Green Lantern Corps. General. 021. Friends.
Title: With Friends Like These…
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Hal Jordan, Dick Grayson
Prompt: 21 - FRIENDS
Word Count: 2579
Rating: PG13
Summary: Kyle has something to tell Hal. The conversation goes less than well.
Author's Notes: Slash (Kyle/Guy) mentioned.
“You’re what?” Hal Jordan said. If he’d been holding the mug of - was that tea? - he would have dropped it. Kyle could see his fingers twitching.
“It’s not like I just told you the world was ending,” he replied, calmly taking a sip of coffee. Calmly.
“But… but…” Hal spluttered. “Guy Gardner? You’re…” Kyle watched him choose a word. “Sleeping with Guy Gardner? Our Guy Gardner?”
“Technically, my Guy Gardner,” Kyle said a little viciously, just to see if Hal would turn interesting colors. Hal obliged.
“But…”
“Look, it’s not that big a deal.” Kyle set the coffee cup aside and stretched his hands in front of him. “I’m -“ he used Hal’s choice of words “-sleeping with Guy. End of story.”
“It is a big deal!” Hal had that over-protective father look, and Kyle silently wished for patience on behalf of any future children Hal might have. They were certainly going to need it. He was at the end of his very short store of patience with one senior Green Lantern.
“What is? That I let Guy Gardner fuck me or that I let men fuck me at all? Which is it, Hal?”
“Both! Neither! Why didn’t you tell me?” Hal was pacing now, shoulders rigid and mouth in a tight closed line.
“I just did!” Kyle retorted. Hal hadn’t exactly been the first one to know about the relationship, but Kyle had come all the way to Earth because he thought Hal should know. Hal was - sort of - his mentor and role model, and Guy’s too. In a way.
“Not that!” Hal said so quickly that Kyle didn’t think he was listening at all. “I mean, Guy, but -“
“So, what, then, that I’m bisexual?” The end of Patience Trolley was heading straight into Rage Lane, brakes gone and steering locked. “Where in our long -“ Kyle invested the word with as much sarcasm as he could, considering that for most of their association, Hal had been possessed by a fear demon and trying to kill him “- history did you expect me to say that? ‘Hi, I’m Kyle, your replacement. By the way, I fuck men and women both. Please stop trying to kill me, Parallax.’ Is that what you wanted out of me?”
Hal turned white. “Don’t ever say throw that in my face again,” he said. His hands had clenched into fists, and he looked more like Parallax in that moment than he had since actually being possessed.
“This was a mistake,” Kyle said tightly, and started for the door. He’d forgotten one of the fundamental rules of combat, which was to never take your eyes off your opponent. Hal had him by the shoulder before he could blink.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” Hal said. Kyle turned around and hit him in the jaw with all the strength he could muster. To his vague surprise, Hal went sprawling.
Kyle hesitated for a bare moment and then tried to do the Right Thing. He went back. “Oh, man, Hal, I’m -“ Hal kicked his legs out from underneath him and Kyle went down. The floor knocked the wind out of him, but he managed to roll out of reach for the time it took to get his breath back and scramble to his feet. Hal was standing, staring at him contemptuously. “You’re asking for it,” Kyle said, and tackled him.
None of the skill Kyle had worked to acquire since he’d been given his ring went into this brawl, with his ring or his fists. He just tried to hit Hal where it hurt, put him down on the ground and keep him there. He had no clear memories of the fight afterwards, just heated impressions of pain and jarring shocks to his wrists and hardened flesh both giving way and resisting his furious onslaught. Finally a flying elbow to his temple dazed him long for Hal to throw him into a wall hard enough to crack it.
Kyle slid down the wall, vision graying out and ears ringing. Shaking his head didn’t really help, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying again, and finally he used the wall as a prop to stand. Hal was holding out a hand, as if he thought Kyle was going to let him touch him again. Kyle shook his head a third time and made his way across the room to the balcony doors.
“Where are you going?” Hal might have said. Kyle couldn’t quite hear over the ringing, and he certainly had no intention of answering. He opened the door and jumped off the balcony, not bothering to ring his uniform on. It was dark, anyway, and no one was going to see him.
Somewhere between Utah and Missouri, the ringing and the underwater vision faded, and Kyle wished he had a warmer jacket. He hadn’t thought about where he was going, either, but when he eventually found himself in New York, it wasn’t too much of a surprise. Then again, he remembered, he didn’t have a place in New York any more. He sighed and landed as out of sight as he could manage, with the vague idea that he’d find a cheap motel room or something and head back home in the morning. Kyle, however, had always been ruled more by his impulses than his brain unless he was making a conscious effort otherwise, which is how he found himself on a rooftop with a bottle of tequila not much later, staring at the unexpectedly bright stars. It was warmer on the ground than in the air, but he was still glad of the constructed jacket. And the tequila. Hal was less enraging through an alcoholic haze.
“Yeah, happy birthday, Kyle,” he muttered. Not only did Hal’s reaction suck, but it pretty much confirmed this as the worst birthday ever. He made a mental note to not announce any news on a birthday ever again and promptly forgot it. He was debating the merits of singing himself a birthday song or figuring out if he could get off the roof when footsteps and a familiar voice intruded.
“Green L-Kyle?”
“Huh?” His vision wasn’t cooperating, but Kyle was fairly sure that face was in Bat-mode. “You’re not Batman.”
Of all the things Nightwing had considered he might find on any rooftop during tonight’s patrol, much less this particular one, an extraordinarily inebriated Green Lantern wouldn’t have made even his least-likely list. He’d even thought it might be a quiet night, according to his keen skills of deduction based on his excellent observations. “What are you doing up here?” he asked, although he didn’t really expect an answer. At least, he didn’t expect a coherent answer.
“Stargazing,” came back the quick and automatic answer, complete with an overlay of what else would I be doing up here?.
“Maybe you should come down.” God forbid Kyle try and fly down from the roof, or climb. The bottle he was clutching like a favorite toy was more than half-empty and as far as Nightwing could tell, the entirety of its missing contents had found their way into Kyle.
“Uh-uh. I like it up here.” Kyle shuffled oddly, and Nightwing realized he was trying to turn around without actually moving away from the wall.
“Why don’t you let me have that,” he said, as more of the tequila migrated inside Kyle.
“Mine,” Kyle said. “Get your own.”
Nightwing sighed. He really didn’t need this; he and Kyle had never been close, not by any stretch of the imagination. Also, he had no idea where to leave him, and he damn well wasn’t taking the kid home with him, and why had he just mentally labeled Kyle a kid? Nightwing himself was the younger of them both. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“Fuck Hal Jordan,” Kyle said, and went back to the tequila.
There were some things Nightwing really did not want to know, ever, and this was one of them. He reached for the other man, slowly, intending to pull him to his feet and get him off the roof somehow. “Come on, Kyle, let’s get you down from here.”
“Get off me!” He was on his feet in a flash, uniform in place and ring sparking. The uniform was blurring badly, shifting between what Nightwing could only assume was his present design and the old black and white he’d adopted when he’d first gotten the ring. “Get away!” Kyle shouted, and dove off the side of the roof.
Cursing, Nightwing followed, sure that he was going to get himself killed in a drunken escapade. Kyle soared past him bare seconds later, bottle still in one hand and mostly upright. Nightwing was still absolutely certain that he was going to fly himself into the side of a building, but he wasn’t sure quite how one went about catching a looping superhero. Besides, it was all he could do to keep up; for someone who probably couldn’t see where he was going, Kyle moved pretty damn fast.
At one point, Kyle vanished and Nightwing started searching for the body, but he zoomed out of a dark alleyway a few minutes later. When Nightwing finally caught up with him, Kyle had found a tree tall enough that Nightwing didn’t think he could climb it and was distressingly near the top.
“Where are there trees in this city?” Nightwing muttered, standing at the base of the tree and staring up. He could clearly see Kyle at the top, thanks to the neat little lenses in his mask, but the few people around at this hour apparently couldn’t tell what was up there.
“Who was that?” Nightwing heard.
“Wasn’t it Green Lantern?”
Resisting the urge to facepalm, Nightwing stepped out of the shadows and asked the onlookers to please move to a safer distance away as he had the situation under control.
“Take that and shove it, Hal!” drifted down ever so faintly from above, but the crowd that wasn’t really there was already dispersing and had left Nightwing alone at the base of the ridiculously tall tree. Kyle was singing something now, and whatever the original tune had been, it was garbled enough that Nightwing had no idea what it might be. He stared at the tree for a moment, debating on whether or not he could be blamed for just leaving Kyle up there and going home. With a deep sigh, he started climbing. Trees and buildings couldn’t be that different.
Roughly halfway up, the singing slurred to a halt and shortly after, the bottle sailed merrily downwards to crash on the ground below. Nightwing pinched the bridge of his nose and redoubled his efforts. Once he’d reached Kyle, though, he started wondering again if he really could be blamed for just leaving the man in the damned tree. There was no way he could carry him back down. Although he supposed the rest of the Corps might be rather unhappy with him for letting one of their members meet his death at the hands of a tree and a bottle of tequila. He’d just come to the conclusion that the safest thing to do would be tying Kyle to the tree when something said earlier struck him.
Hal talked himself out of going after Kyle for the third time; they were both mature adults, and Kyle probably needed some time to cool down, and…. Hell with it. Hal grabbed his jacket. There was no reason the two of them couldn’t talk like reasonable people, and he hadn’t meant to piss his friend off. He’d just been surprised. Mostly. He was on his way out the door when his phone rang. He was tempted to ignore it, but there was always the off chance that it was important. “Hal Jordan.”
“Green Lantern.” The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and formal, and Hal couldn’t place it. “I got your number from Batman,” it added, sounding slightly younger.
“Who… Robin?” Not that he had any idea what Robin might want with his home number.
“Nightwing.”
“Ah.” He didn’t know what Nightwing would want with his home number either. “What can I do for you?”
“You can come and get your friend out of this tree,” Nightwing said, sounding distinctly annoyed, and Hal felt a sudden sinking feeling. “And try not to let him pull any more stunts in my city.”
“Would that be Kyle Rayner?” he asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Nightwing confirmed, and Hal set his ring to scan the New York greater metropolitan area. Kyle’s ring lit up like a beacon; no trouble finding him.
“I’ll be right there.” The ring was capable of flying through atmosphere at high enough speeds that it didn’t take Hal more than a few minutes to make it most of the way there, and then it was just a matter of fine-tuning the signal. When he found them, Kyle was unconscious at the top of an actual tree. Hal had thought Nightwing was using some sort of metaphor. Nightwing was crouched slightly below him, holding Kyle to the tree with one arm. “What did you do to him?”
“He did it all on his own,” Nightwing returned curtly, and then sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but I do not need drunken escapades from the capes, okay?”
Hal blinked at him, and just barely stopped himself from silently repeating the phrase ‘drunken escapades.’ “Thanks, will do,” he said, and ringed a construct to disentangle both Nightwing and Kyle from the tree. Nightwing flipped off as soon as the construct was close enough to the ground and nodded thanks before vanishing. Heading back to Coast City in a bubble took considerably more time than simply flying out had, but Kyle didn’t so much as twitch, not even when Hal carried him into the guest room. As an afterthought, Hal placed a bucket next to the bed and hoped for the best.
As it turned out, the bucket was unnecessary; Kyle looked remarkably cheerful the next morning for someone who’d been passed out in the top of a tree. He was, however, wearing incredibly dark sunglasses and Hal could see construct earplugs. Wordlessly, Hal pushed a mug of coffee towards Kyle. Kyle, for his part, sat down and took it but only wrapped his hands around the warmth and stared at the dark liquid as if it had some kind of answers. Or perhaps he’d fallen asleep again - but then his constructs would vanish. Hal waited.
“Sorry I hit you,” Kyle muttered after a few moments.
Hal shook his head. “I reacted badly. I’m sorry.”
“Accepted.” Kyle inhaled the smell of coffee. “You wouldn’t poison this, would you?”
“Of course not!” Hal’s annoyance was starting to resurface, but then he saw that Kyle was smiling.
“Thanks,” Kyle said, and it wasn’t just for the coffee. “Are we cool?”
Hal smiled. “I suppose.”
“Good.” Kyle finally drank the coffee, and then started chuckling.
“What?” Hal wanted to know.
“Guy wanted to tell you,” Kyle said. “But I told him he should let me do it, because there was less chance of a fistfight following.”
Hal couldn’t help it. He laughed, too.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Hal Jordan, Dick Grayson
Prompt: 21 - FRIENDS
Word Count: 2579
Rating: PG13
Summary: Kyle has something to tell Hal. The conversation goes less than well.
Author's Notes: Slash (Kyle/Guy) mentioned.
“You’re what?” Hal Jordan said. If he’d been holding the mug of - was that tea? - he would have dropped it. Kyle could see his fingers twitching.
“It’s not like I just told you the world was ending,” he replied, calmly taking a sip of coffee. Calmly.
“But… but…” Hal spluttered. “Guy Gardner? You’re…” Kyle watched him choose a word. “Sleeping with Guy Gardner? Our Guy Gardner?”
“Technically, my Guy Gardner,” Kyle said a little viciously, just to see if Hal would turn interesting colors. Hal obliged.
“But…”
“Look, it’s not that big a deal.” Kyle set the coffee cup aside and stretched his hands in front of him. “I’m -“ he used Hal’s choice of words “-sleeping with Guy. End of story.”
“It is a big deal!” Hal had that over-protective father look, and Kyle silently wished for patience on behalf of any future children Hal might have. They were certainly going to need it. He was at the end of his very short store of patience with one senior Green Lantern.
“What is? That I let Guy Gardner fuck me or that I let men fuck me at all? Which is it, Hal?”
“Both! Neither! Why didn’t you tell me?” Hal was pacing now, shoulders rigid and mouth in a tight closed line.
“I just did!” Kyle retorted. Hal hadn’t exactly been the first one to know about the relationship, but Kyle had come all the way to Earth because he thought Hal should know. Hal was - sort of - his mentor and role model, and Guy’s too. In a way.
“Not that!” Hal said so quickly that Kyle didn’t think he was listening at all. “I mean, Guy, but -“
“So, what, then, that I’m bisexual?” The end of Patience Trolley was heading straight into Rage Lane, brakes gone and steering locked. “Where in our long -“ Kyle invested the word with as much sarcasm as he could, considering that for most of their association, Hal had been possessed by a fear demon and trying to kill him “- history did you expect me to say that? ‘Hi, I’m Kyle, your replacement. By the way, I fuck men and women both. Please stop trying to kill me, Parallax.’ Is that what you wanted out of me?”
Hal turned white. “Don’t ever say throw that in my face again,” he said. His hands had clenched into fists, and he looked more like Parallax in that moment than he had since actually being possessed.
“This was a mistake,” Kyle said tightly, and started for the door. He’d forgotten one of the fundamental rules of combat, which was to never take your eyes off your opponent. Hal had him by the shoulder before he could blink.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” Hal said. Kyle turned around and hit him in the jaw with all the strength he could muster. To his vague surprise, Hal went sprawling.
Kyle hesitated for a bare moment and then tried to do the Right Thing. He went back. “Oh, man, Hal, I’m -“ Hal kicked his legs out from underneath him and Kyle went down. The floor knocked the wind out of him, but he managed to roll out of reach for the time it took to get his breath back and scramble to his feet. Hal was standing, staring at him contemptuously. “You’re asking for it,” Kyle said, and tackled him.
None of the skill Kyle had worked to acquire since he’d been given his ring went into this brawl, with his ring or his fists. He just tried to hit Hal where it hurt, put him down on the ground and keep him there. He had no clear memories of the fight afterwards, just heated impressions of pain and jarring shocks to his wrists and hardened flesh both giving way and resisting his furious onslaught. Finally a flying elbow to his temple dazed him long for Hal to throw him into a wall hard enough to crack it.
Kyle slid down the wall, vision graying out and ears ringing. Shaking his head didn’t really help, but he couldn’t stop himself from trying again, and finally he used the wall as a prop to stand. Hal was holding out a hand, as if he thought Kyle was going to let him touch him again. Kyle shook his head a third time and made his way across the room to the balcony doors.
“Where are you going?” Hal might have said. Kyle couldn’t quite hear over the ringing, and he certainly had no intention of answering. He opened the door and jumped off the balcony, not bothering to ring his uniform on. It was dark, anyway, and no one was going to see him.
Somewhere between Utah and Missouri, the ringing and the underwater vision faded, and Kyle wished he had a warmer jacket. He hadn’t thought about where he was going, either, but when he eventually found himself in New York, it wasn’t too much of a surprise. Then again, he remembered, he didn’t have a place in New York any more. He sighed and landed as out of sight as he could manage, with the vague idea that he’d find a cheap motel room or something and head back home in the morning. Kyle, however, had always been ruled more by his impulses than his brain unless he was making a conscious effort otherwise, which is how he found himself on a rooftop with a bottle of tequila not much later, staring at the unexpectedly bright stars. It was warmer on the ground than in the air, but he was still glad of the constructed jacket. And the tequila. Hal was less enraging through an alcoholic haze.
“Yeah, happy birthday, Kyle,” he muttered. Not only did Hal’s reaction suck, but it pretty much confirmed this as the worst birthday ever. He made a mental note to not announce any news on a birthday ever again and promptly forgot it. He was debating the merits of singing himself a birthday song or figuring out if he could get off the roof when footsteps and a familiar voice intruded.
“Green L-Kyle?”
“Huh?” His vision wasn’t cooperating, but Kyle was fairly sure that face was in Bat-mode. “You’re not Batman.”
Of all the things Nightwing had considered he might find on any rooftop during tonight’s patrol, much less this particular one, an extraordinarily inebriated Green Lantern wouldn’t have made even his least-likely list. He’d even thought it might be a quiet night, according to his keen skills of deduction based on his excellent observations. “What are you doing up here?” he asked, although he didn’t really expect an answer. At least, he didn’t expect a coherent answer.
“Stargazing,” came back the quick and automatic answer, complete with an overlay of what else would I be doing up here?.
“Maybe you should come down.” God forbid Kyle try and fly down from the roof, or climb. The bottle he was clutching like a favorite toy was more than half-empty and as far as Nightwing could tell, the entirety of its missing contents had found their way into Kyle.
“Uh-uh. I like it up here.” Kyle shuffled oddly, and Nightwing realized he was trying to turn around without actually moving away from the wall.
“Why don’t you let me have that,” he said, as more of the tequila migrated inside Kyle.
“Mine,” Kyle said. “Get your own.”
Nightwing sighed. He really didn’t need this; he and Kyle had never been close, not by any stretch of the imagination. Also, he had no idea where to leave him, and he damn well wasn’t taking the kid home with him, and why had he just mentally labeled Kyle a kid? Nightwing himself was the younger of them both. “Don’t you think you’ve had enough?”
“Fuck Hal Jordan,” Kyle said, and went back to the tequila.
There were some things Nightwing really did not want to know, ever, and this was one of them. He reached for the other man, slowly, intending to pull him to his feet and get him off the roof somehow. “Come on, Kyle, let’s get you down from here.”
“Get off me!” He was on his feet in a flash, uniform in place and ring sparking. The uniform was blurring badly, shifting between what Nightwing could only assume was his present design and the old black and white he’d adopted when he’d first gotten the ring. “Get away!” Kyle shouted, and dove off the side of the roof.
Cursing, Nightwing followed, sure that he was going to get himself killed in a drunken escapade. Kyle soared past him bare seconds later, bottle still in one hand and mostly upright. Nightwing was still absolutely certain that he was going to fly himself into the side of a building, but he wasn’t sure quite how one went about catching a looping superhero. Besides, it was all he could do to keep up; for someone who probably couldn’t see where he was going, Kyle moved pretty damn fast.
At one point, Kyle vanished and Nightwing started searching for the body, but he zoomed out of a dark alleyway a few minutes later. When Nightwing finally caught up with him, Kyle had found a tree tall enough that Nightwing didn’t think he could climb it and was distressingly near the top.
“Where are there trees in this city?” Nightwing muttered, standing at the base of the tree and staring up. He could clearly see Kyle at the top, thanks to the neat little lenses in his mask, but the few people around at this hour apparently couldn’t tell what was up there.
“Who was that?” Nightwing heard.
“Wasn’t it Green Lantern?”
Resisting the urge to facepalm, Nightwing stepped out of the shadows and asked the onlookers to please move to a safer distance away as he had the situation under control.
“Take that and shove it, Hal!” drifted down ever so faintly from above, but the crowd that wasn’t really there was already dispersing and had left Nightwing alone at the base of the ridiculously tall tree. Kyle was singing something now, and whatever the original tune had been, it was garbled enough that Nightwing had no idea what it might be. He stared at the tree for a moment, debating on whether or not he could be blamed for just leaving Kyle up there and going home. With a deep sigh, he started climbing. Trees and buildings couldn’t be that different.
Roughly halfway up, the singing slurred to a halt and shortly after, the bottle sailed merrily downwards to crash on the ground below. Nightwing pinched the bridge of his nose and redoubled his efforts. Once he’d reached Kyle, though, he started wondering again if he really could be blamed for just leaving the man in the damned tree. There was no way he could carry him back down. Although he supposed the rest of the Corps might be rather unhappy with him for letting one of their members meet his death at the hands of a tree and a bottle of tequila. He’d just come to the conclusion that the safest thing to do would be tying Kyle to the tree when something said earlier struck him.
Hal talked himself out of going after Kyle for the third time; they were both mature adults, and Kyle probably needed some time to cool down, and…. Hell with it. Hal grabbed his jacket. There was no reason the two of them couldn’t talk like reasonable people, and he hadn’t meant to piss his friend off. He’d just been surprised. Mostly. He was on his way out the door when his phone rang. He was tempted to ignore it, but there was always the off chance that it was important. “Hal Jordan.”
“Green Lantern.” The voice on the other end of the line was clipped and formal, and Hal couldn’t place it. “I got your number from Batman,” it added, sounding slightly younger.
“Who… Robin?” Not that he had any idea what Robin might want with his home number.
“Nightwing.”
“Ah.” He didn’t know what Nightwing would want with his home number either. “What can I do for you?”
“You can come and get your friend out of this tree,” Nightwing said, sounding distinctly annoyed, and Hal felt a sudden sinking feeling. “And try not to let him pull any more stunts in my city.”
“Would that be Kyle Rayner?” he asked cautiously.
“Yes,” Nightwing confirmed, and Hal set his ring to scan the New York greater metropolitan area. Kyle’s ring lit up like a beacon; no trouble finding him.
“I’ll be right there.” The ring was capable of flying through atmosphere at high enough speeds that it didn’t take Hal more than a few minutes to make it most of the way there, and then it was just a matter of fine-tuning the signal. When he found them, Kyle was unconscious at the top of an actual tree. Hal had thought Nightwing was using some sort of metaphor. Nightwing was crouched slightly below him, holding Kyle to the tree with one arm. “What did you do to him?”
“He did it all on his own,” Nightwing returned curtly, and then sighed. “Sorry,” he said. “Look, I don’t pretend to know what’s going on, but I do not need drunken escapades from the capes, okay?”
Hal blinked at him, and just barely stopped himself from silently repeating the phrase ‘drunken escapades.’ “Thanks, will do,” he said, and ringed a construct to disentangle both Nightwing and Kyle from the tree. Nightwing flipped off as soon as the construct was close enough to the ground and nodded thanks before vanishing. Heading back to Coast City in a bubble took considerably more time than simply flying out had, but Kyle didn’t so much as twitch, not even when Hal carried him into the guest room. As an afterthought, Hal placed a bucket next to the bed and hoped for the best.
As it turned out, the bucket was unnecessary; Kyle looked remarkably cheerful the next morning for someone who’d been passed out in the top of a tree. He was, however, wearing incredibly dark sunglasses and Hal could see construct earplugs. Wordlessly, Hal pushed a mug of coffee towards Kyle. Kyle, for his part, sat down and took it but only wrapped his hands around the warmth and stared at the dark liquid as if it had some kind of answers. Or perhaps he’d fallen asleep again - but then his constructs would vanish. Hal waited.
“Sorry I hit you,” Kyle muttered after a few moments.
Hal shook his head. “I reacted badly. I’m sorry.”
“Accepted.” Kyle inhaled the smell of coffee. “You wouldn’t poison this, would you?”
“Of course not!” Hal’s annoyance was starting to resurface, but then he saw that Kyle was smiling.
“Thanks,” Kyle said, and it wasn’t just for the coffee. “Are we cool?”
Hal smiled. “I suppose.”
“Good.” Kyle finally drank the coffee, and then started chuckling.
“What?” Hal wanted to know.
“Guy wanted to tell you,” Kyle said. “But I told him he should let me do it, because there was less chance of a fistfight following.”
Hal couldn’t help it. He laughed, too.
FINIS
Nalanzu's Little Damn Table