Green Lantern Corps. General. 074. Dark.
Title: Butterfly Rhythm
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Oliver Queen, Dick Grayson, Dinah Lance, Clark Kent, Carter Hall, Kendra Saunders, others.
Prompt: 074 - Dark
Word Count: 6804
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Maxwell Lord’s OMACs have taken over the Earth and cannot be stopped.
Author's Notes: This fic explores the AU created by the events of Booster Gold v2 6-10, and the final dialogue is quoted from BG v2 07, page 7. Slash and het pairings occur.
“Superman.” Kyle took a deep breath. “Right.” He’d expected the words, known there was no other alternative, but expecting and actually hearing were two different things, and butterflies flickered to life in his stomach.
“He’s the key,” Dick said simply. “Get Max out of his head, and we have the advantage.” His mask was torn above his left eye, and the black of his costume had faded to a murky sort of gray, but his bearing was as straight as it had ever been. Kyle had not seen him waver once over the past fourteen months, and that memory almost quelled the wings beating against the inside of his skin.
“You can do it,” Ollie said, almost too quietly for anyone but Kyle to hear. “I believe in you.” The roomful of assembled heroes - almost the last still alive - pretended not to hear the words Ollie wouldn’t have been caught dead uttering so many years ago, looking elsewhere as if by chance until he disentangled his fingers from Kyle’s short hair.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dick began, “I don’t have to tell you that this is the best chance for the resistance that we’ve had yet.”
“And yet you just did,” Ollie muttered, but this time his voice was in fact low enough that Kyle was the only one who noticed. He wasn’t listening to Dick’s inspirational speech; everyone present in the room knew that they were essentially the only heroes Earth had left. Max Lord’s bid to take over the world had nearly succeeded; that his army of OMACs - Observational Metahuman Activity Constructs, a misnomer if there had ever been one - was firstly so numerous and secondly composed of unwitting civilians infected by a nanovirus had crippled the opposition before the fighting had properly begun. Ted Kord had supposedly been onto something, over a year ago, but no one except Booster Gold had listened and then they had both dropped off the radar.
Most of the Justice League had gone down in the first wave of attacks - Wonder Woman, Flash, Alan Scott, Donna Troy. The brutality the OMACs had shown towards Diana had been unprecedented at the time; Kyle hadn’t been shell-shocked enough to not make note of it, but when the lists of dead got longer and longer, he stopped paying attention to details like whether or not there was a body to bury or how much of one was left. Dinah had been the last straw in that regard; something in him had just shut down when he’d buried what was left of her so that Ollie wouldn’t have to see.
The same fight that had taken the lives of many of the founding members of the League had also seen the disappearance of more heroes than Kyle wanted to think about. Superman had resurfaced so quickly that none of them had had time to consider the ramifications of his absence, but the initial hope and relief the world must have felt had been dashed just as quickly. No one had heard from Batman in months, not even Dick. The Corps was scattered across six sectors, fighting Sinestro’s corps of yellow Lanterns and losing, and Oa itself had been decimated by a crazed Superboy Prime. Kyle didn’t know whether Guy had survived or where he might be, although he knew that John had died on Oa. Recent reports of attacks centering on power plants in the western United States sounded like they might be Guy’s work, but there just wasn’t enough information.
“Kyle,” Dick said sharply, and Kyle tried to act as if he hadn’t had his face buried in Ollie’s shoulder during most of Dick’s speech; Ollie’s arm still around his waist made that both more and less difficult.
“Yes, oh fearless leader,” he said, lamely trying to smile. Dick stayed impassive, the mask making it almost impossible to read his expression.
“Hawkman and Green Arrow will remain here and attempt to make contact with any remaining metahumans,” Dick said abruptly, as if Kyle had been listening all along. “If we don’t make it, you guys are it. Hawkgirl will provide aerial support while Cyborg covers the ground. Green Lantern, you’re going to keep Superman busy.” He paused and looked them over slowly. “I’ll take care of Maxwell Lord.”
By their expressions, no one in the small room had any doubt as to what Dick’s deliberately ambiguous statement meant. The chill Kyle felt had very little to do with the cold temperature, and Ollie’s warmth did nothing to drive it away.
“I’ll also need you to get us close enough to Checkmate headquarters to pull this off,” Dick continued. “Do you have enough power?”
The ring wasn’t the only thing in question; even Kyle could tell. He sat up just a little straighter, letting the ring spark. In theory, his ring wouldn’t run out of charge - that was one of the modifications that he’d made when he’d dumped the Ion energy into the new Central Battery. It had been three years and a lifetime ago. “I can do it,” he said.
The curt nod came after a hesitation so brief that Kyle wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been watching Dick as intently as the other man appeared to be staring at him. “Get some sleep before we go,” Dick said. “All of you. We move out in six hours.” He glanced at Ollie’s hand still resting on Kyle’s hip, the first direct visual acknowledgement of their proximity since the group had first gotten together, and his mouth softened. “This is it, guys.”
T - 5 hours and 48 minutes
The resistance, such as it was, did not and could not stay in one place for long; four of the six members were clearly metahuman and registered on the OMACs’ sensors, and both Dick and Ollie were registered as beta-level targets. Kyle privately felt that Dick should have been classified as an alpha-level threat; he was the one who’d held the dwindling resistance alive and together over the course of the past sixteen months. Dick’s classification with regard to the OMACs wasn’t really an important issue, though, and Kyle very carefully did not speak about how he thought it was precisely the beta-level label that had allowed Dick as Nightwing to work as efficiently as he had - while the OMACs concentrated on Carter and Kyle, Dick organized from the fringes.
Their current hideout was the shell of a cathedral somewhere in the south of France. Kyle hadn’t bothered to remember the name, which was long and unpronounceable and in French, which subject he’d failed in high school. There was a series of smaller rooms underneath the main level, and Kyle had barricaded one heavily enough to survive a zombie apocalypse in case one suddenly materialized. He couldn’t stop the choked laughter that bubbled up as his tired mind inextricably linked OMACs and zombies, telling him that he was already trying to survive the zombie apocalypse and that all the barricades he could put up in this tiny room wouldn’t be enough to keep them out. He wasn’t sure when Ollie slipped past his flimsy wooden defenses, but the pressure of Ollie’s lips on his was enough to drain away the cracked mirth.
Sixteen months of hell broke down a lot of social barriers, and although Kyle had been speaking the truth when he’d told his assistant -- Is Terry even still alive? -- that he was straight, that line had eroded away along with everything else. There had always been sparks with Ollie, but the fights they’d had so long ago seemed petty now, and Ollie was the last real link Kyle felt he had to his former life. Despite Dick’s order to sleep, Kyle allowed his costume to disintegrate under Ollie’s hands. One way or another, the world was ending in the morning.
Fourteen months earlier:
“Hal’s still in there,” Kyle said. Ollie shot him a look comprised of equal parts annoyance that Kyle had said it first and gratitude that they were on the same page.
“We don’t have the manpower,” Nightwing retorted. Kyle glared at him in mute frustration; Hal would be a valuable asset to the fledgling resistance only now forming in the wake of Maxwell Lord’s sudden coup. With the JLA missing and presumed dead, it had taken time for Nightwing to start gathering the superhero community into a cohesive force. Kyle had been running for most of that time, unable to get past the shock of seeing the JLA go down. He’d spent some of it trying to recruit help from Oa - he and John had gone out, but a third party in the form of a Superman Kyle had never seen before and a Superboy quite clearly gone insane had smashed its way through the nascent Corps. John had remained on Oa to provide damage control, but Kyle had felt compelled to return to Earth. Now, nearly two months after the first day of Armageddon, he had just learned that Hal Jordan was not only alive but also that he was uninfected by the OMAC nanovirus, and Nightwing was refusing to mount a rescue operation.
“We need heavy hitters,” Ollie put in, eyeing Kyle. “Hal -“
“I am going to explain this once,” Nightwing said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just this once.” He looked Kyle in the eyes and then Ollie. “We don’t have the strength for a frontal assault, even if we know exactly where Hal and whoever else is with him are. The only way in would be to infiltrate the complex undercover. No one here has the necessary skills to pull it off.”
“You -“ Kyle started.
“Kyle,” Nightwing said, and Kyle was still raw enough to be startled that Nightwing knew who he was under the mask. But Batman had known it, and where he’d lived, back before the world had dissolved, so it made sense that Nightwing could at least figure out his name. “Oliver,” he added, and then hesitated. “I don’t think there’s a high enough chance of success,” he finally said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“If there’s any chance -“ Ollie started, as Kyle said, “But there could be others -“
“Hal Jordan is a founding member of the Justice League.” That Kyle had to strain to hear Nightwing’s voice at all didn’t lessen its force of command in the slightest. “He has the most powerful weapon in the known universe on his finger and the strength of will to use it. If anyone can escape, he can. If he makes it out, then I will do everything I can to make sure he and anyone with him are given the assistance they need, but I will not waste resources on an operation this unlikely to succeed, and neither will you. Is that clear?”
There was nothing to do but agree, and a week later, Hal was dead. It took Kyle several months to piece together the information, but he’d set his ring to keep track of Hal’s and with every new recruit, a little more information came in. The blanks he couldn’t fill in with reliable certainty were colored by his imagination, and finally Kyle spent the majority of every night for a week in a rural subway station recreating Hal’s final battle in rusty black paint on a now-abandoned subway tunnel.
”I have Superman in my back pocket. Sooner or later, I’ll have you, too.” (Kyle had never met Maxwell Lord, but he’d seen him often enough on television while the U.N. had sponsored the Justice League, and this was the kind of thing he thought a villainous ex-sponsor might say.)
”I won’t break,” Hal said. Or maybe ”You’ll never get away with this.” (Hal might not speak at all, just spit at the ground in front of Max’s feet. One thing of which Kyle was very sure was that if Max Lord’s psychokinetic ability required him to sublimate the will of his victims, Hal wouldn’t break. Hal had absolute confidence in his own inner strength, and that just made his considerable will even stronger.)
”We’ll see,” Max said every time, and stalked off in defeat. Hal’s ring was kept in another part of the complex entirely, and Max stared at it for a moment every time he failed to get through Hal’s defenses. This was a daily routine for weeks, until Hal managed to nearly escape. (Kyle wasn’t sure how Hal might have done this; no one knew exactly how Hal had been restrained. He thought, though, that since Hal’s powers - like his - were derived entirely from the ring, that Max would try to humiliate him once the ring had been removed from his immediate vicinity by keeping him under lighter security and fewer restraints. Effectively telling Hal that he wasn’t dangerous enough to be fully restricted would be a blow to the ego, slapping Hal in the face with Max’s lack of respect. Kyle also thought that Hal probably wouldn’t really notice something so indirect.)
A cell, then, small and underground with stone walls and a barred door, would be enough to hold the greatest Green Lantern. Hal, with determination and perseverance, chipped away at the bars on the window - if there was one - or the door. He got a little farther every day, loosening them in their sockets and carefully hiding the evidence. What he didn’t realize was that Max knew exactly what he was doing; for all his strength of will, Hal couldn’t hide his thoughts.
Hal couldn’t call the ring to him, but he knew exactly where it was. On the day he worked the bars loose enough to slip out of the cell, he ran straight to it. He might even have gotten it on his finger. (Kyle liked to imagine that Hal had indeed put the ring on and soared up into the blue, blue sky one last time.) The ceiling of the complex disintegrated in a perfectly circular route straight up, and Hal burst through the roof in a shower of wood chips and tile fragments. Within seconds, he was hovering above the building, trying to get his bearings. (He might not have known, although Kyle did, that he’d been held in northern Canada. Max liked to scatter his captives to minimize the chances that they’d work together. Neither Hal nor Kyle would ever know that Scott Free had been tossed into Bell Reve, to name just one.)
The few seconds it took Hal to figure out where he was were the few seconds that cost him his life. Before he could get much farther, a strong hand grabbed him by the ankle and swung him downwards. Hal was thrown through the building, coming out relatively uninjured on the other side but impacting with the ground. He stood, ring sparking as it informed him it had an 87% charge, to find himself surrounded by a sea of blue. The cloud of OMACs overhead blotted out the sun, and Hal grinned. Once again, he soared skywards. The OMACs surrounded him, and try as he might to escape, they followed. As high as he could go, they could go higher. Hal raced through the ruins of the Watchtower and circled around the moon, but they were always waiting, and no one came to help. This only confirmed his fear - it wasn’t fear, no, never that - that everyone else was gone.
With the finite charge in the ring growing steadily smaller, Hal chose to make his final stand. (Kyle had conflicting reports as to where, exactly, this had been.) The area was isolated, a desert or a forest, with no civilians who could either end up injured or who could swell the OMACs’ ranks. Hal went down to numbers, in the end. Stuck on the ground and fighting all but hand to hand, the ring sputtered and died at the same moment an OMAC got in a lucky hit to the back of his head. Once he was unconscious, it was easy enough for Brother Eye to direct a single OMAC to break his neck.
Hal had been resurrected and exonerated of the deeds he’d done as Parallax less than five months earlier.
(The day he’d gotten the news of Hal’s death, Kyle had barricaded himself in what was essentially a hole in the ground somewhere in Africa and stayed there. He’d half-expected someone to come drag him out, but that was the same day that Nightwing received a communiqué from Asia and they ended up in the mountains long enough that by the time Nightwing decided it was time to move on, Kyle had crawled back outside. Dinah and Ollie were waiting when he did.)
T - 5 hours and 13 minutes
With Ollie’s skin hot against his, nervous energy expended, Kyle finally felt calm enough to sleep. Even knowing what tomorrow brought - or perhaps because of it - for the first time in months, the nightmares didn’t come.
Nine months earlier:
“I pronounce you man and wife.” Kyle closed the half-burned book, discretely holding it together with slender constructed threads. Ollie slipped a ring made out of spare bits and pieces left over from repairing his arrows onto Dinah’s finger, and the ring she put on him in turn was painstakingly and similarly crafted. The past five months had been difficult for all of them, but at least Green Arrow and Black Canary had rediscovered why they’d fallen in love so long ago. The makeshift wedding ceremony was that much brighter for being conducted in a fire-damaged synagogue with no roof in the rain, and there was no lack of well-wishing.
Despite the dirt and grime, Dinah all but glowed radiantly, and Kyle thought he’d never seen anyone look happier. “Any port in a storm,” Nightwing murmured. Kyle cocked his head quizzically, not sure what the other man meant. Nightwing smiled and walked forward to congratulate the couple.
Kyle carefully replaced the book - he thought it might have been the Old Testament, but it was so badly damaged that he couldn’t read any of it, and it was possibly written in something that was not only not English but not even legible Roman lettering. He’d just made it up as he went along, which hadn’t seemed to faze anyone, least of all Ollie and Dinah. To be asked to officiate at their wedding was an honor that touched him deeply, even if he knew that it was partly because he reminded Ollie of Hal and partly because there really wasn’t anyone else.
The marriage wasn’t technically legal by any standards, least of all the ever-increasingly restrictive laws set in place since Checkmate had seized power, but it was a promise that they all recognized. Time enough to worry about legality if they all survived the OMACs; for now, a promise was enough.
T - fourteen minutes
Dick’s voice through the door woke Kyle, and there was no sense of dread or disorientation. He knew where he was and what he - they were doing. He responded with the appropriate passphrase and woke Ollie. It was a little harder than he expected, and they were nearly late to what he had privately and jokingly dubbed the assembly hall. It was just another tiny room in a series of tiny rooms.
“I’d have coffee waiting for you, but we seem to be experiencing a shortage,” Dick remarked when the two of them shuffled through the door, Ollie yawning. Kyle had figured out how to use the ring to banish fatigue when he had to, although the consequences weren’t pleasant. Today, he didn’t need that particular skill.
“Pity,” he heard himself say. “I hear coffee dissolves zombies.” Maybe he was more tired than he’d thought; everyone was staring at the apparent non sequitur, not having made his mental connection between OMACs and the living dead. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“Fortunately, OMACs aren’t zombies,” Dick returned lightly after a moment. “We don’t need to dissolve them, just hold them off.”
“Can we just get going?” Hawkman demanded. He was standing a rigid six inches away from Hawkgirl, but she was far enough behind him that Kyle was sure she was touching him somehow.
“Keep your damn pants on,” Ollie growled, and Dick held up a hand.
“Kyle, if you would.”
The ship was green and translucent from the inside, all soft edges and round curves. While Kyle might once have enjoyed putting detailed work into every inch of his construct, perhaps including a sexy pilot with cleavage spilling out of her low-cut uniform jacket, he had long since learned not to expend more energy than he absolutely had to. The ship was functional and no more. He was mostly sure it was radar-invisible, and the reflective outer surface would help camouflage it from prying eyes. There was no radio signal to give it away, or any other communicative device that might show up on a GPS system. Only the energy of the three metas inside and the ring itself needed to be hidden. Kyle had learned a rather neat trick to that effect, or he thought he had. He hadn’t had the chance to test it under any reliable circumstances.
“Say your goodbyes,” Dick said softly as Hawkman laid a hand on Hawkgirl’s shoulder. It was the most intimate thing Kyle had ever seen them do.
Eight months earlier:
The words that came to mind were inevitably “not enough.” There wasn’t enough space, enough manpower, enough meta strength, enough privacy, enough sleep, enough of anything. Nightwing - Dick - was holding them together as best he could, and for a few months he’d seemed to be succeeding. They’d gathered a respectable number of metahumans and Dick had somehow forged them into a team. Then the OMACs had started a vulture-like circling, both literally and figuratively.
Moving in small groups or pairs over different routes had kept them alive for a while - they were harder to track. Now, some of these groups had started to vanish. Dick had gone out searching for the first three or four, coming up empty-handed. When Dinah and Dr. Midnite failed to report in, he tasked Ollie with keeping order in the latest temporary hideout - they were back in Europe now, in the rolling foothills of Germany’s Swabian albs - and took Kyle with him.
“We’re going to make an active strike against Checkmate,” Dick said after a few moments, almost conversationally.
Kyle missed a step and had to use the ring to get his balance back before he landed on his face. “When?”
“I haven’t decided.” Dick stopped suddenly and peered at the ground, but Kyle was ready for it and did not walk over him. He couldn’t tell what Dick saw, and turned his attention to the sky instead. No OMACs were in sight, but that didn’t mean much. “You’re the strongest weapon I have. I need to know I can count on you.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Kyle couldn’t think of any other response, unless he counted just staring at Dick. “I mean -“
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.” Dick stood and dusted off his hands. He’d managed to keep his costume largely intact; Kyle didn’t know how he did it, but it was a skill shared by all of what he was coming to think of as refugees. His own costume was generated by the ring and altering or repairing it took little mental effort, but it must have been much more difficult for the majority of their teammates. “I can’t - won’t let everyone know every part of the strategy. The OMACs,” he added, seeing Kyle’s confusion.
“If one of us is - oh,” Kyle said. “Why are you telling me?”
“I want you to help coordinate.” Dick veered to the right, and Kyle jogged to keep up. “You’re going to be sending very visible signals, and there will be some very obvious responses. You’re also going to be sending hidden instructions within those signals.”
“I can do that,” Kyle said. It occurred to him to wonder if Dick wasn’t setting him up as a decoy, but it didn’t really matter. Of all the people Dick could have chosen, Kyle was most likely to survive a stint as bait. In a way that Kyle wouldn’t have appreciated before the OMACs had started to overrun the world, Dick was paying him a compliment.
“Drop,” Dick said, and Kyle flattened himself to the ground. “Stay down.” Dick wriggled forward, his black suit with its sky blue stripe blending into the brownish vegetation far better than Kyle thought it had any right to. Within what seemed like moments, Dick returned. His face was pale and he started to shake his head. “Don’t -“
“Where is she?”
Kyle nearly jumped out of his skin. Ollie had followed them, and he hadn’t noticed. Dick didn’t seem in the least surprised, somehow managing to project an air of calm authority while still prone under a bush. “If you stand up, they will see you,” he said, and Ollie apparently still had enough of a sense of self-preservation to listen, because he sank back down.
“Where?” he demanded again, in a harsher whisper than before.
“I’m sorry, Ollie,” Dick said. Something Kyle couldn’t read passed through his gaze and voice, but Ollie read it loud and clear, for Kyle could see the realization that Dinah was gone and that there was nothing any of them could do settle over his features. Silence settled over the small thicket, the scent of pine rising on the wind, until the sun began to drop below the nearest peak.
Without any sign of discomfort, Dick rose smoothly to his feet. He courteously held out a hand to Ollie, but the older man ignored him. Kyle scrambled up as well, nearly tripping over a cramp in his leg he hadn’t known was there. He banged on it with a fist once or twice, not that it did any good. “Keep watch this time,” Dick said quietly, and Ollie took a visible breath before nodding. “Kyle.”
The only reason Kyle was able to identify the remains in the nearby clearing as human was Nightwing’s assurance that it was so. The reddish lumps scattered across the thread groundcover refused to register in his mind as having any kind of recognizable shape, but he felt bile rising in his throat. A boot and a glove that were recognizably Dinah’s and part of what he finally saw as Dr. Midnite’s goggles and helmet sent him over the edge. He turned away and retched until there was nothing left and finally he forced the reflex back through sheer will. Dick’s hand was on his back, rubbing in soothing circles, and finally the words registered.
“We have to bury them before Ollie sees.”
Swallowing, Kyle nodded. He could keep the energy output of the ring too low to register if he managed to invert the field just so. A swarm of threads overturned the earth, gathering the parts large enough to see and pulling the blood away from the plants. Moving the construct eased the lingering nausea as the visual evidence slowly vanished, settling into two mounds with small boulders as headstones. Almost as an afterthought, he carved a crescent moon into one and a flying stylized bird into the other. Ollie didn’t have to know that there had been no way to distinguish between the remains; Kyle had placed Dinah’s marker nearer to where her wedding ring was buried, but that was all he could do.
To Kyle’s surprise - and Dick’s, if he was reading him correctly - Ollie evidenced no desire to visit the grave of the woman he’d married. He would keep his pain inside over the next several weeks, until it had been distanced enough by further horror to be bearable. The ring Dinah had made - woven together partly with strands of her own hair - went on a chain around Ollie’s neck, and it was months before Kyle saw it again. He would be the only one who did.
Present, T + 45 minutes:
“We’re nearly there.” They were close enough to Max’s headquarters in the Swiss Alps that if Kyle squinted, he could make it out on the horizon.
“Hawkgirl, on my mark.”
There were no OMACs visible yet - their absence was either an auspicious sign or a portent of doom. Kyle told the corner of his brain racing through worst-case-scenarios to shut up and focus on piloting the construct.
“Cyborg, on mark two.”
The half-metal man simply nodded. Kyle had a sudden vivid image of Ollie making a show of checking his quiver (although everyone always knew that it was in perfect order) and it triggered a flood of memories. Ollie obsessively checked and rechecked each piece of equipment before a fight. Carter was careful to never seem improper in public, but somehow if Kendra needed something, he was always there. Cyborg was quiet enough that Kyle often forgot entirely that he was even in the room, but he had a habit of constructing tiny intricate puzzles out of whatever material was available and leaving them somewhere inconspicuous every time they left a hideout. Kendra sang when she fought, quietly and under her breath; Kyle had once asked her what the tune was, but she’d just given him a blank look and said she didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d happened to catch Carter’s eye after that, and the shrug Hawkman had given him had been one of the few instances of real camaraderie he’d ever felt with him.
Dick was simply always there, a plan and several backups in place no matter what happened. He might have been trained by Batman, but the student had in this case surpassed the master - Dick was alive and Batman was presumed dead. Kyle thought he was the only one that noticed the little quirk of the mouth that Dick steadfastly maintained was not a smile.
“Keep it steady, Green Lantern.” Dick’s hand on his shoulder was just enough contact to be felt, and Kyle took a deep breath. He could not remember those who hadn’t made it this far, not now. He would remember them afterwards, if he survived. “Hawkgirl, mark.”
The real trouble hopefully started here. The OMACs were on her almost before Kyle could blink, and he sent the construct into a dive as planned before angling up to give the OMACs something else to think about. Distraction accomplished, he swooped downwards again and let the construct dissolve. Dick was gone, but that was part of the plan, too. Kyle raced forward, heading for the center of the complex. Faster than thought, a red and blue blur hung in his path, and he barely stopped himself from bouncing off of it.
“Superman.”
Five months earlier:
The first time it happened, Kyle thought he must have been dreaming. He’d been careless, and an explosion had lodged shrapnel between his fourth and fifth ribs on his right side. Apparently he was lucky it hadn’t pierced his lung, but he’d lost enough blood to black out. He’d woken up behind a rock, vaguely surprised to be conscious at all, to Ollie bending over him. The relief that Kyle had very clearly seen when he’d coughed wasn’t something he’d noticed at the time, mostly because Ollie had proceeded to prod at the sharp bit of metal still stuck in his skin and ask if he could breathe.
“No problem,” Kyle had assured him shakily. “I can even run, if you want.” The ring would fix most damage, including this, but it would take a little time. Ollie had given him an inscrutable look, leaned down, and given him a rough kiss on the mouth. It was the last thing Kyle remembered before waking up in a building somewhere, shrapnel and Ollie both nowhere in sight, and he put it down to the post-traumatic stress of injury.
The second time was two weeks later, and there was no uncertainty. Their best plan to date had just failed spectacularly through no one particular flaw; everything that could have gone wrong, from communication down to lucky shots, had gone as wrong as possible. If Kyle hadn’t known better, he would have assumed that someone had cast a bad-luck spell against them. He was only sure that there was no such spell because none of the magic users on either side were among the living. Half of their members were dead, and this time they hadn’t been able to return to the battlefield to bury them. Kyle felt numb; they were down to seven, including himself, none more than slightly injured. That much, at least, had gone right.
The building they’d commandeered this time had held a pool at some point; the glass all around the cracked and sunken concrete hole in the ground was shattered, and the water itself was long gone. Enough algae had grown in it before it had drained out to create a semblance of soil, and a carpet of purple violets was blooming along the bottom. Kyle stared at it for a moment, entranced by the unexpected sight of beauty. He shook it off, though, and followed everyone else inside. The showers were wet and moldy, and the rot had spread through the lockers, but there were a couple of nearly habitable window-free lounges. Cyborg had volunteered for first watch, which meant that he was likely to simply continue until dawn.
It didn’t take long for Carter and Kendra to vanish in one direction or for Dick and Kimiyo to vanish in another, and Kyle had just sort of shrugged at Ollie before he realized that he was shaking. His hands wouldn’t stop trembling, even when he clenched them into fists. Ollie drifted towards him, taking Kyle’s cold hands into his, and before Kyle could stop himself, he’d all but thrown himself at Ollie. It was messy and rough, but he’d been able to sleep afterwards. Ollie had still been there when he’d woken up.
“I’m not gay,” Kyle said, before he realized how ridiculous it sounded.
“Me either.” Ollie was remarkably calm, all things considered. “Neither was Hal,” he added, and Kyle twitched. Ollie smirked, and Kyle demanded to know whether or not Ollie was pulling his leg. (Ollie was, in fact, starting what would become a standing gag, and Kyle would never know whether or not he was telling the truth. He was.)
“It’s the adrenaline,” Ollie said later. “If that makes you feel any better. You know, the whole reaffirming life thing,” he added when Kyle just stared.
Dinah’s ring had been on a cord around Ollie’s neck the entire time, but by the time the skies lightened and the rest of their remaining teammates started to wander back in, Ollie was dressed and the ring once again hidden.
Ollie found excuses to touch him after that - an arm around his waist, a hand on his shoulder, a quick ruffle through his now-short hair. No one else paid any outward attention, any more than they did to Kimiyo’s habit of standing behind Dick and resting her fingers lightly on the nape of his neck on the rare occasions he actually sat down, or to how Kendra always stood just barely too close to Carter.
Kyle wasn’t alone in trying to discretely keep an eye on Dick when an unexpected flood of OMACs descended on them during Kimiyo’s watch some time later and only six of them managed to escape. In the last Kyle had seen of her, she’d still been alive and struggling. He didn’t know if that made it better or worse. As far as any of them could tell, Dick was unaffected, but it was only after that that Kyle remembered Dick making plans for their last-ditch effort to save the planet, and there were no further attempts to contact any other pockets of resistance.
Present, T+58 minutes:
“Superman.” Repeating the word didn’t make the man go away, but it apparently distracted him enough to telegraph his next move so clearly that Kyle could see it coming. He dodged easily and grabbed Superman with a construct. His intent was to throw Superman as far into space as he could in the hopes that distance would break Max’s hold, but Superman grabbed the construct and pulled. Kyle dissolved it just in time to avoid being dragged within range of Superman’s fists. The fleet of OMACs surrounding them had other ideas; four of them closed in from above while Superman waited below, and he didn’t see the fifth.
The blow to the side of his head stunned him just long enough for Superman to pin his arms to his sides, but Kyle didn’t need his hands free to send a construct rippling outwards. It pulled him away from Superman and sent the OMACs tumbling. They were too numerous to count, swirling around one distinct point in the sky and one on the ground - Hawkgirl was still fighting, but the man on the ground could be Nightwing or Cyborg or both. Adrenaline brought anger boiling to the surface, and Kyle lashed out with a stronger whip than before. OMACs fell, tumbling to the ground like so many snowflakes, but no matter how many he sent reeling, more were ready to take their place.
Inexplicably, Superman hung back after the first rush. Kyle could see him out of the corner of his eye, but he wasn’t moving. It gave him a moment of hope until the flood of OMACs trickled to a momentary halt and Superman started towards him. “Are you-“ Kyle started. Superman knocked him out of the sky.
Actual snow covered the ground, but it didn’t make the landing any easier. There was no further disturbance of crowd of OMACs above him, but Kyle had seen a fight on the ground just before he’d impacted, and he threw himself at it. Superman was in the way again, and this time Kyle did bounce off his broad chest. Before he could catch himself, three OMACs grabbed him from behind and sent him skyward. By the time he managed to control his descent, Superman was nowhere to be seen.
Activating the mostly functional communicator for the warning signal was easy enough to do through a construct, but it took a split-second of concentration longer than Kyle had. The second blow to his head sent him downwards, but at least the signal had been sent and if Dick was still alive, he would know that Kyle had failed to keep Superman distracted. His vision blacked out for a bare second on landing, and when he came to, Cyborg was standing over him. Over his shoulder, he saw what remained of Hawkgirl falling, and he struggled upright. His vision was wavery, but the ring responded well enough.
There was no way to get to the air and take Cyborg with him, and he wouldn’t leave him behind. They stood back to back, Cyborg fighting with calm efficiency while Kyle tried to hold them back long enough for the Cyborg’s strikes to take effect. He couldn’t concentrate enough through the pain in his head to contain them all, and there seemed no end. As he sparked the ring yet again, gaining a few precious seconds, the distress signal in the communicator sounded. There was little to no chance that Dick would have survived activating the signal; it was his final order to leave. Kyle made a split-second decision and turned to Cyborg.
“Run!” he shouted, but Dick’s authoritative attitude hadn’t rubbed off, because Cyborg did no such thing. It cost him his life as an OMAC finally got through his defenses, and Kyle reached for a reservoir of strength he’d thought long drained dry. The entire army stopped dead in their tracks, caught in the most complex construct he’d ever made. He scrambled over to Cyborg’s prone form, but there was nothing he could do, and the OMACs were struggling against his web. He couldn’t hold it long; the strain was driving him to his knees already, but he could and would keep it together until he was sure he was the only one left. “Dick!” There was no answer through the communicator or anything else.
Red stained the snow in front of him and he realized distantly that he was bleeding. The construct flickered and winked out of existence. “Kill him,” Kyle heard from somewhere, and he pushed himself upright. The OMACs surged forward.
The very near future:
“Incoming transmission. Source OMACS 566, 4652, 885, and 32. Subject Alpha. Rayner, Kyle - Green Lantern. Subject terminated. Power ring captured.”
“Another weapon to add to my collection.” Maxwell Lord’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, but that was perfectly normal now. Perhaps it had always been so. “Thank you, Brother I. Who’s next?”
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Oliver Queen, Dick Grayson, Dinah Lance, Clark Kent, Carter Hall, Kendra Saunders, others.
Prompt: 074 - Dark
Word Count: 6804
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Maxwell Lord’s OMACs have taken over the Earth and cannot be stopped.
Author's Notes: This fic explores the AU created by the events of Booster Gold v2 6-10, and the final dialogue is quoted from BG v2 07, page 7. Slash and het pairings occur.
“Superman.” Kyle took a deep breath. “Right.” He’d expected the words, known there was no other alternative, but expecting and actually hearing were two different things, and butterflies flickered to life in his stomach.
“He’s the key,” Dick said simply. “Get Max out of his head, and we have the advantage.” His mask was torn above his left eye, and the black of his costume had faded to a murky sort of gray, but his bearing was as straight as it had ever been. Kyle had not seen him waver once over the past fourteen months, and that memory almost quelled the wings beating against the inside of his skin.
“You can do it,” Ollie said, almost too quietly for anyone but Kyle to hear. “I believe in you.” The roomful of assembled heroes - almost the last still alive - pretended not to hear the words Ollie wouldn’t have been caught dead uttering so many years ago, looking elsewhere as if by chance until he disentangled his fingers from Kyle’s short hair.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dick began, “I don’t have to tell you that this is the best chance for the resistance that we’ve had yet.”
“And yet you just did,” Ollie muttered, but this time his voice was in fact low enough that Kyle was the only one who noticed. He wasn’t listening to Dick’s inspirational speech; everyone present in the room knew that they were essentially the only heroes Earth had left. Max Lord’s bid to take over the world had nearly succeeded; that his army of OMACs - Observational Metahuman Activity Constructs, a misnomer if there had ever been one - was firstly so numerous and secondly composed of unwitting civilians infected by a nanovirus had crippled the opposition before the fighting had properly begun. Ted Kord had supposedly been onto something, over a year ago, but no one except Booster Gold had listened and then they had both dropped off the radar.
Most of the Justice League had gone down in the first wave of attacks - Wonder Woman, Flash, Alan Scott, Donna Troy. The brutality the OMACs had shown towards Diana had been unprecedented at the time; Kyle hadn’t been shell-shocked enough to not make note of it, but when the lists of dead got longer and longer, he stopped paying attention to details like whether or not there was a body to bury or how much of one was left. Dinah had been the last straw in that regard; something in him had just shut down when he’d buried what was left of her so that Ollie wouldn’t have to see.
The same fight that had taken the lives of many of the founding members of the League had also seen the disappearance of more heroes than Kyle wanted to think about. Superman had resurfaced so quickly that none of them had had time to consider the ramifications of his absence, but the initial hope and relief the world must have felt had been dashed just as quickly. No one had heard from Batman in months, not even Dick. The Corps was scattered across six sectors, fighting Sinestro’s corps of yellow Lanterns and losing, and Oa itself had been decimated by a crazed Superboy Prime. Kyle didn’t know whether Guy had survived or where he might be, although he knew that John had died on Oa. Recent reports of attacks centering on power plants in the western United States sounded like they might be Guy’s work, but there just wasn’t enough information.
“Kyle,” Dick said sharply, and Kyle tried to act as if he hadn’t had his face buried in Ollie’s shoulder during most of Dick’s speech; Ollie’s arm still around his waist made that both more and less difficult.
“Yes, oh fearless leader,” he said, lamely trying to smile. Dick stayed impassive, the mask making it almost impossible to read his expression.
“Hawkman and Green Arrow will remain here and attempt to make contact with any remaining metahumans,” Dick said abruptly, as if Kyle had been listening all along. “If we don’t make it, you guys are it. Hawkgirl will provide aerial support while Cyborg covers the ground. Green Lantern, you’re going to keep Superman busy.” He paused and looked them over slowly. “I’ll take care of Maxwell Lord.”
By their expressions, no one in the small room had any doubt as to what Dick’s deliberately ambiguous statement meant. The chill Kyle felt had very little to do with the cold temperature, and Ollie’s warmth did nothing to drive it away.
“I’ll also need you to get us close enough to Checkmate headquarters to pull this off,” Dick continued. “Do you have enough power?”
The ring wasn’t the only thing in question; even Kyle could tell. He sat up just a little straighter, letting the ring spark. In theory, his ring wouldn’t run out of charge - that was one of the modifications that he’d made when he’d dumped the Ion energy into the new Central Battery. It had been three years and a lifetime ago. “I can do it,” he said.
The curt nod came after a hesitation so brief that Kyle wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been watching Dick as intently as the other man appeared to be staring at him. “Get some sleep before we go,” Dick said. “All of you. We move out in six hours.” He glanced at Ollie’s hand still resting on Kyle’s hip, the first direct visual acknowledgement of their proximity since the group had first gotten together, and his mouth softened. “This is it, guys.”
T - 5 hours and 48 minutes
The resistance, such as it was, did not and could not stay in one place for long; four of the six members were clearly metahuman and registered on the OMACs’ sensors, and both Dick and Ollie were registered as beta-level targets. Kyle privately felt that Dick should have been classified as an alpha-level threat; he was the one who’d held the dwindling resistance alive and together over the course of the past sixteen months. Dick’s classification with regard to the OMACs wasn’t really an important issue, though, and Kyle very carefully did not speak about how he thought it was precisely the beta-level label that had allowed Dick as Nightwing to work as efficiently as he had - while the OMACs concentrated on Carter and Kyle, Dick organized from the fringes.
Their current hideout was the shell of a cathedral somewhere in the south of France. Kyle hadn’t bothered to remember the name, which was long and unpronounceable and in French, which subject he’d failed in high school. There was a series of smaller rooms underneath the main level, and Kyle had barricaded one heavily enough to survive a zombie apocalypse in case one suddenly materialized. He couldn’t stop the choked laughter that bubbled up as his tired mind inextricably linked OMACs and zombies, telling him that he was already trying to survive the zombie apocalypse and that all the barricades he could put up in this tiny room wouldn’t be enough to keep them out. He wasn’t sure when Ollie slipped past his flimsy wooden defenses, but the pressure of Ollie’s lips on his was enough to drain away the cracked mirth.
Sixteen months of hell broke down a lot of social barriers, and although Kyle had been speaking the truth when he’d told his assistant -- Is Terry even still alive? -- that he was straight, that line had eroded away along with everything else. There had always been sparks with Ollie, but the fights they’d had so long ago seemed petty now, and Ollie was the last real link Kyle felt he had to his former life. Despite Dick’s order to sleep, Kyle allowed his costume to disintegrate under Ollie’s hands. One way or another, the world was ending in the morning.
Fourteen months earlier:
“Hal’s still in there,” Kyle said. Ollie shot him a look comprised of equal parts annoyance that Kyle had said it first and gratitude that they were on the same page.
“We don’t have the manpower,” Nightwing retorted. Kyle glared at him in mute frustration; Hal would be a valuable asset to the fledgling resistance only now forming in the wake of Maxwell Lord’s sudden coup. With the JLA missing and presumed dead, it had taken time for Nightwing to start gathering the superhero community into a cohesive force. Kyle had been running for most of that time, unable to get past the shock of seeing the JLA go down. He’d spent some of it trying to recruit help from Oa - he and John had gone out, but a third party in the form of a Superman Kyle had never seen before and a Superboy quite clearly gone insane had smashed its way through the nascent Corps. John had remained on Oa to provide damage control, but Kyle had felt compelled to return to Earth. Now, nearly two months after the first day of Armageddon, he had just learned that Hal Jordan was not only alive but also that he was uninfected by the OMAC nanovirus, and Nightwing was refusing to mount a rescue operation.
“We need heavy hitters,” Ollie put in, eyeing Kyle. “Hal -“
“I am going to explain this once,” Nightwing said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Just this once.” He looked Kyle in the eyes and then Ollie. “We don’t have the strength for a frontal assault, even if we know exactly where Hal and whoever else is with him are. The only way in would be to infiltrate the complex undercover. No one here has the necessary skills to pull it off.”
“You -“ Kyle started.
“Kyle,” Nightwing said, and Kyle was still raw enough to be startled that Nightwing knew who he was under the mask. But Batman had known it, and where he’d lived, back before the world had dissolved, so it made sense that Nightwing could at least figure out his name. “Oliver,” he added, and then hesitated. “I don’t think there’s a high enough chance of success,” he finally said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“If there’s any chance -“ Ollie started, as Kyle said, “But there could be others -“
“Hal Jordan is a founding member of the Justice League.” That Kyle had to strain to hear Nightwing’s voice at all didn’t lessen its force of command in the slightest. “He has the most powerful weapon in the known universe on his finger and the strength of will to use it. If anyone can escape, he can. If he makes it out, then I will do everything I can to make sure he and anyone with him are given the assistance they need, but I will not waste resources on an operation this unlikely to succeed, and neither will you. Is that clear?”
There was nothing to do but agree, and a week later, Hal was dead. It took Kyle several months to piece together the information, but he’d set his ring to keep track of Hal’s and with every new recruit, a little more information came in. The blanks he couldn’t fill in with reliable certainty were colored by his imagination, and finally Kyle spent the majority of every night for a week in a rural subway station recreating Hal’s final battle in rusty black paint on a now-abandoned subway tunnel.
”I have Superman in my back pocket. Sooner or later, I’ll have you, too.” (Kyle had never met Maxwell Lord, but he’d seen him often enough on television while the U.N. had sponsored the Justice League, and this was the kind of thing he thought a villainous ex-sponsor might say.)
”I won’t break,” Hal said. Or maybe ”You’ll never get away with this.” (Hal might not speak at all, just spit at the ground in front of Max’s feet. One thing of which Kyle was very sure was that if Max Lord’s psychokinetic ability required him to sublimate the will of his victims, Hal wouldn’t break. Hal had absolute confidence in his own inner strength, and that just made his considerable will even stronger.)
”We’ll see,” Max said every time, and stalked off in defeat. Hal’s ring was kept in another part of the complex entirely, and Max stared at it for a moment every time he failed to get through Hal’s defenses. This was a daily routine for weeks, until Hal managed to nearly escape. (Kyle wasn’t sure how Hal might have done this; no one knew exactly how Hal had been restrained. He thought, though, that since Hal’s powers - like his - were derived entirely from the ring, that Max would try to humiliate him once the ring had been removed from his immediate vicinity by keeping him under lighter security and fewer restraints. Effectively telling Hal that he wasn’t dangerous enough to be fully restricted would be a blow to the ego, slapping Hal in the face with Max’s lack of respect. Kyle also thought that Hal probably wouldn’t really notice something so indirect.)
A cell, then, small and underground with stone walls and a barred door, would be enough to hold the greatest Green Lantern. Hal, with determination and perseverance, chipped away at the bars on the window - if there was one - or the door. He got a little farther every day, loosening them in their sockets and carefully hiding the evidence. What he didn’t realize was that Max knew exactly what he was doing; for all his strength of will, Hal couldn’t hide his thoughts.
Hal couldn’t call the ring to him, but he knew exactly where it was. On the day he worked the bars loose enough to slip out of the cell, he ran straight to it. He might even have gotten it on his finger. (Kyle liked to imagine that Hal had indeed put the ring on and soared up into the blue, blue sky one last time.) The ceiling of the complex disintegrated in a perfectly circular route straight up, and Hal burst through the roof in a shower of wood chips and tile fragments. Within seconds, he was hovering above the building, trying to get his bearings. (He might not have known, although Kyle did, that he’d been held in northern Canada. Max liked to scatter his captives to minimize the chances that they’d work together. Neither Hal nor Kyle would ever know that Scott Free had been tossed into Bell Reve, to name just one.)
The few seconds it took Hal to figure out where he was were the few seconds that cost him his life. Before he could get much farther, a strong hand grabbed him by the ankle and swung him downwards. Hal was thrown through the building, coming out relatively uninjured on the other side but impacting with the ground. He stood, ring sparking as it informed him it had an 87% charge, to find himself surrounded by a sea of blue. The cloud of OMACs overhead blotted out the sun, and Hal grinned. Once again, he soared skywards. The OMACs surrounded him, and try as he might to escape, they followed. As high as he could go, they could go higher. Hal raced through the ruins of the Watchtower and circled around the moon, but they were always waiting, and no one came to help. This only confirmed his fear - it wasn’t fear, no, never that - that everyone else was gone.
With the finite charge in the ring growing steadily smaller, Hal chose to make his final stand. (Kyle had conflicting reports as to where, exactly, this had been.) The area was isolated, a desert or a forest, with no civilians who could either end up injured or who could swell the OMACs’ ranks. Hal went down to numbers, in the end. Stuck on the ground and fighting all but hand to hand, the ring sputtered and died at the same moment an OMAC got in a lucky hit to the back of his head. Once he was unconscious, it was easy enough for Brother Eye to direct a single OMAC to break his neck.
Hal had been resurrected and exonerated of the deeds he’d done as Parallax less than five months earlier.
(The day he’d gotten the news of Hal’s death, Kyle had barricaded himself in what was essentially a hole in the ground somewhere in Africa and stayed there. He’d half-expected someone to come drag him out, but that was the same day that Nightwing received a communiqué from Asia and they ended up in the mountains long enough that by the time Nightwing decided it was time to move on, Kyle had crawled back outside. Dinah and Ollie were waiting when he did.)
T - 5 hours and 13 minutes
With Ollie’s skin hot against his, nervous energy expended, Kyle finally felt calm enough to sleep. Even knowing what tomorrow brought - or perhaps because of it - for the first time in months, the nightmares didn’t come.
Nine months earlier:
“I pronounce you man and wife.” Kyle closed the half-burned book, discretely holding it together with slender constructed threads. Ollie slipped a ring made out of spare bits and pieces left over from repairing his arrows onto Dinah’s finger, and the ring she put on him in turn was painstakingly and similarly crafted. The past five months had been difficult for all of them, but at least Green Arrow and Black Canary had rediscovered why they’d fallen in love so long ago. The makeshift wedding ceremony was that much brighter for being conducted in a fire-damaged synagogue with no roof in the rain, and there was no lack of well-wishing.
Despite the dirt and grime, Dinah all but glowed radiantly, and Kyle thought he’d never seen anyone look happier. “Any port in a storm,” Nightwing murmured. Kyle cocked his head quizzically, not sure what the other man meant. Nightwing smiled and walked forward to congratulate the couple.
Kyle carefully replaced the book - he thought it might have been the Old Testament, but it was so badly damaged that he couldn’t read any of it, and it was possibly written in something that was not only not English but not even legible Roman lettering. He’d just made it up as he went along, which hadn’t seemed to faze anyone, least of all Ollie and Dinah. To be asked to officiate at their wedding was an honor that touched him deeply, even if he knew that it was partly because he reminded Ollie of Hal and partly because there really wasn’t anyone else.
The marriage wasn’t technically legal by any standards, least of all the ever-increasingly restrictive laws set in place since Checkmate had seized power, but it was a promise that they all recognized. Time enough to worry about legality if they all survived the OMACs; for now, a promise was enough.
T - fourteen minutes
Dick’s voice through the door woke Kyle, and there was no sense of dread or disorientation. He knew where he was and what he - they were doing. He responded with the appropriate passphrase and woke Ollie. It was a little harder than he expected, and they were nearly late to what he had privately and jokingly dubbed the assembly hall. It was just another tiny room in a series of tiny rooms.
“I’d have coffee waiting for you, but we seem to be experiencing a shortage,” Dick remarked when the two of them shuffled through the door, Ollie yawning. Kyle had figured out how to use the ring to banish fatigue when he had to, although the consequences weren’t pleasant. Today, he didn’t need that particular skill.
“Pity,” he heard himself say. “I hear coffee dissolves zombies.” Maybe he was more tired than he’d thought; everyone was staring at the apparent non sequitur, not having made his mental connection between OMACs and the living dead. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“Fortunately, OMACs aren’t zombies,” Dick returned lightly after a moment. “We don’t need to dissolve them, just hold them off.”
“Can we just get going?” Hawkman demanded. He was standing a rigid six inches away from Hawkgirl, but she was far enough behind him that Kyle was sure she was touching him somehow.
“Keep your damn pants on,” Ollie growled, and Dick held up a hand.
“Kyle, if you would.”
The ship was green and translucent from the inside, all soft edges and round curves. While Kyle might once have enjoyed putting detailed work into every inch of his construct, perhaps including a sexy pilot with cleavage spilling out of her low-cut uniform jacket, he had long since learned not to expend more energy than he absolutely had to. The ship was functional and no more. He was mostly sure it was radar-invisible, and the reflective outer surface would help camouflage it from prying eyes. There was no radio signal to give it away, or any other communicative device that might show up on a GPS system. Only the energy of the three metas inside and the ring itself needed to be hidden. Kyle had learned a rather neat trick to that effect, or he thought he had. He hadn’t had the chance to test it under any reliable circumstances.
“Say your goodbyes,” Dick said softly as Hawkman laid a hand on Hawkgirl’s shoulder. It was the most intimate thing Kyle had ever seen them do.
Eight months earlier:
The words that came to mind were inevitably “not enough.” There wasn’t enough space, enough manpower, enough meta strength, enough privacy, enough sleep, enough of anything. Nightwing - Dick - was holding them together as best he could, and for a few months he’d seemed to be succeeding. They’d gathered a respectable number of metahumans and Dick had somehow forged them into a team. Then the OMACs had started a vulture-like circling, both literally and figuratively.
Moving in small groups or pairs over different routes had kept them alive for a while - they were harder to track. Now, some of these groups had started to vanish. Dick had gone out searching for the first three or four, coming up empty-handed. When Dinah and Dr. Midnite failed to report in, he tasked Ollie with keeping order in the latest temporary hideout - they were back in Europe now, in the rolling foothills of Germany’s Swabian albs - and took Kyle with him.
“We’re going to make an active strike against Checkmate,” Dick said after a few moments, almost conversationally.
Kyle missed a step and had to use the ring to get his balance back before he landed on his face. “When?”
“I haven’t decided.” Dick stopped suddenly and peered at the ground, but Kyle was ready for it and did not walk over him. He couldn’t tell what Dick saw, and turned his attention to the sky instead. No OMACs were in sight, but that didn’t mean much. “You’re the strongest weapon I have. I need to know I can count on you.”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Kyle couldn’t think of any other response, unless he counted just staring at Dick. “I mean -“
“It’s not that I don’t trust you.” Dick stood and dusted off his hands. He’d managed to keep his costume largely intact; Kyle didn’t know how he did it, but it was a skill shared by all of what he was coming to think of as refugees. His own costume was generated by the ring and altering or repairing it took little mental effort, but it must have been much more difficult for the majority of their teammates. “I can’t - won’t let everyone know every part of the strategy. The OMACs,” he added, seeing Kyle’s confusion.
“If one of us is - oh,” Kyle said. “Why are you telling me?”
“I want you to help coordinate.” Dick veered to the right, and Kyle jogged to keep up. “You’re going to be sending very visible signals, and there will be some very obvious responses. You’re also going to be sending hidden instructions within those signals.”
“I can do that,” Kyle said. It occurred to him to wonder if Dick wasn’t setting him up as a decoy, but it didn’t really matter. Of all the people Dick could have chosen, Kyle was most likely to survive a stint as bait. In a way that Kyle wouldn’t have appreciated before the OMACs had started to overrun the world, Dick was paying him a compliment.
“Drop,” Dick said, and Kyle flattened himself to the ground. “Stay down.” Dick wriggled forward, his black suit with its sky blue stripe blending into the brownish vegetation far better than Kyle thought it had any right to. Within what seemed like moments, Dick returned. His face was pale and he started to shake his head. “Don’t -“
“Where is she?”
Kyle nearly jumped out of his skin. Ollie had followed them, and he hadn’t noticed. Dick didn’t seem in the least surprised, somehow managing to project an air of calm authority while still prone under a bush. “If you stand up, they will see you,” he said, and Ollie apparently still had enough of a sense of self-preservation to listen, because he sank back down.
“Where?” he demanded again, in a harsher whisper than before.
“I’m sorry, Ollie,” Dick said. Something Kyle couldn’t read passed through his gaze and voice, but Ollie read it loud and clear, for Kyle could see the realization that Dinah was gone and that there was nothing any of them could do settle over his features. Silence settled over the small thicket, the scent of pine rising on the wind, until the sun began to drop below the nearest peak.
Without any sign of discomfort, Dick rose smoothly to his feet. He courteously held out a hand to Ollie, but the older man ignored him. Kyle scrambled up as well, nearly tripping over a cramp in his leg he hadn’t known was there. He banged on it with a fist once or twice, not that it did any good. “Keep watch this time,” Dick said quietly, and Ollie took a visible breath before nodding. “Kyle.”
The only reason Kyle was able to identify the remains in the nearby clearing as human was Nightwing’s assurance that it was so. The reddish lumps scattered across the thread groundcover refused to register in his mind as having any kind of recognizable shape, but he felt bile rising in his throat. A boot and a glove that were recognizably Dinah’s and part of what he finally saw as Dr. Midnite’s goggles and helmet sent him over the edge. He turned away and retched until there was nothing left and finally he forced the reflex back through sheer will. Dick’s hand was on his back, rubbing in soothing circles, and finally the words registered.
“We have to bury them before Ollie sees.”
Swallowing, Kyle nodded. He could keep the energy output of the ring too low to register if he managed to invert the field just so. A swarm of threads overturned the earth, gathering the parts large enough to see and pulling the blood away from the plants. Moving the construct eased the lingering nausea as the visual evidence slowly vanished, settling into two mounds with small boulders as headstones. Almost as an afterthought, he carved a crescent moon into one and a flying stylized bird into the other. Ollie didn’t have to know that there had been no way to distinguish between the remains; Kyle had placed Dinah’s marker nearer to where her wedding ring was buried, but that was all he could do.
To Kyle’s surprise - and Dick’s, if he was reading him correctly - Ollie evidenced no desire to visit the grave of the woman he’d married. He would keep his pain inside over the next several weeks, until it had been distanced enough by further horror to be bearable. The ring Dinah had made - woven together partly with strands of her own hair - went on a chain around Ollie’s neck, and it was months before Kyle saw it again. He would be the only one who did.
Present, T + 45 minutes:
“We’re nearly there.” They were close enough to Max’s headquarters in the Swiss Alps that if Kyle squinted, he could make it out on the horizon.
“Hawkgirl, on my mark.”
There were no OMACs visible yet - their absence was either an auspicious sign or a portent of doom. Kyle told the corner of his brain racing through worst-case-scenarios to shut up and focus on piloting the construct.
“Cyborg, on mark two.”
The half-metal man simply nodded. Kyle had a sudden vivid image of Ollie making a show of checking his quiver (although everyone always knew that it was in perfect order) and it triggered a flood of memories. Ollie obsessively checked and rechecked each piece of equipment before a fight. Carter was careful to never seem improper in public, but somehow if Kendra needed something, he was always there. Cyborg was quiet enough that Kyle often forgot entirely that he was even in the room, but he had a habit of constructing tiny intricate puzzles out of whatever material was available and leaving them somewhere inconspicuous every time they left a hideout. Kendra sang when she fought, quietly and under her breath; Kyle had once asked her what the tune was, but she’d just given him a blank look and said she didn’t know what he was talking about. He’d happened to catch Carter’s eye after that, and the shrug Hawkman had given him had been one of the few instances of real camaraderie he’d ever felt with him.
Dick was simply always there, a plan and several backups in place no matter what happened. He might have been trained by Batman, but the student had in this case surpassed the master - Dick was alive and Batman was presumed dead. Kyle thought he was the only one that noticed the little quirk of the mouth that Dick steadfastly maintained was not a smile.
“Keep it steady, Green Lantern.” Dick’s hand on his shoulder was just enough contact to be felt, and Kyle took a deep breath. He could not remember those who hadn’t made it this far, not now. He would remember them afterwards, if he survived. “Hawkgirl, mark.”
The real trouble hopefully started here. The OMACs were on her almost before Kyle could blink, and he sent the construct into a dive as planned before angling up to give the OMACs something else to think about. Distraction accomplished, he swooped downwards again and let the construct dissolve. Dick was gone, but that was part of the plan, too. Kyle raced forward, heading for the center of the complex. Faster than thought, a red and blue blur hung in his path, and he barely stopped himself from bouncing off of it.
“Superman.”
Five months earlier:
The first time it happened, Kyle thought he must have been dreaming. He’d been careless, and an explosion had lodged shrapnel between his fourth and fifth ribs on his right side. Apparently he was lucky it hadn’t pierced his lung, but he’d lost enough blood to black out. He’d woken up behind a rock, vaguely surprised to be conscious at all, to Ollie bending over him. The relief that Kyle had very clearly seen when he’d coughed wasn’t something he’d noticed at the time, mostly because Ollie had proceeded to prod at the sharp bit of metal still stuck in his skin and ask if he could breathe.
“No problem,” Kyle had assured him shakily. “I can even run, if you want.” The ring would fix most damage, including this, but it would take a little time. Ollie had given him an inscrutable look, leaned down, and given him a rough kiss on the mouth. It was the last thing Kyle remembered before waking up in a building somewhere, shrapnel and Ollie both nowhere in sight, and he put it down to the post-traumatic stress of injury.
The second time was two weeks later, and there was no uncertainty. Their best plan to date had just failed spectacularly through no one particular flaw; everything that could have gone wrong, from communication down to lucky shots, had gone as wrong as possible. If Kyle hadn’t known better, he would have assumed that someone had cast a bad-luck spell against them. He was only sure that there was no such spell because none of the magic users on either side were among the living. Half of their members were dead, and this time they hadn’t been able to return to the battlefield to bury them. Kyle felt numb; they were down to seven, including himself, none more than slightly injured. That much, at least, had gone right.
The building they’d commandeered this time had held a pool at some point; the glass all around the cracked and sunken concrete hole in the ground was shattered, and the water itself was long gone. Enough algae had grown in it before it had drained out to create a semblance of soil, and a carpet of purple violets was blooming along the bottom. Kyle stared at it for a moment, entranced by the unexpected sight of beauty. He shook it off, though, and followed everyone else inside. The showers were wet and moldy, and the rot had spread through the lockers, but there were a couple of nearly habitable window-free lounges. Cyborg had volunteered for first watch, which meant that he was likely to simply continue until dawn.
It didn’t take long for Carter and Kendra to vanish in one direction or for Dick and Kimiyo to vanish in another, and Kyle had just sort of shrugged at Ollie before he realized that he was shaking. His hands wouldn’t stop trembling, even when he clenched them into fists. Ollie drifted towards him, taking Kyle’s cold hands into his, and before Kyle could stop himself, he’d all but thrown himself at Ollie. It was messy and rough, but he’d been able to sleep afterwards. Ollie had still been there when he’d woken up.
“I’m not gay,” Kyle said, before he realized how ridiculous it sounded.
“Me either.” Ollie was remarkably calm, all things considered. “Neither was Hal,” he added, and Kyle twitched. Ollie smirked, and Kyle demanded to know whether or not Ollie was pulling his leg. (Ollie was, in fact, starting what would become a standing gag, and Kyle would never know whether or not he was telling the truth. He was.)
“It’s the adrenaline,” Ollie said later. “If that makes you feel any better. You know, the whole reaffirming life thing,” he added when Kyle just stared.
Dinah’s ring had been on a cord around Ollie’s neck the entire time, but by the time the skies lightened and the rest of their remaining teammates started to wander back in, Ollie was dressed and the ring once again hidden.
Ollie found excuses to touch him after that - an arm around his waist, a hand on his shoulder, a quick ruffle through his now-short hair. No one else paid any outward attention, any more than they did to Kimiyo’s habit of standing behind Dick and resting her fingers lightly on the nape of his neck on the rare occasions he actually sat down, or to how Kendra always stood just barely too close to Carter.
Kyle wasn’t alone in trying to discretely keep an eye on Dick when an unexpected flood of OMACs descended on them during Kimiyo’s watch some time later and only six of them managed to escape. In the last Kyle had seen of her, she’d still been alive and struggling. He didn’t know if that made it better or worse. As far as any of them could tell, Dick was unaffected, but it was only after that that Kyle remembered Dick making plans for their last-ditch effort to save the planet, and there were no further attempts to contact any other pockets of resistance.
Present, T+58 minutes:
“Superman.” Repeating the word didn’t make the man go away, but it apparently distracted him enough to telegraph his next move so clearly that Kyle could see it coming. He dodged easily and grabbed Superman with a construct. His intent was to throw Superman as far into space as he could in the hopes that distance would break Max’s hold, but Superman grabbed the construct and pulled. Kyle dissolved it just in time to avoid being dragged within range of Superman’s fists. The fleet of OMACs surrounding them had other ideas; four of them closed in from above while Superman waited below, and he didn’t see the fifth.
The blow to the side of his head stunned him just long enough for Superman to pin his arms to his sides, but Kyle didn’t need his hands free to send a construct rippling outwards. It pulled him away from Superman and sent the OMACs tumbling. They were too numerous to count, swirling around one distinct point in the sky and one on the ground - Hawkgirl was still fighting, but the man on the ground could be Nightwing or Cyborg or both. Adrenaline brought anger boiling to the surface, and Kyle lashed out with a stronger whip than before. OMACs fell, tumbling to the ground like so many snowflakes, but no matter how many he sent reeling, more were ready to take their place.
Inexplicably, Superman hung back after the first rush. Kyle could see him out of the corner of his eye, but he wasn’t moving. It gave him a moment of hope until the flood of OMACs trickled to a momentary halt and Superman started towards him. “Are you-“ Kyle started. Superman knocked him out of the sky.
Actual snow covered the ground, but it didn’t make the landing any easier. There was no further disturbance of crowd of OMACs above him, but Kyle had seen a fight on the ground just before he’d impacted, and he threw himself at it. Superman was in the way again, and this time Kyle did bounce off his broad chest. Before he could catch himself, three OMACs grabbed him from behind and sent him skyward. By the time he managed to control his descent, Superman was nowhere to be seen.
Activating the mostly functional communicator for the warning signal was easy enough to do through a construct, but it took a split-second of concentration longer than Kyle had. The second blow to his head sent him downwards, but at least the signal had been sent and if Dick was still alive, he would know that Kyle had failed to keep Superman distracted. His vision blacked out for a bare second on landing, and when he came to, Cyborg was standing over him. Over his shoulder, he saw what remained of Hawkgirl falling, and he struggled upright. His vision was wavery, but the ring responded well enough.
There was no way to get to the air and take Cyborg with him, and he wouldn’t leave him behind. They stood back to back, Cyborg fighting with calm efficiency while Kyle tried to hold them back long enough for the Cyborg’s strikes to take effect. He couldn’t concentrate enough through the pain in his head to contain them all, and there seemed no end. As he sparked the ring yet again, gaining a few precious seconds, the distress signal in the communicator sounded. There was little to no chance that Dick would have survived activating the signal; it was his final order to leave. Kyle made a split-second decision and turned to Cyborg.
“Run!” he shouted, but Dick’s authoritative attitude hadn’t rubbed off, because Cyborg did no such thing. It cost him his life as an OMAC finally got through his defenses, and Kyle reached for a reservoir of strength he’d thought long drained dry. The entire army stopped dead in their tracks, caught in the most complex construct he’d ever made. He scrambled over to Cyborg’s prone form, but there was nothing he could do, and the OMACs were struggling against his web. He couldn’t hold it long; the strain was driving him to his knees already, but he could and would keep it together until he was sure he was the only one left. “Dick!” There was no answer through the communicator or anything else.
Red stained the snow in front of him and he realized distantly that he was bleeding. The construct flickered and winked out of existence. “Kill him,” Kyle heard from somewhere, and he pushed himself upright. The OMACs surged forward.
The very near future:
“Incoming transmission. Source OMACS 566, 4652, 885, and 32. Subject Alpha. Rayner, Kyle - Green Lantern. Subject terminated. Power ring captured.”
“Another weapon to add to my collection.” Maxwell Lord’s smile didn’t reach his eyes, but that was perfectly normal now. Perhaps it had always been so. “Thank you, Brother I. Who’s next?”
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table