’m unreliable-,”

“You have a great heart-,”

“Sort of pointless if I’m not around to demonstrate it-,”

“You’re loyal, brave – reckless, yes, but brave-,”

“So is every hero, Ollie, that doesn’t prevent me from royally cocking it all up!”

“Will you just let me give you a damn compliment, Jordan? You’re a grown-ass man!”

“I don’t even have an apartment! I don’t pay bills, I don’t pay taxes! Bar has tried to sit me down to discuss a damn 401k with me, ‘cause he thinks I’m somehow going to make it to some form of earthly retirement one day and it all goes in one ear and out the other! Oh g-d, how has he been my friend all this time?”

“I joke about Allen being a government yes-man, but even he doesn’t go around judging people for their property investments and savings accounts, you know. You said it – he’s been your friend all this time when both of you have hit enough rock bottoms to make it to the earth’s core, there’s obviously something about you he likes. Don’t go having an identity crisis now of all times. You’re a Green Lantern for a god-damned reason, right? Whatever happened to ‘do, don’t think’?”

Hal could barely hear his friend over the thundering of his heart, the panic racing up his spine. An awful, necrotic pit had opened up in his stomach, growing and eating away at his insides – it was the same pit he’d felt when he’d made the decision to become a pilot, knowing it would break his mother’s heart. It was a ravenous sickness, an obliterating nausea which sought to snuff out even the smallest joy in any situation.

“Hal, your construct!” Oliver shouted, real anxiety now in his voice.

Reality slammed back into him just as the distorted green energy around Oliver had begun to seriously waver, on the verge of collapsing inwards. So close was his bond with the power ring that he barely had to focus to shore it up, sending it ballooning back out into a perfect sphere. Oliver was staring at him, his sunglasses cast aside and blond hair dishevelled, bracing himself as though he could do anything against the merciless universe if Hal actually fell apart.

He licked his dry lips.

“Sorry. I’m good,” he croaked. Sweat had gathered in unpleasant, clammy patches under his uniform-shrouded tee, sticking it uncomfortably to his body; pity solar winds weren’t really a thing. “Sorry.”

“…Maybe we should have this conversation planet side. Any planet will do, frankly. After this I need my feet on solid ground for a minute. And don’t you dare say ‘you’re fine’.”

Hands shaking, Hal surrendered. “Actually I wouldn’t mind-,”

What precisely he wouldn’t mind would have to wait, for at that moment the ring on his hand burst into a brilliant glow, the flare coalescing into a band and shooting off into space, an emerald pennant disappearing into a celestial dot. The audience blinked in surprise, glancing from the ring back at one another.

“Err…what does that mean?” Oliver frowned.

“Not sure-,”

“Oh, that’s comforting.”

“-but we’re about to find out.”

“Now hold on a second, spacecase, that better be a royal ‘we’. I have to get back to Earth to my wife and family, the ones you kidnapped me from.”

Hal clucked his tongue.

“It wasn’t a kidnapping,” he drawled, ignoring the hypocrisy of his own words. “I offered to take you on a vacation and you, Mr Millionaire-CEO with nothing but boring board-meetings to look forward to, accepted.”

“Uh, yeah, I accepted for a sight-seeing trip, not to go running away to the ass-end of the galaxy because my taxi-driver got distracted by something shiny. If I die out in space, Dinah’s gonna kill me.”

“She’s one for open-casket funerals, huh?”

“She’s one for any casket funerals, which I’m not gonna get if we both go incommunicado. She wouldn’t even know we were dead until the next Crisis re-animates our corpses or chucks our fossilised bodies into Earth’s orbit or something equally nuts.”

The ring was warm on his finger, pulsating with energy, drawing Hal onwards – it was comforting in its familiarity; this, he knew how to do. Matters of the heart and of the humdrum life of a ground-pounder faded into nothingness besides the call of the unknown. Hal might have dropped Oliver off back on earth as he wished, but it would be a trip in the opposite direction of the green line and there was no way he was going to listen to Oliver kvetch the whole way. So, he pulled out the big guns.

Hal gave a dramatic sigh.

“Wow, you’re really starting to sound like Barry.”

That shut him up. Green eyes, colour blending into the bubble surrounding him, narrowed. “I know what you’re doing, Jordan.”

“So you do want to go home?” Hal asked, cocking his head.

Oliver glowered at him and then threw up his hands in frustration.

“Fine. Fine. Let’s get pulverised by whatever planet-destroyer wants a piece of you next. But I am CC’ing you in any angry e-mails I get about this.”

Hal grinned. “Agreed.”

Not like he ever opened his inbox anyway.

Chapter Text

With the speed of the Green Lantern shepherding them onwards, it took little time to reach their destination – well, Hal assumed so, anyway; in deep space, the perception of time got a little…loose; he rarely knew just how long he had been gone from Earth until he alighted again. The ring did a lot of work supressing thirst and hunger and the thousand irritating little impulses that plagued the human body, but Oliver hadn’t made any motions towards starvation or dehydration, so Hal reckoned it couldn’t have taken them that long to come upon the lumbering hunk of grey metal which floated amongst the stars like a dead fish in a poisoned pond.

The ship was enormous, like a sky-scraper turned upon its side and it fulfilled all the speculative-fiction desires nerds loved to throw onto models – a bristling array of aerials dotted its side, interspersed with narrow portals currently covered by dark shutters as equally utilitarian as the riveted plates that covered the main body. Some sort of thrusters protruded from one end, cold and lifeless, whilst the other terminated in a sheer face, unlike the pointed noses terran shuttles tended to come equipped with. In the far distance, a lone moon threw the light of a removed sun back onto the ship, lighting up its dotted planes as it lazily rotated about its axis. No other signs of life nor movement presented themselves.

Hal might have thought of her as downed, if only there was such a direction in space. Still, here was where the ring had led them and continued to lead them, drawing them further towards a particular ring of protruding metal, about the size of an aircraft hangar, currently closed off by impenetrable metal doors. Well, Hal assumed they were metal – if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably some sort of alien metal.

For a moment the two of them just hovered in conjoined anticipation, looking at where the green track vanished into the surface of the door.

“So…what now, hotshot?” Oliver asked.

He was answered instead by the glow of a construct, manifesting as a giant hydraulic spreader, sharp jaws opening and closing mechanically, reader to force the seam.

“Never been one to leave a can of worms unopened,” Hal smirked, ready to get to work.

“Okay, hang on a second, before you go busting up these people’s whole house,” Oliver said, holding up his hands as though that could do anything to stop his friend if he was so inclined. “How about we try knocking first.”

“Knocking?” Hal raised his brow.

“Knocking,” Oliver confirmed. “It’s what civilised people do.”

“Right you are, Mr Queen, sir,” Hall drawled, dissolving the pryers and morphing them instead into an equally titanic hand which walked itself, Yellow Pages-style, across the vacuum and pounded its emerald knuckles against the door.

Once. Twice.

“Three times a lady,” Hal murmured, just about ready to go back to his preferred way of handling things – directly.

The ship shuddered, curtailing any space-based diy he’d been planning on and before their eyes the clamping jaws began to creak ponderously open, the grinding sound of clanking gears transmitted across empty space by the power of the Lantern ring. When it had opened enough for an Earth man or two to slip through, a light blinked from within, beckoning.

“Thank god this doesn’t feel like a trap,” Oliver quipped, folding his arms as they stared down the maw of the mechanical goliath. The jittery twitches that ran through his muscles evidenced how naked he felt without his bow and arrows. As soon as he thought so, a glowing bow appeared before him, along with a spectral quiver which slithered around his chest.

“Better?” Hal asked, grinning.

Oliver grabbed the bow and twanged its string, grimacing. “Your ring might be able to do a lot of stuff, Hal, but it clearly can’t make up for your ignorance about good archery.”

“Hey man, you don’t want it, I’ll take it back.”

“No, no, I’ll keep it,” Oliver waved him off, grabbing the bow tightly around the middle before muttering to himself, “Better to fight with a stick than nothing at all, I guess.”

 With that they forged onwards, the ambient light of the solar star dimming as they passed between the thick doors, space giving way to the usual tunnels of exposed cables and batteries that seemed to be endemic to many species across the universe and would give an OSHA inspector the headache of the century. The whole deck was flooded with a red light, glowing with a vitriolic warning, even as nothing alive appeared to hail them. Behind them, a hideous screeching sound signalled the closing of the doors, terminating with an ominous boom and the hiss of a vacuum seal.

Guess we’re really in it now, Hal thought, the welcome thrum of adrenaline racing through him.

He checked his hand.

“Ring says the atmosphere is breathable, gravity near earth-levels,” he said, dropping the green sphere and letting his feet touch down onto the warm metal below. He felt perhaps a little lighter, but nothing too off-putting – he staggered a few steps; Barry often joked about his ‘sea legs’ when he went home after an extended tour in space and found the whole walking thing taking a second to get used to again.

His heart gave a hollow pang.

“Not the time,” he muttered, making Oliver raise a brow.

“What?”

“Nothing – let’s follow the trail and finally find out what’s going on here.”

Theseus had nothing on the labyrinthine tangle of corridors through which they followed the emerald pennant, Hal leading the way and Oliver following wearily, his construct bow nocked in readiness. Eventually – mercifully – sound began to tickle the edges of their hearing, disrupting the grave-like quality of their surroundings. At first indistinguishable, the nearer they drew to its source the clearer the noise became, and not just in volume, but in its frantic disarray. The narrow walls suddenly gave way and they stepped into the centre of the chaos.

The red light was even more intense here and figures dashed about, hurrying from one display to another, crowding the tall, clumped banks of terminals which ran around the room, circling some sort of central cell. More wires and cables ran amok, underfoot, under the ceiling, along the walls – some had been patched together, Hal guessed in some MacGyvered manner, comparing some of these rough splices with the more professional jobs done on the rest of the lines.

As for the figures themselves, they appeared to be roughly humanoid, but with deep blue skin and a mass of tentacles protruding from their bodies, seemingly in different places for each individual, accommodated for in their clothing, which looked akin to flight-suits, but decorated all over with beads and little fabric tendrils.

It did not take long for one of the crew to flick their singular red eye over and to spot them standing in the doorway. The shock manifested itself in the abrupt stiffening of the two antenna nestled amongst their wiry purple hair and sudden pointing. Fifty or so cyclopes turned towards them simultaneously.

“…Hello,” Hal said, waving.

At first, all the response he got was an indistinct babble, until the ring caught up with whatever dialect the alien was speaking and began to feedback to them in English.

“Gashet do kaengine is collapsing in on itself. Thank Bangre’shet you have come, Green Lantern; we were beginning to fear nobody had received our signal,” the creature said, bowing low with its hands and tentacles upon its knees. Behind them, the frantic business had resumed. “I am Flinka, to your joy.”

“Hal Jordan,” Hal said, then stuck his thumb over his shoulder. “He’s Oliver Queen. You said you got engine trouble?”

“Yes, yes – come, come hither,” Flinka said, leading them over to the cell.

They joined the cluster of what Hal assumed were scientists or engineers gathered about a massy container, rising above their heads by about thirty or forty feet. A matrix of welded steel held in place a series of tubes through which different coloured liquids passed, feeding into giant pipes which led to the central cell. The cell itself was like a huge vat and within, a dark brown substance writhed. One of Flinka’s tentacles started playing nervously with their antennae.

“It is the hypersling,” they explained. “It is what propels and guides us towards…Paradise, to our joy.”

The ring seemed to struggle for a second with ‘Paradise’, lagging behind Flinka’s moving lips.

“And Paradise is…?” Hal pressed, already sending out a green light beam to begin scanning the hypersling; where the machinery wasn’t painted red by the emergency lights, it now shone with the Lantern’s unnatural emerald shimmer, casting double shadows across the floor and giving the swirling liquid before them an eerie sheen. Every so often, an alien would glance over to Hal with awed expression before resuming the clattering, clanking and hissing of their work.

“The world wither we must go. All of the surviving Uli’shen are aboard this ship, sleeping until we arrive at Paradise, to our joy.”

At Flinka’s words, some of the Uli’shen ducked their heads and echoed ‘to our joy’.

“You’re a refugee ship?”

Flinka’s antennae drooped slightly. “Yes, yes.  Uli’len Prime, oh sorrow, is no more.”

“Hmm,” Hal said, struggling through the analysis the ring was feeding back to him. Window after window of fluorescent information scrolled past him and with every word he read, the white eyeholes of his mask narrowed.

At the edge of his attention, he heard Oliver take it upon himself to point to the murky liquid. “I’m guessing it’s not meant to look like that?”

“No, no – we encountered some space debris and the ship’s destability has damaged the Sacred Fountains, oh alarm.” Here Flinka gestured towards the matrix and its tubes. “Without the clarity of the Well,” indicating the vat, “the hypersling cannot drive us. From the heart, it will destroy us, oh alarm.”

“It’s a matter of chemistry,” Hal jumped in, indicating vaguely the hard light information. “If we could figure out the chemical balance needed to restore the hypersling, all we’d need to do is adjust the, uh, Sacred Fountains and Bob’s your uncle.” Before Flinka had time to be confused by the expression, he continued. “But I got a C in chemistry, and while the knowledge of Oa can put forward 50 potential mixing ratios, we fuck it up, we blow this place up faster than it’s headed now. Ollie?”

“No can do, brother,” he said, raising his hands apologetically. “Never really been my strong-suite.”

Hal sighed. “Barry could fix this in ten seconds,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair absently. “He’s a genius. He’d love this.”

“Think it’ll make the situation worse if I throw up in here?” Oliver drawled. “Is this what it’s gonna be like now? You gonna be thinking about Allen every mission?”

The brief flash of embarrassment that sparked within him was immediately overshadowed by annoyance. Annoyance and hurt.

“Shut it, Arrow,” Hal snapped. Maybe Barry was never far from his thoughts and maybe he had always subconsciously drawn comfort from that but now, as he recalled involuntarily the sight of his friend’s face, the crinkle of the skin around his eyes as he smiled, the way he rubbed his nose when he was mortified by something, the joy he derived from it seemed insignificant compared to the pain his recent revelation now engendered. Some invisible hand had materialised within his chest and grabbed his heart – these first pangs were threats of what the future held. He clenched his own fingers into a fist, feeling the thrum of the power ring in his palm. “He’s married, anyway,” Hal muttered, intending it as an end to the conversation.

Oliver furrowed his brow, opened his mouth as though about to speak, then closed it again. Flinka glanced from one to the other, antennae flicking anxiously.

“Is something wrong, Green Lantern?”

Hal drew in a sharp breath through his nostrils, then forced a smile to his lips. “Nothing wrong, Flinka. Let’s get your baby purring again.”

It was the sort of thing easier said than done. It took a great deal of confab between Hal and the engineers to decide that the safest option they had was to reprogram the mixing protocols of the ship’s computer - which would be the dominion of said engineers – and to replace the physical feeding components of the colossal mechanism, for which the power of the Green Lantern had been volunteered. Oliver did his best to help where he could, but having discovered that the average Uli’sha wielded the strength of three men, he had been somewhat relegated to watching the bustle about him, clearly unhappy to be so helpless in a dangerous situation.

Hal had little time to spare for his friend’s feelings, calling upon the reserves of his powers to disconnect and reconnect ten-foot pipes, and unscrew bolts the size of his whole body with great green wrenches and hands, flying up to keep an eye on the mess; this was a ship which had been constructed at the beginning of the Uli’shen’s escape from their planet, centuries prior, and had never been intended to be taken apart until they had reached Paradise. Apart from basic, external maintenance, it was an independent system, and the knowledge of its endomechanisms and chemical components had been lost with the original engineers; Hal was working off of a lot of guesswork and the one time he’d had to fix a bearing failure in his own engines at thirty angels above sea-level.

But there was a reason he was a Green Lantern above all.

It was in the midst of connecting a titanic chute to the last of the so-called Sacred Fountains that he felt it – a cold pulse racing through his hand, as though a shot of ice-water had found its way into his veins and was now being pumped around his body.

“No,” Hal grunted, knowing what it foretold; the ring was running out of energy.

 The construct heaving the large pipe began to waver, dimming a little in its intensity as he hauled it through the air, climbing higher and higher in order to reach the final Fountain. If his power gave out now, he would not only crush whomever was standing beneath him in that moment, but potentially destroy all chance the Uli’shen had of continuing their journey. He pushed his free hand onto the wrist of his ring-bearing one, a habit he had never bothered to restrain within himself. Despite the dropping temperature of the ship, sweat beaded on his temples and dripped down his face as he gritted his teeth, scraping the vestiges of willpower from his mental vault.

“C’mon, c’mon,” he muttered, coming up to the exposed portal and struggling to align the projecting prongs that would lock the two ends together.

He sensed without looking the monocular gazes of the crewmembers upon him, heard their chatter grow and ebb and then return with some notes of universal alarm when the chute dipped suddenly, knocking loudly against the metal casing of its receptor with a damning clang. It wasn’t going to hold much longer.

A split second decision.

The glow surrounding the pipe vanished entirely and there was a sudden scramble below as the Uli’shen made to get out of the way of the imminent catastrophe. Hal ignored their panic, mind intent on the immediate reformation of the construct at the terminus: a massive, verdant spider, larger than a man and with long, stretching legs, had appeared at the junction, jumping without a pause into action, throwing out cable-like stings of emerald energy to catch the falling chute. The web spun out its intricate net until, with the force of a semi slamming into a wall, the thick conduit came to a shuddering halt, suspended for but a second, straining the limits of Hal’s reserved as, slowly, slowly, it began to inch back up, the fluorescent appendages drawing it up, up, up-

A scrape, a heavy, grinding clunk and the hiss of pneumatic clamps engaging and the transfer was complete even as a headache bloomed low and throbbing in Hal’s head. Black dots bloomed at the edges of his vision and he had to squint against the brightness of his own construct, the spider evaporating into shimmering particles of waste energy.

The descent to ground level (as it were) was shaky, and Hal was still about ten feet from the floor when the ring finally exhausted its last reserves.

He dropped to the ground like a stone.

“Fuuuck,” he groaned, pressing the palms of his hands to his eyes and wincing; the headache was worse than the bruises from the fall, but neither were fun. “Anyone got the plate of the saucer that hit me?”

“Don’t they teach you about tuck and roll in pilot school?” Oliver’s voice drifted in, accompanied by a proffered hand when Hal finally peeled his eyes open to look at him.

“Easy for you to talk, princess,” Hal said, grasping the hand and wavering as he was hauled abruptly to his feet. The world swam a little around him. “Some of us did more than just dick around on the ground, y’know.”

“Well some of us didn’t ask to be here in the first place.”

“Semantics.”

Oliver peered at him. “You good, man? You kinda look like you’re about to upchuck.”

Hal waved him off. “’S what happens sometimes if you empty the ring too quickly. Should really leave a small reserve in it, but I wasn’t exactly expecting all…this. Was kinda running on bingo fuel.”

“And now?”

Hal looked down at himself, where the Green Lantern uniform had melted away to reveal his civvies. He shrugged. “Now I’m not.”

“Hal…,” Oliver said slowly, working his jaw. “Don’t tell me we’re stuck here without your magic ring, in the asshole of space.”
“No problem.”

They stared at one another before Oliver threw his hands up.

“So are we stuck?”

“You said not to tell you!” Hal protested.

“Jordan-,”

“Well don’t get too excited, we’re not out of bad news yet,” Hal winced.

“Gimme- just gimme a second,” Oliver said, taking several deep breaths and beginning to pace up and down the small area of floor free of tools, fasteners, cables, debris and workers. The Uli’shen had clustered together in small groups, conversing quietly, comparing notes on digital tablets, occasionally flicking antennae and singular eyes their way.

Flinka approached Hal as Oliver muttered to himself and began to speak, only for the two humans to realise abruptly that they had not only lost the physical benefits of the Oan energy, but also the linguistic ones. Halfway through their sentence, Flinka seemed to catch onto their incomprehension and faltered. Oliver joined them again.

“You good now?” Hal asked.

“Not really, but I’ve packaged up what little hope I had left and launched it into the nearest sun so whatever you’re about to say can’t get me any lower than rock bottom. Lay it on me.”

Hal looked from his friend to Flinka, and, for the benefit of the alien, tried to convey as much of his words through gestures as he could. “As long as the Uli’shen have their computations set up, we’re almost good to go but for one thing; there’s a button we have to press to start the thing. Of course, since the original engineers were so certain nothing could go wrong with their ship, they didn’t exactly think to put it in an easily accessible place. If I had the ring, it wouldn’t be a problem, but now…,”

“Where is it?”

Silently, Hal pointed; in amongst the tight, nigh-on impenetrable tangle of wires, deep, deep in the bowels of the dust-filled darkness where no Uli’sha had set appendage for decades, a faint, yellow light blinked, almost lost in the voracious blackness of grime and metal. It glowed weakly, sickly, and Hal thought that, if a loose wire had extinguished it, likely nobody would have thought – or been able – to light it up again. Oliver was staring into the mechanical abyss, eyes narrowed in thought.

Then, he began to unbuckle his belt.

“Uh, Ollie? Not sure that’s the sort of tool we need right now,” Hal joked.

His friend rolled his eyes as he slipped the leather out of its loops, then began to kick about on the floor, looking for something. Occasionally he’d pick up a piece of debris – a bolt, a bracket, a nut – and hold it up towards the tiny spark of light. “Look, if we can see the light, there’s a clear path to it.”

“Yeah, a clear path with approximately six million very important cables very close nearby. You hit one of them, we’re toast,” Hal protested.

“What, you think I can’t do it?”

“Do what?”

Oliver plucked a part that looked something akin to a large fuse out of a pile of scraps, evaluated it, and tossed it in his hand before seemingly approving it. He place it in the middle of his belt, doubled it over in one hand and began to swing it around, going faster and faster with rapid twists of the wrist until the contraption spun through the air with the sound of a bull-roarer.

“Oi…you’re not gonna try and hit the switch from here?” Hal asked, trepidation clear in his tone. “Look, you’re good Oliver, but that’s not exactly a bow or arrow.”

He grinned at Hal and flexed his arm in readiness.

“Hey, if it’s good enough for David-,” he said and sent the projectile flying.

The snap of the release shocked around the room and the little metal piece whistled as it raced into the tight tangle of cybernetic spaghetti, smashing into the mass with a raw velocity which could only, to an uneducated observer, end in disaster. The split second of travel seemed to stretch out into an hour, as Hal internally prepared for whatever catastrophe a clipped wire would bring upon them.

A quiet thunk as metal struck metal.

“-it’s good enough for me,” Oliver finished with a grin as, with a loud bubble and the sudden rumble of a hundred pipes beginning to flush in unison, the Sacred Fountains restarted, liquid rushing through the giant chutes in splashing torrents. In no time, the dark, murky depths of the central cell moved slightly, then swirled, then were pulled forcefully into some hidden sluice, draining the vile liquid little by little as a clear, sparkling mixture poured in to replace it.

Almost simultaneously, the Uli’shen let out a collective noise that Hal could only assume was celebration.

There was such a look of perfect self-satisfaction on his friend’s face that nothing on Earth or beyond could have stopped the words that came out of Hal’s mouth next:

“Barry could have vibrated through the cables and pressed it himself.”

Oliver stared at him while, in the background, the engines powered up and the warning red flood of the alarm ceased entirely, clicking over to a warm ambient light illuminating the new vitality evident in the alien crew. Flinka had already turned back to their engineers and engaging them, no doubt distributing commands for the continued journey of the refugee ship towards their final destination.

“Hey, Hal?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

Chapter Text

Shocking cold pierced Barry’s skin as he raced through the streets of Central City, dragging behind him a trail of melted tarmac and the smell of burning rubber. He could - and almost always did - clean up after himself, but for all he had a degree in forensic sciences, he was not an expert in urban engineering and could not replace the deep tracks his battles carved into the landscape of his city; Central might not be at the very top of the list of National financial grants for civic maintenance (this honour was usually reserved for Metropolis), but it was certainly up there. 

Currently, at least, he was not entirely at fault for the road fractures - it was the icy pursuit of Captain Cold’s latest plot which shocked the macadamised streets, the dramatic change in temperatures splitting the cement like tectonic shifts. 

“Give it up, Snart,” Barry called out, barrelling back into the intersection where Cold had decided to vent his frustrations; at his arrival, a flurry of trash, leaves and early blossoms whirled about them, getting stuck on the frictious surface of the glacial spread running up and down the surrounding buildings, where the ambient temperature had already begun to thaw the surface, only for it to be artificially refrozen by the rapacious blasts of the Cold Gun. Above them, the unusually warm spring sunshine glanced off the frozen surfaces, reflecting across windows and glass lamps in a kaleidoscope of glaring, white flashes. “What are you even trying to achieve?” he asked, genuinely curious. At his ribs, the sub-zero clip was already healing over, pain fading into hunger as his body ate into his nutritional reserves.

Leonard Snart glowered down at him from atop a tall platform of ice. Behind him, the victim of his attack, a third floor unit tucked away in an unremarkable downtown apartment block on Messner Street, already slightly worn and run-down before the Rogue had got to it, was crystallised, sparkling shards of ice and rime frost decking it out like a picturesque winter postcard. The other occupants had been evacuated at the beginning of the conflict between hero and villain, rushed off their feet by a spontaneous blast of lightning-speckled air before finding themselves deposited en masse several blocks away from the source of the danger, children in hand, and pets beside their owners, both equally bewildered. Snart, to his credit, had never cared to involve innocent bystanders in his personal vendettas.

And this, it seemed, was personal.

“Stay out of it, Flash,” he growled, levelling his gun at Barry. He could hear the intricate mechanisms hum within the super-cooled metal. “For once in your goddamn life, stay out of it.”

“You know I can’t do that, Cold,” Barry said. “C’mon, talk to me – whatever this is, we can sort it out.”

As he tried to coax Snart into communication, his eyed the particular apartment consideringly, trying to figure out for himself why Cold had targeted this place in particular. Nobody that Barry – or, for that matter, the Flash – knew lived there, which ruled out an inter-Rogue conflict, the cause of many an explosion from Snart.

“Sort it out? To what end?” Snart snarled down to him, scowl growing deeper and darker as he spoke. “I tried it your way, for once. Rode out my sentence, good behaviour, parole. Went down on my fucking knees for grease-stained managers without two brain-cells to rub together, humiliating myself for the lowest position the City would ever give a man with a criminal record. Got turned down again and again, as though I was nothing better than gum on their shoe – it wasn’t even fear; it was disdain. You ever been to prison, Flash? It doesn’t just change you, it changes the world around you, takes away everything you are and spits you out as less than human and gives everyone else the right to treat you like a de-clawed animal to be spat on and jeered at.” In the midst of this release of frustrations, Snart appeared to have forgotten what he had come here to do in the first place, gesturing with his weapon now less as a threat and more for emphasis. “And when finally, finally, some two-bit ass-wipe deigns to take me on because he knows he can get away with paying me half what he gives the rest of his schmucks for hauling waste barrels from the pharmacies down to the landfills, and ‘cause he knows no pig’s gonna care if some ex-con’s skin melts off or his lungs explode from the stuff – finally I’m so fucking tired of it all that I take it on the chin, keep my head down, get on with it, the fucking G-men grab me anyway, saying I set some sort of bombs at some stupid plant somewhere. Oh, they ain’t got a motive – and I got an alibi – but you and I know that don’t matter; Singh’s got me measured for an orange suit, alright.”

Barry couldn’t help but flinch at the tirade, wincing at what he had predicted would occur. He held up his suited hands in conciliation, as though he were attempting to calm a wild animal he had encountered.

“Look, Len,” he said slowly, calmly, “I get it, okay, this was- this was badly done, alright, and I believe you didn’t do it, But if we want to sort this out, you’ve got to come with me – I’ll speak up for you, get your alibi tight before the judge-,” even as he said it, he knew it was a lost cause.

Snart laughed bitterly, the sound rattling in his throat. “You just can’t fucking help yourself, huh, Flash? Nah – in some ways, I’m grateful to the CCPD.”

“Oh?” Barry asked reluctantly.

“Yeah. I lost myself there for a bit. Life got me down, y’know, straws and camels and all that. But this made me remember why we did it in the first place. Hell, if men were treated right, they never would think of committing crime at all.”

“C’mon, Snart, don’t do this-,”

“And do what instead? Go back to living that shit-scraping existence? Eking out a spare dollar one day at a time that might give me enough to buy a six-pack by the weekend and only dip a toe into the red?” Snart shook his head, then grinned; it struck Barry as so familiar in that moment that it stunned him for a second. You spend enough years fighting the same guys over and over again that the line between friend and foe starts to look a little fuzzy.

He’d known Snart hadn’t been behind the ice-mine in the first place, but he hadn’t worked hard enough, long enough to prevent this. Cold’s relapse was his fault. He should have done more.

“I can help you,” Barry tried again.

Snart snorted, sending the ragged hood of his blue suit trembling. “You know the real kicker? I think you really believe that, too,” he said, before pulling the trigger.

Both opponents knew the beam wouldn’t strike home, but it was as good as a starting-gun for the two to resume their chase. The spray of ice crept from the barrel at a snail’s pace as Barry kicked off, shooting up the titans of jagged, frozen spikes which protected Snart’s platform. During their talk, the ambient temperature had dropped, worming frigid fingers into the small tears of his suit and grabbing onto his muscles, squeezing tight, slowing him down. Barry’s breath came out as vapour as he raced around the injurious maze.

“I don’t want to do this,” he tried again, foot kicking off a narrow level ledge, pushing him up further towards his opponent.

Snart sneered. “You people never do, but hell if it’s ever fucking stopped you.”

A spray of melted water, immediately freezing into falling snow, followed Barry up as he cleared the ramp, gritting his teeth against the unending cycle of frost-bite nipping at his toes before his rapid circulation warmed him up again. Snart stood before him, the furrow of his brow disguised by the blocky mask of his glasses, but the resentment, the indignation, the spite clear in the narrowing of his brown eyes within the apertures. He raised the barrel again, ready to deal the Flash another blow, but – as always – Barry was faster; he reached out, the fabric of the blue suit with his grasp-

The man before him disappeared in an instant, leaving Barry to slide into a sudden stop, steam rising in billowing clouds of pale vapour around him, momentarily obscuring his view.

“Snart!” He called out, just as a movement underfoot caught his attention.

Green and blue wavered below the reflective surface, the figures slightly blurred about the edges as one turned on the other.

“I don’t need your help, Scudder,” Snart snapped.

“You’re welcome,” Mirror Master replied dryly, rolling his eyes. “Wasn’t exactly gonna let you get snatched up again just when you’re back to yourself. The Rogues could do with a frigid kick up the backside.”

“Eyes on the sky, Flash!” A voice rang out overhead. “You’d think of all people you’d know to watch out for lightning.”

Had Barry been an ordinary person, the sudden bolt of superheated radiation would have scorched him from the inside out – instead it struck where he had stood but a millisecond previously, shattering the icy platform and throwing a spray of jagged icicles into the surrounding city-scape. The resulting rush of debris-ridden water poured into the blackened hole left behind in the road. A noxious mixture of burning cement and ozone stung Barry’s nose as he came to a stop without the bolt’s radius, catching a few errant shards seeking to puncture a startled cat which has jumped into the fray unexpectedly.

“C’mon kitty, it’s not safe here,” he said quietly, keeping half of his attention fixed firmly on the distant figure of the Weather Wizard, crackling sparks illuminated him distantly against the dark clouds which had settled in deep drifts about the highest skyscrapers. Thick and clinging air grey thicker every second, and as he reached for the animal a static bridge sparked it, startling a hiss from it and making the cat leap from its perch and dart into the surrounding rubble.

“That works, I guess,” Barry muttered, straightening up and observing his surroundings; a seemingly-simple encounter had suddenly become much more complex. He had no moment of worry that Mardon’s bolt might have blasted his compatriots – the ice might be gone, but Barry knew Scudder would have taken himself and Snart off somewhere safe in that split-second of attack. Indeed, as soon as he thought it, he was proven right.

“Fine,” Snart said, his voice now issuing from one of the whole panes of glass in a nearby window, Scudder appearing in the next window over. “But I have some personal business to deal with first.” He checked the settings on his Cold Gun as he put this threat forth.

“How personal?” Scudder asked, the two apparently ignoring the hero now that they were in a dimension normally inaccessible by the Flash.

“Intellectual property theft.”

Scudder whistled through his teeth. “Pretty personal then.”

Whatever he said next was obliterated from Barry’s hearing as whatever frontogenesis Mardon had brewed up exploded into howling winds; they blasted through the gaps between the tall buildings, ripping from the ground small shrubs, rubbish, twigs and a hail of leaves until, with cacophonous cracks, great limbs were ripped from the trunks of century-old trees, smashing into buildings and cars, themselves beginning to rumble and rattle in their parked spots. The shrieking of the winds was so loud Barry almost missed the sound of hundreds of alarms going off at once and the creak of street lights bending over under the violence of the gust. The storm whirled about like a rabid animal, rushing through the streets, rattling windows, throwing unsuspecting civilians into one another, chasing its own tail until the roaring tempestuous mass folded in on itself in a huge, devastating funnel, creating a tornado which reached from the black clouds all the way to the ground, its ravenous maw hungering for destruction.

Barry gritted his teeth, throwing up his arms against the suffocating cloud of debris; he squinted past the scarlet suit, trying to pinpoint Mardon in the whirling, screaming wind.

Off to the races, Allen.

The lightning came to him with familiar, reassuring ease. The Speed Force unfurled its petals, lending him its power, painting the chaos around him in a familiar series of black-white-yellow flashes as the energy of the universe crackled through him. Every molecule of his body thrummed again with electrifying energy and when he kicked off, the world became, not a blur, but something unreal, thin, like smoke on water as it slowed almost to a standstill.

He chased the twister, running around it counter-clockwise, feeling the thrum of his racing heart in his throat, in his ears, the air becoming thin as he sped into the oncoming winds. But the Speed Force would not abandon him – it urged him on, faster, faster, looping his own burning trail, creating his own updraft. He felt the cyclone fight him; it roared against his constraint, pushing, trying to uproot him. Beneath his feet, the street began to rip up, chunks of concrete and asphalt rising under his boots. He kicked off from one to the other, dodging flying slabs and the occasional car which was sucked into the mass.

A window nearby shattered, struck by his sparking lightning. The lightshow played on the underside of the stormclouds overhead as he climbed the outside of the twister, jumping and grabbing at the debris until he could see Mardon just above him, weather wand pointed upwards, seemingly unaware of the hero speeding from soaring brick to whirling bough, the roofs of the buildings falling away beneath him.

Don’t think about it, Barry, he thought, trying not to focus on how precarious his position was, or how steep the drop if he messed up. I wish Hal was here.

It was a stupid thing to think. Pointless, really. Hal would catch him if he could, but with his friend spending more and more time in space, missing him only lead to heartbreak. Well, more heartbreak.

“A tornado, Mark?” Barry shouted into the wind, outpacing his regrets for the moment. “You might be good at ‘em, but isn’t it getting a little old? Running out of ideas?”

Mardon turned to him, the storm flashing in his eyes, black hair whipped about by the gale. He smirked. “An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of…doubtful competency.”

“Twain again? Now it really does feel like our first dance over again,” Barry replied.

Mardon laughed.

“This is what I like about you, Flash, you have taste, appreciation for the classics - it is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you.”

“I’m flattered, but I’m not interested in you like that,” Barry said.

Suddenly a car, torn from the ground, shot towards him – some old Toyota, already battered and scratched before the tornado even got to it. Barry hated seeing it; it was never the limos or the BMWs that got totalled in villain attacks, and tomorrow some poor citizen who was probably already up to their neck in loans would have to see if they could stretch their tight budget to their new commute.

Sorry.

He kicked off the hood as it tried to slam into him, launching himself into a high, flying arc and directly at the Weather Wizard. Mardon only had time to widen his eyes in surprise before Barry’s fist connected with his cheek, his other hand grabbing the wand and ripping it from his grasp; it was hot to the touch, searing like an overworked circuit. Barry held it fast, and grabbed the other man by the coat as the cyclone dissipated around them, the sudden pillar of wind vanishing rapidly beneath their feet.

“You fool! Give me the wand, give-,” Mardon gasped, but before he could make any move for it, the tornado died entirely and together, they dropped into the void.

The wind that now whistled past their ears was no man-made attack, only the natural, merciless result of their hurtling towards terminal velocity and imminent impact. It stung his eyes, making them water, and he wished, not for the first time, that he’d put lenses in his costume, like Wall-

He swallowed down the lump in his throat and gripped the wand between his teeth (ignoring Mardon’s indignant cry of disgust) and began whirling his arm, trying to create a cushion for their drop, but it was too late, he wasn’t going to make it in time, they were going to end up bloody splatters on the ground-

Barry bounced off a soft surface. He blinked, staring at the familiar green glow of the bed which had materialised beneath him, following the trail of emerald energy up to its wielder.

“Not the way I expected to get you into bed, Flash,” Hal quipped. Then, curiously, he coloured, as though only just realising how the flirtatious quips he doled out easy as breathing might be interpreted. It was almost fascinating to see the unnatural flush of red in the Lantern’s cheeks as he cleared his throat. “You good?”

“Nughighn-,” he spat out the wand, snatching it out of reach as Mardon made a desperate lunge for it, “nothing ten pizzas can’t cure. Didn’t think you’d be back so soon. By the way, you’re childish.” Barry might not be able to see his friend’s eyes, but he just knew they were being rolled in the moment.

“Whatever. You’re welcome for saving your ass, Sparky.”

“Whatever yourself. I got about 70 texts from D- Black Canary about you snatching up Green Arrow to go gallivanting around the stars with you. Stay still,” he said the last to Mardon.

“This is undignified,” the villain snarled, finding himself on his front as Barry held his wrists together, the two descending to the ground as the Green Lantern did.

“You jealous?” Hal teased Barry, dismissing the Wizard.

Barry scoffed, ignoring a sudden, painful pulse in his chest. “Ha. Hardly – just shocked I can’t see your brains leaking out of your ears after having to listen to his sanctimonious soap-boxing for a week.”

“One of these days I’m going to lock the two of you in a room and force you to be friends,” Hal said mildly, alighting amongst the rubble and destruction Mardon’s cyclone had left behind. Half the buildings in the street had their facades torn off, or had been battered into a brittle, crumbling state. Cars were overturned, sidewalks blown apart and all the potted trees that had once lined the avenue had been reduced to bare, leaning trunks, their roots exposed to the elements. Slowly, curious citizens were starting to trickled back onto the scene; no villain attack could keep Central City down for long. The people were as quick to get back up as their hero was.

“Try it,” Barry warned Hal.

“Can you two do this sometime else?” Mardon complained, now being pulled upright as the construct vanished into green sparkles. No longer supported by his own theatrics, he looked somehow more ragged and pitiful than even his victims. His coat sported the tatters and burn-marks of his own weather experiments and no amount of conditioner could have protected his long hair from the tangles of the storm.

“Oi, you have the right to remain silent and I suggest you take it,” Hal warned, waving an emerald hand which held, pinched between its fingers, Mardon’s wand.

“Say, you seen Cold and Mirror Master around?” Barry asked, looking towards the apartment Cold had previously targeted; from where he stood, he saw no more ice. Everything from that quarter was still and silent. A green wave chased his gaze and Hal shook his head. Barry sighed. “Probably skipped soon as they saw you pop up. Gimme a sec.”

The run to the nearest station took only a few seconds, hauling his prisoner along with him and handing him off unceremoniously to one of the officers there; he took his payment in doughnuts, swiping a few from an open box in the office pen to satisfy the growling of his stomach and the trembling that low sugar-levels were beginning to send up and down his limbs.

Another couple of seconds to get back to his friend, and he arrived to see Hal already beginning clean-up, using his ring to lift some of the heavier debris from where it had been carelessly tossed by the cyclone.

“I think that was more like five secs,” Hal teased, easing a bicycle off a balcony and forcibly straightening it out before handing it off to a grateful delivery driver.

“Yeah, and you said your little space-jaunt would take four days max, which is less than a week,” Barry pointed out.

“So sue me, there was a gridlock in the Milky Way. Besides, Ollie and I were having too much fun watching the singing crystal pillars of Tyluria Zen, we lost track of time. Worth the trillion year wait, in my opinion.”

Barry paused momentarily in the act of rebuilding a wall. “…That does actually sound quite interesting-,”

“That’s why I offered to take you,” Hal cried, throwing his hands up.

“You didn’t tell me anything about the singing towers, Hal,” Barry shot back, dropping his voice and pulling Hal aside.

“Well it was meant to be a surprise. I said it was a once in a life-time opportunity.”

“Yeah, and the last time you said something was a once in a life-time opportunity you took me to see the bi-annual Tennessee Air Show. It was bi-annual, Hal, and while we were gone, Grodd absolutely tore up the Gardner Bridge. We’re still restricting through-flow a year on! And I still feel guilty whenever I run by it for my bagel fix.”

“You’re mad at me right now. I can’t believe you’re mad at me,” Hal huffed.

“I’m not mad at you,” Barry argued before sighing. The urge to pull his hood down to run his hands through his hair was almost strong enough to make him forget they were still within eyeshot of the keener sort of observer. “I’m not, just- just-,” his hands were shaking again. He swallowed with difficulty; he couldn’t look at Hal, could only fixate on a particularly ragged crack in the nearby sidewalk. “I-,” Everything was hot and oppressing. The world was suddenly getting very small around him, pressing down on him until he struggled even to draw breath into his lungs.

“Hey,” Hal said quietly, serious now, putting a heavy hand on Barry’s shoulder; his touch drew all of Barry’s focus like a lightning rod. “Are you-,”

“EverythingsfineI’mfineI’mgood,” Barry spat out.

“Real convincing, buddy. Try it at human speed and I might believe you.”

As always, Hal’s voice was dangerously comforting, his presence drawing the anxiety from his chest; it was too easy to fall into relying on his friend to be there to catch him. Tomorrow Hal would probably be called off for another five-month mission, leaving Barry alone again. He couldn’t grow used to him being there.

Besides, it wasn’t Hal’s job to clean up after his messes.

He sent Hal a forced smile. “Really, I’m fine; just…it’s just been a busy few months, y’know?”

Hal frowned, and opened his mouth to saw something when, in the far distance, a church bell rang.

“Shoot,” Barry said, craning his neck to try and catch sight of a clock. “What time is it?”

“You got somewhere to be?”

“Crime scene – Barry Allen was on his way there when Cold got my attention,” he said lowly. “Look, I gotta go, GL, there’s only so much I can blame on non-existent traffic.”

“Wait,” Hal said, grabbing Barry’s forearm before the other could speed off. “I’ll see you later, right?”

 Barry felt his heart skip a beat, and quashed it forcefully. Don’t consider it a promise, he told himself. That’s always been the problem.

“Sure. I’ll see you late, pal,” he said, hoping the manufactured steadiness in his voice passed for natural; from the look Hal levelled at him, that was unlikely. “Gotta run.”

And with that, he was gone.