Chapter Text
In spite of it all, Hal wasn’t as familiar with fear as he ought to be.
Sinestro, crazy bastard that he was, had tried his darndest to get him acquainted with mixed results. Hal had always been too stubborn for his own good, a trait that’s more or less kept him alive until this point. He’d been tortured before, of course. Came with the job and the moment those fuckers had set their sights on Jo, he had said no, absolutely not. She was damn capable and smart but he couldn’t let someone new to the Corps, new to all of this get their asses in a mess they didn’t sign up for.
Hal could take it. He’d always had that stupid streak along with his stubbornness. A deadly combination, as some would say, but it hadn’t failed him now. He’d taken the fall so that Jo didn’t have to. He’d taken the fall because he trusted himself to get out.
That had been the plan. Ring or not, he always made it work.
But Hal wasn’t sure what day it was. He didn’t know if it was night or morning or afternoon. He couldn’t tell how much time had passed between the meagre meals he was allowed. At some point, his clothes had been changed, jacket and ring confiscated. He didn’t remember, one of the many periods of time now unaccounted for.
Hal wasn’t afraid in the traditional sense. A growing, pervasive numbness instead had taken root of his mind, interrupted by brief flashes of the most intense, blood-curdling terror he’d ever felt in his life.
He looked around, half-leaned against the wall with a limp arm over his stomach. They’d gone to the trouble of taking his fucking shoes as well. Like he had any fight left in him. Escape was a distant thing in his mind, a hope that flashed through the fog occasionally. Hal longed to fly again.
Instead, he stared at his bare feet and tried to feel much of anything. The sleeves of this shirt were too long. The pants had grown loose around the waistband. His heart hurt, thumping erratically against his chest. Something was wrong with it. One day soon, he hoped it would kill him.
But that line of thought was a dangerous, dangerous thing. What would Guy do if he ever heard Hal voice that aloud? Probably beat the shit out of him.
He chuckled quietly to himself. That memory, the one of Guy’s face, he held in his mind as a bloody, broken thing. It was irreversible. Like he couldn’t imagine his friend smiling for the life of him. It was killing him worse than the gas.
The door always clicked before it opened. He looked up tiredly, vision swimming as the usual white coat and a young woman, an intern maybe, wandered in. She looked familiar in that hazy way, a girl he might have met in a dream. Long brown hair and dark eyes and God, her face itched at him in a way he couldn’t understand but the way she stood so stiffly, apart from the man, it made his brain scream.
He was talking and the words washed right over Hal. Bunch of science mumbo jumbo he couldn’t decipher if he tried. Barry could. Barry was smart like that. So was John.
Instead, he contended with the itch in his chest. Like a deep ache, it sat over his heart and rattled through his every breath. He coughed once, and it was wet and awful. Blood coated the inside of his mouth. The tears in his eyes only blurred his vision further.
One cough became two. A stream of them flooded out of his mouth as his chest seized in earnest, the ache settling deep into his bones.
Slim hands landed on his shoulder and it was the first touch he had received in days. He didn’t realise how much he needed it until the warmth was seeping deep into him. He closed his eyes, refused to look. He didn’t think he could take much more of this.
“It’s okay,” she was saying.
Jess?
But that was impossible. No one was supposed to have followed him down here, wherever this was. And yet—
“We’ve got you, Hal,” she breathed and drew back so quickly it made him dizzy. He stared at her, unblinking and wide. There’s no way.
They were leaving, door sliding shut. He was alone again.
A telltale hiss had him bolting upright, his first true movement in hours. Helplessly, he looked at the vents surrounding the room and muttered, “Again?” to himself as he ducked his head and tried to hide the tremble in his shoulders. The smell of the gas varied day to day. Today, it was sickly sweet, a miasma too strong to be anything natural.
He had tried at the beginning, not to breathe in it. But that proved again and again to be a futile exercise. Without the ring, Hal was just a man in desperate need of oxygen.
He inhaled it by the lungful and it settled over him, a sticky film. He could practically see its yellow tendrils curl lovingly around his body as it enveloped him. Hal sucked in a breath and sunk right in.
The boy in front of him was small, gap-toothed and bloody. The shock of red hair would’ve been more than enough to distinguish him but Hal didn’t need any of those markers to know who he was. His thin neck hung on an angle, a painful one, an impossible one. Finger shaped bruises marked his little throat. Hal felt sick to his stomach, the beginnings of fear striking a match in his belly.
“You aren’t real,” he dared utter.
“Ain’t I?” the boy asked tremulously. “I was, once. I still fucking am. I’m here, I swear!”
“He’s grown,” Hal insisted. “He grows up. He’s big and strong now,” he tried to soothe, reaching out to the boy-Guy, to land a hand on his shoulder with the hurt beginning in his heart. “You aren’t dead. You’re still—Guy, you’re okay.”
“Why’d you let him kill me?” the boy asked instead, sticking to routine.
Hal shook his head, hands trembling fiercely. “You can’t keep doing this to me,” he said, loud and to no one at all. “You can’t keep showing me the same shit and expecting it to turn out different. He’s okay. I damn well made sure of it.”
Little Guy opened his mouth and spat out a clot of blood, starting to convulse. Like a coward, Hal could only manage to look away, the coward’s move. His chest hurt.
The hand that clamped around his wrist was bony. Hal didn’t want to see. “Hal,” Kyle cried, desperation leaking into his tone, “Hal, look! Hal, please don’t let him take me!”
It was all the same. Always the same. Kyle in that stupid jacket of his with a mouth foaming over, bubbling with spit and bile as a man dragged him away, twitching limbs and all. No matter how hard Hal tried to hang on, he watched Kyle go anyway, watched Kyle get ripped out of his grip no matter what he did.
“I saved him,” he persisted. “I got him out. Nothing happened. Nothing happened!”
Tearing his eyes away from the wall, he watched in horror as the man, large, featureless face as bright as the moon, dipped where its mouth should’ve been into Kyle’s neck. Hal swore he felt the laugh run through his veins. Triumph. He was fucking terrified.
Like an animal, beating and clawing at fate itself, he lunged forward. His hands cracked against something steel as he slammed his fists into the face again and again, listening to the soundless laughter surround him. Kyle was on the floor and he wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving.
Tearing away, he settled his bruised hands over Kyle’s chest and listened. The laughter was loud and his blood rushed through his ears but beyond that, was the silence.
Kyle’s face was ashen and still. The kid was dead. The kid was dead.
“Not real,” Hal said numbly. “Not real. This isn’t real.”
He clamped his hand over his mouth. They would not see him cry. That was the one victory he could hold over their heads. He would not break.
Hal made himself turn away from Kyle’s body. He crawled to the far end of the room, not trusting his legs to work and slumped back against the wall as he waited. Kyle turned to dust as he always did. A fine smattering fell onto his own body. He scrubbed it away.
Firelight fell over his body. Sluggishly he looked up and still found himself horrified at the sight.
Martin Jordan had been a handsome enough man in life. Charismatic and all. Hal watched the burning monstrosity that pretended to be his father take that man’s place. Weakly, he gasped out, “Dad,” as an acknowledgement that cracked around the edges.
His body was burning, flesh hissing and spitting as it sloughed off in chunks. Whatever didn’t burn was now melting like a fucking candlestick. His face was half gone, pale skin of his cheek now hanging down around his shoulders and he smiled at Hal, grotesque and inhumane. He swallowed back the horrified little noise in the back of his throat and shied away from it.
All Martin could ever do was make those sounds, caught between pained groans and screams of anguish. Hal clenched his hands over his ears to ward the noise away but it still pierced right through his measly barrier of skin and bone.
Trying to speak to him, now reaching out, charred and skeletal fingers cupping his cheek as Hal opened his mouth and screamed, raw and loud as the terror of it all wrapped around him like a vice.
Martin’s head snapped backwards and like some fucked up show, his chest split open as ribs cracked and tore, shattering as they fell to the floor in jagged splinters.
Parallax slid out of his father’s chest and landed on Hal’s legs. He nearly threw up then and there.
“Hal Jordan,” it hissed, “my favourite. The greatest, the most spectacular. Look at what you are capable of.”
Parallax was coiling around his ribs, squeezing tight-tight-tight and Hal could barely breathe, let alone speak, but the one thing he could do was refuse. So he slammed his eyes shut. His face was wet.
“Not…real,” he wheezed out.
“Look,” it said, poison-sweet. “Look at all you are capable of, Hal Jordan. Look at what you can do.”
There was a pressure around his head, deep into his eyes. Like the worm was trying to squeeze the life out of his skull. It was a pressure that throbbed, pulsed along with his heartbeat. “Open your eyes, Parallax,” it whispered and he obeyed with a strangled gasp.
Bodies piled high in the center of the room. Hal moaned in despair when he recognised John and Jo. Head cleaved open, intestines spilling out every which way. Simon lying limp near the top, Barry with his legs broken, Ollie with a hole through his heart. And Helen too, sweet, innocent little Helen who loved and adored Hal, with her broken little body and her glassy eyes staring up at him, expression morphed in fear.
His resolve broke. A sob leaked out as helpless tears streamed down his face. Parallax coiled tighter, teeth against his neck and he begged for it to end, for the conclusion to come in his death however small and pathetic he felt now. God, let him die before it happens again. Let him die before fear overcomes him.
The door clicked and slid open. Parallax disappeared but its touch lingered on Hal’s skin as unpleasant as ever.
“Aw shit, she wasn’t lying. He’s in bad shape, Johnny.”
“No matter. We extract now and deal with whatever they did to him later.”
Two voices that made his chest hurt more shredded right through the fog in his head. Dumbly, he turned and caught sight of familiar red hair. Almost wept with relief.
“Guy,” he hiccupped, dragging himself over to his friend. If there was anyone he could rely on for this, it was Guy. “Kill me. You hafta—you need to kill me,” he slurred. “Please,” Hal added as if it could mitigate the growing horror on his friend’s face.
“The hell are you talking about, Jordan?” he barked. Hal felt his heart sink to his stomach. “We’re here to get you the fuck out!”
Fresh tears ran down his face. He clawed at his chest with one hand and reached out. “You-you don’t understand. P-Parallax, it’s—”
“Hal,” John was saying from right beside him. When had he moved? Something was pushed over his mouth and cool air infiltrated his nostrils. He almost held his breath out of principle. “No, breathe. We’re trying to help but you need to trust us first.”
“Parallax,” he said again, voice rising because how were none of them hearing him?
“Parallax isn’t here,” John said firmly. “It’s in your head, Hal. It isn’t really here. Can you stand?”
Weakly, he shook his head no. John exchanged a look with Guy who then hook his arm under Hal’s and pulled him up, supporting most of his weight. Hal went like a ragdoll, pawing uselessly at the thing strapped to his face. Already his head felt clearer. Already, he could feel that something wasn’t quite right anymore. At least, not with his body.
“You ready to go, Hal?” Guy asked, surprisingly gentle.
He tried to cough out a response that sounded coherent and came up with nothing. The coil around his ribcage squeezed like a vice and he used his free hand to thump at it, eventually fisting the fabric as the agony shot up tenfold.
“Hal?”
“—ey, hey, what’s wrong? Tell us what’s wrong, dipshit!”
“Put him down Guy, he’s—"
“—barely touched him. Is it the gas? Has to—”
“—start compressions!”
Hal felt his chest hurt. And then, nothing.
The quiet was an old friend to him at this point. But the warmth was new, encompassing his whole body from top to toe. Hal woke up slowly, surrounded by the beeping of machines and clinking of tubes, eyes peeled millimetres apart to take in the steady light from a source that was already dimmed.
He sighed softly, scratching the sheet slightly with his blunt nails. No. Not the sheet. His jacket. Clean and laid on top of him. Panic receded immediately, ignoring the immobilising stiffness his body felt and the disorientation his mind was battling. He felt like he was drifting away with nothing to tether himself to aside from the voices talking quietly in the background.
Slowly, he turned his head towards them. The figures, who hadn’t noticed yet, were engrossed in conversation that flowed between them like water. A man and a woman laughing together, stealing quick looks at Hal.
It warmed him, so he said nothing as to not ruin the moment.
Simon caught him first. His smile froze on his face before widening to a painful degree. “Look who’s awake!” he cheered quietly. “That’s one point for Highball and nil to those idiots.”
“Morning, Hal!” Jessica said, eyes looking a little worn. “You okay?”
It struck him with clarity in that moment of moments, matching the tone of her voice and the curve of her nose. He smiled softly, the biggest one he could manage. “Thank you,” he said as sincerely as he could.
She looked puzzled. “For what, Hal? John and Guy were the ones who—” Simon elbowed her here which caused her to promptly snap her mouth shut.
“It was you,” he slurred, already being pulled back into the depths of sleep. He couldn’t explain it then, but that gentle touch all the way back there had revitalised something he didn’t know had broken. “Thanks.”
“Not even a hello to me,” Simon grumbled, though it lacked heat. He was grinning ear to ear.
Jess reached out and patted Hal’s hand. “Sleep some more. We’re taking shifts so you won’t be alone too long.”
That was nice of them. Far nicer than he deserved, but he was too out of it to mention anything. No matter. He trusted them to flay his ass when he came back fully.
“…and, like, Jess told me it would be funny, right? So I didn’t think too much of it when I drew it but now it’s at the bottom of my drawer and I’m terrified someone’s gonna find it. Because, like, what do you even say to justify it? ‘Batman pissed me off so I drew him pregnant’? No! I can’t tell anyone I know because they’ll either tell me it was a bad choice morally or they’ll ask to see it which I can’t do for them. And the worst part is that it’s almost good enough to go onto my portfolio which haunts me, Hal. You’re the only one I can tell because you’ll either understand or you’ll forget this conversation ever happened.”
The voice, grating at first, soothed the inklings of fear stirring in Hal’s belly from being woken up in the dark. He blinked slowly at the ceiling, trying to get his bearings.
It was Kyle talking, he realised with a warm feeling. Kyle gesturing animatedly with one hand while drawing on a pad of paper with the other, brows furrowed in concentration.
“Anyway,” he was saying, “do you have a favourite flower? I asked around and they all laughed at me like the great Hal Jordan couldn’t have a favourite plant. I’m gonna put down dandelions if you don’t say anything, by the way. Stubborn, just like you.”
“Lillies,” Hal croaked out.
There was a scrape of a chair and the sound of something being dropped. “You’re awake!” Kyle blurted out. “Oh my God, how are you feeling?”
Blinking owlishly at the kid, he muttered, “Don’t stop yapping now.”
Kyle flushed bright red, stammering out, “Uh—well it’s-it’s not important anymore. I gotta—Jo! Hal’s awake!”
“’Bout goddamn time.”
The relief that came with seeing Jo in one piece almost had his head spinning off to dream land again. He kept his head screwed on tight through sheer willpower alone and beamed up at her as best he could. “Hey,” he said hoarsely.
“Hey.” Oh wow, she looked pissed. Sitting down next to him, she jabbed a finger, not quite touching his chest. “You know, considering how broken your ribs were when we got you here, I’d have thought you’d be a little more fucked up about it. Guess they’ve got you on the good stuff, huh?”
Hal frowned to himself. “Bro-ken?” he asked carefully. They hadn’t touched him, at least, not physically.
Jo pursed her lips and Kyle looked slightly paler than before. “You went into cardiac arrest, Hal. They had to perform CPR on you until help arrived. You almost didn’t make it because of your little stunt.”
Right. Hal was personally finding it difficult to come up with reasons to be mad at himself for so he tried to imagine Simon or Kyle doing the same and something poked through the numbness enough to make him shiver. “’S okay,” he insisted. “I’m fine.”
“You almost weren’t, Hal,” Kyle cut in. “It could’ve gone a lot worse.”
He laid a hand on top of his chest. Felt his heart pound to the same beat as the monitors and sighed softly through his nose, summoning just enough will to nod along and puff himself up. “I’d do it again,” he got out. Jo’s eyebrows shot up in disbelief. “Got bad this time but I’d do it again. Your shit is my shit,” he added.
To his surprise, she smiled at him. “Shut up. Goddamn sap. Kyle, are you hearing this guy?”
Kyle, picking up his drawing pad off the ground, only laughed in response.
“You got them good, right?”
“Like you even have to ask, Hal,” Guy snorted, leaning back with a scowl. “That operation ain’t gonna be running for the next hundred years or so.”
Hal nodded along, a crease in his brow. “Explain what they wanted?”
“They were testing new strains of fear toxin on you,” John said. Hal picked absently at a loose thread in his bedsheets, morbidly fascinated.
“Fucked, ain’t it? Tryna force a GL into being that scared. Even Bats won’t shut up about how it’s a miracle you survived.” Hal could tell that Guy was doing his utmost to remain calm and composed despite the poorly concealed storm of emotions simmering barely underneath. “Damn good thing we got there when we did.”
“Definitely. I owe you a drink.”
“Make it ten.”
“Deal.”
Silence lapsed between them. It was an uncomfortable, itching type of silence, broken by John straightening in his seat.
“Hal,” he began suddenly, “do you remember what you said to us?”
“Uh, not really?” he replied truthfully. He got flashes, bits and pieces of jumbled nightmares and the real-life rescue missions, but nothing concrete. Honestly, just a whole lot of yelling. “Was it anything bad?”
Judging by the look on their faces, it had been very bad. “You…” John trailed off for a second, mouth pursed, before trying again. “You thought Parallax was there. And you asked us to…”
“To kill you,” Guy finished bluntly. “Which is dramatic even for you.”
“Shit.” Hal ran a hand through his hair and whispered, “I’m sorry, I really am, I just don’t remember—"
“Quit it,” Guy growled. “Listen to us, idiot. You preach all this shit about how the GLs are always gonna be there for one of us but what about you, huh? You don’t think we have your back?”
Frowning, Hal tried, “That’s not—”
“It is,” John cut in smoothly. “You thought that the only way forward after a potential encounter with Parallax was to put you down. That’s not true anymore. You know that.”
“John—”
“Couldn’t be fucking clearer if we tried.” Guy stood up and placed both of his meaty hands on Hal’s shoulders, shaking him slightly. “You let us help. No matter what happens, you let us help you. We’re a fucking team. We’re the goddamn Green Lanterns of Earth and if you fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. You understand, Jordan?”
Overwhelmed, embarrassingly close to tears, he nodded with a grin. “Understood,” Hal responded.