The Big Damn List has Connor/Kyle and space flu.
Title: Splinter
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, various JLA
Prompt: 039 - TASTE
Word Count: 6026
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kyle should listen to J’onn. It would save him a lot of trouble.
Author's Notes: Slash, Connor/Kyle. Extremely silly. Incredibly silly.
I hate waking up on the floor, and this is the second time this week. Deadlines, if I didn’t have to meet these deadlines…
Kyle leveraged himself off the floor with a groan. At least it looked as if he’d finished his assignment before apparently deciding the walk to bed wasn’t worth it and the floor was the better option. A shower and a cup of coffee were called for, not necessarily in that order, and then he’d have time to drop off his assignment before he was due for monitor duty. He’d gotten through the coffee, boxed up his assignment, and was halfway through the shower when a rather loud crash sounded outside.
For a very brief moment, he debated just leaving it alone and finishing his shower, but a second and louder crash sounded. It was in this case that the ring really came in handy - Kyle was dry, soap-free, and in costume by the time he made it to the window. A quick look outside - he’d never thought he’d be so grateful to have a view of an alley - told him the coast was clear, and he leapt into the air. For a moment, vertigo sliced through him and he thought he was already under attack, but his head cleared and no one was in sight.
The source of the explosions wasn’t difficult to find - smoke was pouring into the sky in two separate columns a few blocks to the southeast. Kyle flew to the larger one first, where several cars had been piled together and set on fire. There were no life signs inside, and he sincerely hoped that there wasn’t anyone dead inside, either. Containing the fire was a matter of creating a bubble around the inferno and sucking out the oxygen - it died within seconds. The second conflagration - fewer cars, and again no one alive inside - didn’t take any longer, but there was no immediate sign of the perpetrator.
The road itself had been shredded between both fires, cement buckling in the heat and the earth rent in long furrows. Two civilians and a dog were huddled near one of the rocks, and as Kyle got closer he could see that the man was trapped. He leveraged the rock to the side, careful not to overbalance any of the rubble, and ringed the couple to safety. A few people had come out to see what was going on, and Kyle ringed signs bearing the words “Danger! Stay back!”. He didn’t really feel up to shouting.
A rush of heat to his back sent Kyle into an automatic dive and he flipped around to see Effigy hovering behind him. The former Manhunter was grinning like a madman as he held up both hands and filled them with flame. Too tired to bring up something more complex, Kyle enclosed Effigy’s hands in a bubble and solidified it. Effigy only grinned wider and pulled his hands apart. The bubble shattered, sending another wave of dizziness through him. In that moment, Effigy darted forward and threw a sphere of flame.
The fragile shield that was all Kyle had time to summon broke under the onslaught of the rushing fireball and he was slammed downward. A desperate reflex slowed his fall to the point of probably-not-fatal, but he misjudged exactly where the ground was and everything went dark.
* * *
memory
“We’re going out in space for what, again?” Kyle fidgeted. He didn’t have any work deadlines looming right that moment, but he didn’t really want to leave Earth. Every time he’d gone out of the solar system recently, stuff had had a tendency to blow up in his face. On the other hand, it hadn’t been going so well on Earth itself, either, so he supposed he should just resign himself to the mission, whatever it was.
“Kyle,” Wally said, sounding distinctly annoyed.
“Huh?” From the look on Wally’s face - what Kyle could see below the mask - Wally had just explained for the second time - third? - and Kyle had missed it. “Uh, sorry?”
As far as Kyle could understand from an explanation that was just barely short of tapping into the speed force, some kind of little aliens had had their souls sucked out by a swarm of littler aliens and these littler aliens had found their way through a natural dimensional rift that had been caused by the gravitational stresses of a black hole and a supernova. Or something.
“Suit up,” J’onn told them both, and Kyle ringed on a suit. J’onn raised what would have been an eyebrow if he had them, and Kyle grinned. “Don’t lose your concentration,” J’onn said. Kyle shrugged at Wally, who had returned in a proper suit, perfectly adjusted.
The plan was relatively simple; the extradimensional aliens, which looked like nothing so much as tiny silvery fluffballs, spit acid, and could hit with enough percussive force to knock J’onn on his ass before he started hitting back, were easily herded. They bred like rabbits in the presence of oxygen, but fortunately there was little enough here to make it much of an issue.
Kyle set up a barrier, and Wally and J’onn forced the aliens into the funnel back through the tear. The last batch of the little round spheres was on its way down the tunnels when one of them bounced erratically and smacked Kyle hard across the side of the face. He kept the funnel in place through sheer desperation, but his suit vanished. He took one breath of acrid not-air before J’onn grabbed him and the touch focused him enough to flicker the suit back on.
“Are you all right?” Wally whirlwinded the last of the aliens through the closing rift. Kyle nodded, coughing.
“Fine,” he choked out after a moment. “That was the worst air I have ever tasted.”
“Don’t you mean smelled?”
“Tasted,” Kyle said firmly. “It’s coating the back of my tongue. Yeeaaugh.”
* * *
In the Watchtower, J’onn waited. With his telepathic link to the rest of the team, he was the one most often performing monitor duty, so that he could quickly alert whoever was needed for any given crisis. On this particular day, he’d caught a dam collapsing in Egypt, a freak thunderstorm in India, and a potential plane crash above Tokyo; nothing out of the ordinary. The Leaguers had been sent to deal with the problems, all of which had gone off without a hitch. He was, however, looking forward to the end of his shift. A nagging doubt in the pit of his stomach told him that he was going to run into trouble, but he firmly told it to go away. Green Lantern might be late to monitor duty, but he always showed up.
Despite his assertions, J’onn found himself growing irritated when Lantern did not, in fact, show up on time. He directed one of the monitors to a video feed of Green Lantern’s neighborhood and was surprised to see evidence of a fight - rubble on the ground and smoke obscuring the air. He refined the feed just in time to see him take a hit a raw recruit could have avoided and smash into the ground behind a charred mass of cars. Irritation faded to worry when Green Lantern did not reappear. The villain he’d been fighting was clearly cackling maniacally, fire leaking from every pore.
“Watchtower, one to transport,” came a voice on an accepted frequency and J’onn hit the transporter control without thinking about it. Green Arrow - Connor Hawke - stepped out of the tube.
“Kyle?”
“You’re on monitor duty,” J’onn said, standing and pushing the boy towards the control panels. As much as he hated fire, there was no one else available to go help Lantern.
“What?” Green Arrow nearly tripped over the floor, but J’onn had transported out before Green Arrow could ask him anything else.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Effigy singsonged, zigzagging back and forth above the battlefield. Most of the street was still fairly intact when J’onn arrived, although the random spurts of flame Effigy kept tossing into the ground certainly weren’t helping. Invisibility being, in this case, the better part of valor, J’onn used it, and then scooped up a pebble. While his aim wasn’t quite that of a Green Arrow, it was still accurate enough to peg Effigy in the forehead.
“Come out and face me, you coward!” Effigy screamed.
“Right here,” J’onn told him, allowing himself to become visible and striking Effigy with a handful of concrete. The would-be supervillain went down, flames flickering out. J’onn caught him by the ankle and dropped him by the police car that had arrived at the edge of the scene. Without waiting for a reply from New York’s finest, he turned and started searching for Green Lantern.
While J’onn wasn’t one to call property damage lucky on a regular basis, in this case it was fortunate that the piles of still-smoking vehicles and the random spots of fire were enough to keep the onlookers away. Green Lantern was exactly where J’onn had seen him fall - unconscious, the ring dull, and completely naked. It was such a bizarre note that J’onn stared for a full half-second before removing his cape and wrapping Lantern in it. As an afterthought, he twitched the cape to cover Lantern’s face, on the off chance that one of the people in the surrounding crowd might recognize him. He rose into the air, intending to fly directly back to the Watchtower before it occurred to him that Lantern needed to be conscious for his ring to protect him against the vacuum of space.
“Watchtower, two to teleport,” he said into his communicator, and the world vanished into little sparkles of light and reappeared. A bit of relief that Green Arrow did in fact know how the teleporters worked snaked through him, but it vanished as he stepped off the pad to hear a crash. Green Arrow was staring at him, bow at his feet and face white.
“Kyle?” he said, taking one trembling step forward. “The news out of New York says Green Lantern is… he didn’t…”
“He’s not dead,” J’onn said, and the color rushed back into Green Arrow’s face. J’onn started toward the infirmary; the tech there was both advanced enough and user-friendly enough to take care of most problems, although J’onn already had a sneaking suspicion what was wrong with Green Lantern. Green Arrow jogged after him, and J’onn glared. “You’re on monitor duty,” he said.
“But -“
“Go.” Green Arrow went.
As J’onn had suspected, Lantern had contracted a not particularly common and also not particularly pleasant viral infection during the cleanup mission roughly two weeks earlier. He’d warned both Lantern and Flash several times that the planet they were visiting was inimical to human systems, and then Lantern had - albeit briefly - lost his ring-generated suit. J’onn had checked them both out with the shuttle’s scanners, and they’d both been clean, but he’d been meaning to do a more detailed scan at the Watchtower. He just hadn’t gotten around to Lantern; Flash had presented himself within three hours of returning, virus free. Fortunately for all involved except Green Lantern, he hadn’t reached the contagious stage. J’onn counted small blessings and programmed the computers to make the treatments.
* * *
Connor hung back, lurking near the door. Not that he would have described himself as lurking, really. He was just making sure there was space. Several Leaguers had drifted back into the Watchtower over the past couple of hours, various crises diverted, and they all had come at some point to see if their Lantern was in fact still alive. The rumor that Green Lantern had been killed in action was apparently going through the American cape community rather quickly despite J’onn repeating that it was not accurate.
“See? Not dead.” That was Wally, poking at Kyle, who was still out. Connor grunted in reply, not sure if Wally was talking to him. Then again, no one else was in the room.
“Hi, guys.” Or maybe not. “What’s going on?” In Connor’s admittedly limited experience, superheroes did not sound plaintive when asking questions, but Kyle was an exception to a lot of rules. Wally was laughing, which did not make the puppy-dog expression on Kyle’s face go away. “None of these clothes are mine, I’m not bandaged anywhere, and I don’t remember anything past - my deadline! What day is it?”
“Tough luck, Kyle,” Wally said. “Hang in there.” He zoomed away before Kyle could ask for clarification, and Kyle turned his eyes on Connor.
“Well, you’re going to be fine,” Connor said, but that didn’t make the Look go away. “J’onn said it’d only take a few weeks.”
“Weeks?” Kyle didn’t quite squeak.
Connor pulled a chair over to the side of the bed and started explaining. At some point, he found that he’d taken Kyle’s hand and was stroking the back with his thumb as he talked.
“You did not just tell me I have space flu.” Kyle couldn’t quite bury his face in only one hand, but he was making a pretty good effort. “Wait, you said weeks. J’onn said weeks. I don’t have weeks. I have a job. I have deadlines.” None of which was going to get him out of the infirmary any faster.
“Tell them the truth,” Connor suggested.
“Oh, right. Space flu. Great idea.” Kyle drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his free arm around them. “Connor…”
“Oh, no.” That expression was no less distressing than the plaintive puppy-dog look, but Connor had no intention of being talked into anything that might get J’onn pissed off at him. Given a choice between an angry Kyle and an angry J’onn, the Martian Manhunter won hands down. Dating Kyle or not, Connor had a healthy sense of self-preservation.
“It’s not that bad. I feel fine. I’m going to miss my deadline, Connor.”
“I’ll deliver whatever you have,” Connor said hastily. “Give me the address and I’m gone.”
Half an hour later, Connor was searching through Kyle’s apartment for the box that Kyle had claimed contained the assignment, with no luck. As he looked under the table for the fifth time, his communicator went off.
“Did you find it?”
“No.” Connor stood, knocking his knee against the tabletop. “And ow.”
“It’s right next to the door. You can’t miss it.”
A search by the door did indeed turn up a flat box, addressed but no postage, hidden under an overbalanced stack of newspapers. “It was under the papers, Kyle.”
“What papers?”
“The newspapers. Whole pile of ‘em.”
“I was trying to recycle.” Kyle sounded the tiniest bit defensive.
“You have to actually take them to a recycling center for that to work, you know.” Connor shoved the papers away from the door and left, box under one arm. “I’m locking the door behind me and keeping your key. Just so you know.”
“But I might -“
“The address on the box is the one where it needs to go?”
“Yeah.” There was a sudden scrambling noise and then a hurried “thanks, Connor” before the line went dead. Connor shook his head and headed toward the street. The package wasn’t difficult to deliver - Kyle’s agent was at first furious at the delay and then worried when told Kyle would be unavailable for the next few weeks due to illness - but when Connor left the building, a sudden commotion down the street caught his attention.
A bouncing silvery ball of fluff was caroming off buildings, gathering attention from the crowd below. It didn’t look dangerous, until Connor saw it hit a brick wall and leave a dent the size of a tractor tire, and he cursed himself for not having either his costume or his arrows within reach. He did have some small darts; he threw three in quick succession. They hit the fluffball and it shattered. The pieces rained down over the street, and then melted away. Connor frowned, but of all the strange things he’d seen, this wasn’t even weird enough to rate a formal report.
* * *
Two weeks later:
Connor faced down another rampaging pile of fluff, wondering when things had gotten quite so out of hand. If he’d made the report when he’d first seen these creatures, perhaps they wouldn’t have managed to breed so enthusiastically. Then again, given the reaction of these creatures’ metabolisms to oxygen, it might not have made any difference at all. They were showing up all over the world, apparently mindless and flitting back and forth like butterflies. Unfortunately, they had a distinct tendency to shatter anything they hit, and any attempt to pound them into submission lead to fracturing and many tiny monsters.
Electric shocks and creating a vacuum seemed to be the only way to deal with the creatures. Connor, fully aware of the irony, had taken to raiding his late father’s trick arrow collection to find and duplicate taser arrows. The rest of the Leaguers worked with whatever they had.
It seemed as if they’d gotten these things - someone had dubbed them “tribbles”, which made no sense to Connor, but he wasn’t going to complain - under control, or at least to the level of nuisance instead of world-devouring threat, but Connor really wished that they could just get rid of all of them. Kyle would have been a great help, but he was still in the infirmary; J’onn had noted that the treatment for his bug would be particularly unpleasant, and it left Kyle in no shape to fight. Or do much of anything else.
The tribbles swelled together in a group, and Connor thanked any deity listening for small favors. He readied a shot and sent it to the center of the mass. The tribbles flickered and their color dulled to an opaque gray. Connor clicked on his communicator. “Green Arrow to Watchtower. I’ve got another bunch for transport.”
The only thing to do with the tribbles was keep them in a containment field until someone could figure out how to return them to their proper universe. Failing that, they’d just have to be kept frozen, and the moon was the safest place for that. Connor watched the sparkle of the transporter fade and then started combing the area to make sure no tribbles remained. They were like cockroaches, really.
Unable to find any trace of the tribbles, Connor asked for transport up to the watchtower himself, thinking of a shower, tea, and a visit to Kyle. No new tribble sightings having been reported, he found himself on the transporter pad and waved to J’onn.
“Connor.”
Uh-oh. He stopped halfway to the door and turned around. “Yeah?”
“Make sure Kyle eats.”
Connor blinked. “Okay.” Relieved that he did not have to turn around and go back, he headed off to find his shower.
When he got to the infirmary, Kyle was bent over a sketchpad. Connor peered over his shoulder, but Kyle wasn’t sketching anything other than geometric shapes and random doodles. He wasn’t really sketching so much as listlessly pushing the pencil across the paper.
“Hey,” Connor said. “Temperature down yet?” Kyle had been spiking fevers on and off at irregular intervals, not that it seemed to have much bearing on how much he did or didn’t complain.
“Mm.” Kyle didn’t look up. “I’m bored.”
“Lucky,” Connor almost told him, and then caught himself. He’d been specifically instructed not to tell Kyle about the tribbles, because Kyle would probably go chase them. “Hang in there?” he said instead.
Kyle made a face. “You try being stuck here for days.”
Connor ruffled his hair. “Hang in there,” he said again. “You hungry?”
“No.” Kyle picked up an eraser and erased a shape that looked meaningless to Connor. “You want my fruit cup?” he said hopefully, groping around the other side of the bed and waving the aforementioned dessert at Connor. It hadn’t been opened.
“How about you eat the fruit cup?”
“I just got another dose of J’onn’s torture device. If I eat now, it’ll just come back up.” Kyle dropped the cup back onto what Connor assumed was a tray. “Later.”
“Are you sure?”
“Arrrgh,” said Kyle halfheartedly. He flopped backwards, abandoning the sketchbook. “I’m going to go crazy if I can’t look at something else.”
That was a blatant subject change if Connor had ever heard one, he went along with it. “The mo- promenade?” The monitor room would have tribble imagery. The promenade, on the other hand, was probably safe. Kyle grinned, and Connor wondered if he’d just missed something. Bringing the sketchbook and a number of pencils, they headed out of the infirmary. Kyle kept leaning on Connor, but when asked whether - his temperature had not, in fact, gone down, if the heat he was giving off was any indication - he shouldn’t be sitting still instead of walking, Kyle vehemently protested that he was fine.
“Your inability to support your own weight seems to contradict your statement,” Connor muttered, but Kyle ignored him. The promenade was empty, perhaps not surprisingly, and Kyle settled against a wall, sketchbook in lap, and started sketching out the curves of the hall. Connor sat near him, cross-legged, and began a period of meditation. He’d had all too little time in the past couple of weeks, between Kyle and the tribbles.
A muffled thud from the lower levels broke Connor’s concentration. He glanced over at Kyle, but Kyle had apparently fallen asleep over the sketchpad - which had a detailed drawing of Connor himself, now, framed against a half-finished starry sky - and Connor figured he’d be fine where he was. Climbing to his feet, he jogged down to investigate the sound. A few seconds later, a louder crash sounded and Connor broke into a run.
The noise had come from the tribble containment area. They were kept in one of the hangars, which had had the equipment removed and been depressurized. It was, at this moment, rapidly repressurizing through a rather large hole in the wall. Its outer doors were closed and the system was stable, so tribble-searching was the next order of business. One of the containment pods was open, and empty. Connor briefly checked the rest - safe - before following the sudden spate of crashes.
The single escaped tribble was wreaking havoc with the containment cells, and Superman was already chasing it. It managed to evade him and rocketed straight up through the ceiling, veering just slightly as it went out of sight. Superman followed it and Connor followed him.
By the time Connor reached the end of the tribble’s passage, Superman had subdued it. The promenade was distinctly worse for the wear, but as far as Connor could tell, structural integrity hadn’t been breached. At least, he hoped not; if the tribbles broke the Watchtower, someone would have to be pulled away from pest control to rebuild and the delicate balance they’d reached would tip. Someone would already have to rebuild the wall around the hangar, but Connor figured that would end up being the Flash, and it might not screw them over as far as the exploding tribble population was concerned.
“Arrow,” Superman said, arms full of tribble, and Connor’s wandering attention jerked back to the promenade. “Lantern’s been injured. Please see to him.”
Kyle was right where Connor had left him, sprawled over the sketchpad. Connor bent over him, checking for injury, and didn’t know whether to laugh or scream when he realized that Kyle had just slept through the entire fight. After a few moments of trying to convince Kyle to wake up and walk back to the infirmary, Connor gave it up as a bad job and carried him instead. It was easier than he’d expected; Kyle weighed less than he had the last time Connor had had the pleasure of dragging him around. Back in the infirmary, he couldn’t get Kyle awake enough to eat, either, despite J’onn’s request, and before he could think of something to do about it, another alarm went off. Tribbles had shown up in Star City, and Connor was the only one free.
“No rest for the wicked,” he muttered as he ran towards the transporter. “Or was that for the weary?” No rest either way. There had to be something they could do about the tribbles, something beyond damage control. Connor hoped that a plan was in the process of being created, because he had no idea what to do. Teleporting down, he checked his stock of arrows. He’d need to make more after this fight, assuming the tribbles didn’t eat him alive.
* * *
Kyle was fairly sure that he never wanted to open his eyes, ever again. No matter what J’onn’s space flu viruses would have done to him, it couldn’t possibly have been worse than the fiendish concoctions the Martian seemed to take gleeful delight in spreading through Kyle’s veins. He checked his train of thought; to be fair, J’onn probably wasn’t indulging in schadenfreude, but that didn’t mean his meds weren’t horrendous. Half the time he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t draw, didn’t even want to sometimes, and the rest of the time he spent plotting the most direct route towards the nearest porcelain god, right now being a case in point.
“I can’t,” he said, well aware of how petulant he sounded and not caring enough to try and modulate his voice. He wasn’t sure he could, anyway; every time his temperature spiked, his control over his emotions and voice went straight to hell. It was ridiculous, but there it was.
“Eat it, Kyle.”
No matter what it was, he wasn’t going to touch it. Connor was going to have to force it down his throat, and not only was Kyle pretty sure Connor was way too nice to try a move like that, he was also fairly certain that it would result in him puking all over both of them. Or it would, if he had anything to throw up. “Uh-uh. It’ll come right back up anyway.”
It was entirely possible that Connor was going to break a tooth grinding his jaw like that, or possibly throw whatever he was trying to get Kyle to eat at him instead. Kyle couldn’t bring himself to care, and that made him feel guilty. “I’m sorry,” he offered.
“Look.” This was clearly a last-ditch effort; he was almost home free, almost to the point of being left in peace with his complete and total misery. “If you just eat it, you’ll feel better.”
“How?” Kyle demanded, really trying not to sound as irritated as he felt.
“That’s what J’onn said.” Connor had reached the end of his patience; sick as he felt, Kyle could still read him like a book. Or maybe he was just making stuff up.
“Leave it and I’ll eat it later,” he countered. “Promise.” He had no intention whatsoever of keeping it, but it wouldn’t be the first time, and he hadn’t been caught throwing anything away yet.
“Fine.” Connor turned to go, and Kyle noticed what he hadn’t when Connor had come in - that Connor was limping.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“What?” Connor turned fluidly, but he couldn’t quite mask that he wasn’t putting his full weight on his left foot.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Connor said. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t quite a lie either, according to the changes in his body chemistry as tracked by Kyle’s ring.
“Okay,” Kyle said, not willing to push the issue yet. Connor shot him a suspicious look, but Kyle just closed his eyes and tried very hard to not be awake. He heard Connor leave, and the door close, and was drifting in and out of a not-quite-so-icky place when the sudden knowledge that someone was standing next to him woke him up thoroughly. He was not pleased. The Bat-eared shadow lurking over him looked less pleased, though, so he just stared at it.
“Lantern.” That was the Bat-Voice.
“Batman,” he returned, somewhat shakily. Batman was just staring at him. “Um.”
With something of a flourish, Batman pulled a chair up to the side of Kyle’s bed, and sat down, managing to not catch his cape on anything or sit on it, or look like he was trying to avoid it.
“Did you need…” Kyle started and then trailed off. It sounded too much like ‘What the hell are you doing here’, and although that was exactly what he wanted to ask, it probably wasn’t polite.
“No,” Batman replied, and produced a paring knife from the depths of his utility belt. Kyle almost tried to grab it with the ring, completely sure that he wanted nothing to do with whatever Batman thought he was going to do with a tiny, curved, and probably very sharp blade. When Batman produced an apple from parts unknown, he was sure of it.
“I…” he started, but he couldn’t even get the syllable out against the reflexive wave of nausea. Batman ignored him entirely, apparently focused on peeling the apple. Kyle watched him for a few moments before he started drifting off again. This time, he was woken by something cool and wet pressing against his mouth. It smelled like apple, and he opened his eyes. Either he was hallucinating, again, or Batman was feeding him a piece of fruit. He waited a moment, and Batman didn’t dissolve into smoke, but he did start looking impatient. Batman was leaning over him and looking impatient. Despite himself, Kyle opened his mouth and accepted the apple.
Much to his surprise, it did not make a precipitous reappearance, and when Batman fed him another piece, Kyle accepted it. The second piece stayed down as well, and the third, and before Kyle knew it, the apple was entirely gone. The core was nowhere to be seen, but he wasn’t about to ask where it was. Between one blink and the next, Batman was gone as well. Kyle would have been sure that he’d dreamed the entire thing, except that for the first time in days, he didn’t feel so completely miserable, and there was one long perfect spiral apple peel sitting on the tray next to the bed.
The apple peel was still in one piece - Kyle was trying to decide whether or not he should get rid of it or not - when the earsplitting claxon of the general alarm sounded. There was only one way to react to that, no matter how he felt. Kyle had his uniform on and was headed for the monitor room before the first siren had faded. He reached the monitor room without being intercepted, which was a little surprising; not only should there have been someone on monitor duty at all times, he knew that Connor and Batman had both been in the infirmary only a few minutes ago.
The answer was on the screens of the monitor room - the entire team and some of the backup members were facing a swarm of fuzzy silvery balls that looked suspiciously familiar. Memory struck with the force of a sledgehammer and Kyle grabbed the back of a chair to keep his balance. The current swarm of not-so-cute little balls was of the same type as the alien invasion he and Wally and J’onn had put a stop to a few weeks before. The Leaguers were taking what amounted to potshots at the huge mass, but none of the aliens were acting aggressively. In fact, they were just swarming more tightly together, and starting to glow. For a brief second, the glow spiked, and Kyle put up a hand to cover his eyes. When the glow faded, the swarm of little round spheres had coalesced into a single shape. Its edges were fuzzy, and it looked wrong, somehow. Kyle wondered briefly if he might possibly be hallucinating, but then the alien lashed out and he decided it didn’t matter.
The transporter worked just as well by remote; it was quicker than flying. Kyle set it and ran to the tube. It deposited him just outside the battlefield, and he was airborne as soon as he could see the blue sky over his head. A writhing limb knocked him out of the sky; he barely managed to slow his momentum enough not to crash into the ground. Shaking his head to clear the dizziness, he sent a construct to hold the alien in place. The alien twisted oddly, pulling away, and it felt like something was dragging at the inside of his head. Kyle went down on one knee and the construct melted, but the alien had been distracted enough for at least three Leaguers to get a good hold on it and try to smash it.
“Oxygen!” J’onn shouted at him mentally, and Kyle realized that Superman and Wonder Woman weren’t trying to smash it, they were trying to get it out of the atmosphere. J’onn was down there as well, but none of them could so much as budge the creature. Kyle struggled to his feet, threw himself forward, and grabbed a flailing limb. It whipped him back and forth, but since it couldn’t really make him much dizzier than he was already, he gritted his teeth and hung on. He could see the alien, he could see it, and he poured a construct along its surface, all its twisty lines, until he could feel it meet with a pop on the other side. The alien struggled, but the construct moved with it, infinitely stretchable. The creature finally began to pull away from the ground under the combined efforts of several Leaguers, and Kyle added one more element to the construct.
Every bit of oxygen inside drained out. The creature struggled more wildly, nearly overbalancing its opponents, but it was still moving upwards, and it slowly grew still and started to shrink. Kyle gritted his teeth and held the construct in place, letting it contract as the creature shrank. The ground receded behind them until finally the stars shone brightly, and the alien was completely still.
“You can let go now,” J’onn said, and Kyle dissolved the construct, shivering as he realized for the first time how damnably cold it was in space.
The alien began moving again, and Kyle almost tried to grab it before he realized that Superman was carrying the corpse off somewhere. “I’ll scan for any left,” he said instead.
“None remain,” J’onn told him, and gave him an inscrutable look.
“I’m going, I’m going.” Kyle backed towards the Watchtower, hands in front of him. J’onn just kept staring at him, so Kyle finally turned around and headed for the moon. The airlock opened to his code, none of the alien gunk was sticking to his gloves, and the Watchtower was empty. It wasn’t any warmer inside than it had been outside, either. He wrapped his arms around himself and headed to the monitor room on the off-chance someone wanted to be teleported up, but he hadn’t been sitting in the chair more than a few moments before he fell asleep despite the cold.
He woke in the infirmary again, Connor staring at him. It was worse than J’onn. At least J’onn didn’t make inscrutable faces on purpose.
“Giant alien?” Kyle ventured. It could have been a dream. At least he was warm now.
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Connor said. “Or that you’re not worse.”
“Luck of the Irish,” Kyle informed him solemnly. “Works every time.”
“Apparently.” Connor reached out, cupping Kyle’s face in one hand. “But they seem to think you did okay. For a rookie.”
“Ha,” Kyle muttered. He wasn’t ever going to be the one with experience, the way this was going.
Connor kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Next time, I’m going to tie you down.” He might actually do it, too, but Kyle was pretty sure he could get out of the ropes.
“Promises,” he said, just to see if he could make Connor blush. It didn’t work, but it did get him a proper kiss.
FINIS
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, various JLA
Prompt: 039 - TASTE
Word Count: 6026
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Kyle should listen to J’onn. It would save him a lot of trouble.
Author's Notes: Slash, Connor/Kyle. Extremely silly. Incredibly silly.
I hate waking up on the floor, and this is the second time this week. Deadlines, if I didn’t have to meet these deadlines…
Kyle leveraged himself off the floor with a groan. At least it looked as if he’d finished his assignment before apparently deciding the walk to bed wasn’t worth it and the floor was the better option. A shower and a cup of coffee were called for, not necessarily in that order, and then he’d have time to drop off his assignment before he was due for monitor duty. He’d gotten through the coffee, boxed up his assignment, and was halfway through the shower when a rather loud crash sounded outside.
For a very brief moment, he debated just leaving it alone and finishing his shower, but a second and louder crash sounded. It was in this case that the ring really came in handy - Kyle was dry, soap-free, and in costume by the time he made it to the window. A quick look outside - he’d never thought he’d be so grateful to have a view of an alley - told him the coast was clear, and he leapt into the air. For a moment, vertigo sliced through him and he thought he was already under attack, but his head cleared and no one was in sight.
The source of the explosions wasn’t difficult to find - smoke was pouring into the sky in two separate columns a few blocks to the southeast. Kyle flew to the larger one first, where several cars had been piled together and set on fire. There were no life signs inside, and he sincerely hoped that there wasn’t anyone dead inside, either. Containing the fire was a matter of creating a bubble around the inferno and sucking out the oxygen - it died within seconds. The second conflagration - fewer cars, and again no one alive inside - didn’t take any longer, but there was no immediate sign of the perpetrator.
The road itself had been shredded between both fires, cement buckling in the heat and the earth rent in long furrows. Two civilians and a dog were huddled near one of the rocks, and as Kyle got closer he could see that the man was trapped. He leveraged the rock to the side, careful not to overbalance any of the rubble, and ringed the couple to safety. A few people had come out to see what was going on, and Kyle ringed signs bearing the words “Danger! Stay back!”. He didn’t really feel up to shouting.
A rush of heat to his back sent Kyle into an automatic dive and he flipped around to see Effigy hovering behind him. The former Manhunter was grinning like a madman as he held up both hands and filled them with flame. Too tired to bring up something more complex, Kyle enclosed Effigy’s hands in a bubble and solidified it. Effigy only grinned wider and pulled his hands apart. The bubble shattered, sending another wave of dizziness through him. In that moment, Effigy darted forward and threw a sphere of flame.
The fragile shield that was all Kyle had time to summon broke under the onslaught of the rushing fireball and he was slammed downward. A desperate reflex slowed his fall to the point of probably-not-fatal, but he misjudged exactly where the ground was and everything went dark.
* * *
memory
“We’re going out in space for what, again?” Kyle fidgeted. He didn’t have any work deadlines looming right that moment, but he didn’t really want to leave Earth. Every time he’d gone out of the solar system recently, stuff had had a tendency to blow up in his face. On the other hand, it hadn’t been going so well on Earth itself, either, so he supposed he should just resign himself to the mission, whatever it was.
“Kyle,” Wally said, sounding distinctly annoyed.
“Huh?” From the look on Wally’s face - what Kyle could see below the mask - Wally had just explained for the second time - third? - and Kyle had missed it. “Uh, sorry?”
As far as Kyle could understand from an explanation that was just barely short of tapping into the speed force, some kind of little aliens had had their souls sucked out by a swarm of littler aliens and these littler aliens had found their way through a natural dimensional rift that had been caused by the gravitational stresses of a black hole and a supernova. Or something.
“Suit up,” J’onn told them both, and Kyle ringed on a suit. J’onn raised what would have been an eyebrow if he had them, and Kyle grinned. “Don’t lose your concentration,” J’onn said. Kyle shrugged at Wally, who had returned in a proper suit, perfectly adjusted.
The plan was relatively simple; the extradimensional aliens, which looked like nothing so much as tiny silvery fluffballs, spit acid, and could hit with enough percussive force to knock J’onn on his ass before he started hitting back, were easily herded. They bred like rabbits in the presence of oxygen, but fortunately there was little enough here to make it much of an issue.
Kyle set up a barrier, and Wally and J’onn forced the aliens into the funnel back through the tear. The last batch of the little round spheres was on its way down the tunnels when one of them bounced erratically and smacked Kyle hard across the side of the face. He kept the funnel in place through sheer desperation, but his suit vanished. He took one breath of acrid not-air before J’onn grabbed him and the touch focused him enough to flicker the suit back on.
“Are you all right?” Wally whirlwinded the last of the aliens through the closing rift. Kyle nodded, coughing.
“Fine,” he choked out after a moment. “That was the worst air I have ever tasted.”
“Don’t you mean smelled?”
“Tasted,” Kyle said firmly. “It’s coating the back of my tongue. Yeeaaugh.”
* * *
In the Watchtower, J’onn waited. With his telepathic link to the rest of the team, he was the one most often performing monitor duty, so that he could quickly alert whoever was needed for any given crisis. On this particular day, he’d caught a dam collapsing in Egypt, a freak thunderstorm in India, and a potential plane crash above Tokyo; nothing out of the ordinary. The Leaguers had been sent to deal with the problems, all of which had gone off without a hitch. He was, however, looking forward to the end of his shift. A nagging doubt in the pit of his stomach told him that he was going to run into trouble, but he firmly told it to go away. Green Lantern might be late to monitor duty, but he always showed up.
Despite his assertions, J’onn found himself growing irritated when Lantern did not, in fact, show up on time. He directed one of the monitors to a video feed of Green Lantern’s neighborhood and was surprised to see evidence of a fight - rubble on the ground and smoke obscuring the air. He refined the feed just in time to see him take a hit a raw recruit could have avoided and smash into the ground behind a charred mass of cars. Irritation faded to worry when Green Lantern did not reappear. The villain he’d been fighting was clearly cackling maniacally, fire leaking from every pore.
“Watchtower, one to transport,” came a voice on an accepted frequency and J’onn hit the transporter control without thinking about it. Green Arrow - Connor Hawke - stepped out of the tube.
“Kyle?”
“You’re on monitor duty,” J’onn said, standing and pushing the boy towards the control panels. As much as he hated fire, there was no one else available to go help Lantern.
“What?” Green Arrow nearly tripped over the floor, but J’onn had transported out before Green Arrow could ask him anything else.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Effigy singsonged, zigzagging back and forth above the battlefield. Most of the street was still fairly intact when J’onn arrived, although the random spurts of flame Effigy kept tossing into the ground certainly weren’t helping. Invisibility being, in this case, the better part of valor, J’onn used it, and then scooped up a pebble. While his aim wasn’t quite that of a Green Arrow, it was still accurate enough to peg Effigy in the forehead.
“Come out and face me, you coward!” Effigy screamed.
“Right here,” J’onn told him, allowing himself to become visible and striking Effigy with a handful of concrete. The would-be supervillain went down, flames flickering out. J’onn caught him by the ankle and dropped him by the police car that had arrived at the edge of the scene. Without waiting for a reply from New York’s finest, he turned and started searching for Green Lantern.
While J’onn wasn’t one to call property damage lucky on a regular basis, in this case it was fortunate that the piles of still-smoking vehicles and the random spots of fire were enough to keep the onlookers away. Green Lantern was exactly where J’onn had seen him fall - unconscious, the ring dull, and completely naked. It was such a bizarre note that J’onn stared for a full half-second before removing his cape and wrapping Lantern in it. As an afterthought, he twitched the cape to cover Lantern’s face, on the off chance that one of the people in the surrounding crowd might recognize him. He rose into the air, intending to fly directly back to the Watchtower before it occurred to him that Lantern needed to be conscious for his ring to protect him against the vacuum of space.
“Watchtower, two to teleport,” he said into his communicator, and the world vanished into little sparkles of light and reappeared. A bit of relief that Green Arrow did in fact know how the teleporters worked snaked through him, but it vanished as he stepped off the pad to hear a crash. Green Arrow was staring at him, bow at his feet and face white.
“Kyle?” he said, taking one trembling step forward. “The news out of New York says Green Lantern is… he didn’t…”
“He’s not dead,” J’onn said, and the color rushed back into Green Arrow’s face. J’onn started toward the infirmary; the tech there was both advanced enough and user-friendly enough to take care of most problems, although J’onn already had a sneaking suspicion what was wrong with Green Lantern. Green Arrow jogged after him, and J’onn glared. “You’re on monitor duty,” he said.
“But -“
“Go.” Green Arrow went.
As J’onn had suspected, Lantern had contracted a not particularly common and also not particularly pleasant viral infection during the cleanup mission roughly two weeks earlier. He’d warned both Lantern and Flash several times that the planet they were visiting was inimical to human systems, and then Lantern had - albeit briefly - lost his ring-generated suit. J’onn had checked them both out with the shuttle’s scanners, and they’d both been clean, but he’d been meaning to do a more detailed scan at the Watchtower. He just hadn’t gotten around to Lantern; Flash had presented himself within three hours of returning, virus free. Fortunately for all involved except Green Lantern, he hadn’t reached the contagious stage. J’onn counted small blessings and programmed the computers to make the treatments.
* * *
Connor hung back, lurking near the door. Not that he would have described himself as lurking, really. He was just making sure there was space. Several Leaguers had drifted back into the Watchtower over the past couple of hours, various crises diverted, and they all had come at some point to see if their Lantern was in fact still alive. The rumor that Green Lantern had been killed in action was apparently going through the American cape community rather quickly despite J’onn repeating that it was not accurate.
“See? Not dead.” That was Wally, poking at Kyle, who was still out. Connor grunted in reply, not sure if Wally was talking to him. Then again, no one else was in the room.
“Hi, guys.” Or maybe not. “What’s going on?” In Connor’s admittedly limited experience, superheroes did not sound plaintive when asking questions, but Kyle was an exception to a lot of rules. Wally was laughing, which did not make the puppy-dog expression on Kyle’s face go away. “None of these clothes are mine, I’m not bandaged anywhere, and I don’t remember anything past - my deadline! What day is it?”
“Tough luck, Kyle,” Wally said. “Hang in there.” He zoomed away before Kyle could ask for clarification, and Kyle turned his eyes on Connor.
“Well, you’re going to be fine,” Connor said, but that didn’t make the Look go away. “J’onn said it’d only take a few weeks.”
“Weeks?” Kyle didn’t quite squeak.
Connor pulled a chair over to the side of the bed and started explaining. At some point, he found that he’d taken Kyle’s hand and was stroking the back with his thumb as he talked.
“You did not just tell me I have space flu.” Kyle couldn’t quite bury his face in only one hand, but he was making a pretty good effort. “Wait, you said weeks. J’onn said weeks. I don’t have weeks. I have a job. I have deadlines.” None of which was going to get him out of the infirmary any faster.
“Tell them the truth,” Connor suggested.
“Oh, right. Space flu. Great idea.” Kyle drew his knees up to his chest and wrapped his free arm around them. “Connor…”
“Oh, no.” That expression was no less distressing than the plaintive puppy-dog look, but Connor had no intention of being talked into anything that might get J’onn pissed off at him. Given a choice between an angry Kyle and an angry J’onn, the Martian Manhunter won hands down. Dating Kyle or not, Connor had a healthy sense of self-preservation.
“It’s not that bad. I feel fine. I’m going to miss my deadline, Connor.”
“I’ll deliver whatever you have,” Connor said hastily. “Give me the address and I’m gone.”
Half an hour later, Connor was searching through Kyle’s apartment for the box that Kyle had claimed contained the assignment, with no luck. As he looked under the table for the fifth time, his communicator went off.
“Did you find it?”
“No.” Connor stood, knocking his knee against the tabletop. “And ow.”
“It’s right next to the door. You can’t miss it.”
A search by the door did indeed turn up a flat box, addressed but no postage, hidden under an overbalanced stack of newspapers. “It was under the papers, Kyle.”
“What papers?”
“The newspapers. Whole pile of ‘em.”
“I was trying to recycle.” Kyle sounded the tiniest bit defensive.
“You have to actually take them to a recycling center for that to work, you know.” Connor shoved the papers away from the door and left, box under one arm. “I’m locking the door behind me and keeping your key. Just so you know.”
“But I might -“
“The address on the box is the one where it needs to go?”
“Yeah.” There was a sudden scrambling noise and then a hurried “thanks, Connor” before the line went dead. Connor shook his head and headed toward the street. The package wasn’t difficult to deliver - Kyle’s agent was at first furious at the delay and then worried when told Kyle would be unavailable for the next few weeks due to illness - but when Connor left the building, a sudden commotion down the street caught his attention.
A bouncing silvery ball of fluff was caroming off buildings, gathering attention from the crowd below. It didn’t look dangerous, until Connor saw it hit a brick wall and leave a dent the size of a tractor tire, and he cursed himself for not having either his costume or his arrows within reach. He did have some small darts; he threw three in quick succession. They hit the fluffball and it shattered. The pieces rained down over the street, and then melted away. Connor frowned, but of all the strange things he’d seen, this wasn’t even weird enough to rate a formal report.
* * *
Two weeks later:
Connor faced down another rampaging pile of fluff, wondering when things had gotten quite so out of hand. If he’d made the report when he’d first seen these creatures, perhaps they wouldn’t have managed to breed so enthusiastically. Then again, given the reaction of these creatures’ metabolisms to oxygen, it might not have made any difference at all. They were showing up all over the world, apparently mindless and flitting back and forth like butterflies. Unfortunately, they had a distinct tendency to shatter anything they hit, and any attempt to pound them into submission lead to fracturing and many tiny monsters.
Electric shocks and creating a vacuum seemed to be the only way to deal with the creatures. Connor, fully aware of the irony, had taken to raiding his late father’s trick arrow collection to find and duplicate taser arrows. The rest of the Leaguers worked with whatever they had.
It seemed as if they’d gotten these things - someone had dubbed them “tribbles”, which made no sense to Connor, but he wasn’t going to complain - under control, or at least to the level of nuisance instead of world-devouring threat, but Connor really wished that they could just get rid of all of them. Kyle would have been a great help, but he was still in the infirmary; J’onn had noted that the treatment for his bug would be particularly unpleasant, and it left Kyle in no shape to fight. Or do much of anything else.
The tribbles swelled together in a group, and Connor thanked any deity listening for small favors. He readied a shot and sent it to the center of the mass. The tribbles flickered and their color dulled to an opaque gray. Connor clicked on his communicator. “Green Arrow to Watchtower. I’ve got another bunch for transport.”
The only thing to do with the tribbles was keep them in a containment field until someone could figure out how to return them to their proper universe. Failing that, they’d just have to be kept frozen, and the moon was the safest place for that. Connor watched the sparkle of the transporter fade and then started combing the area to make sure no tribbles remained. They were like cockroaches, really.
Unable to find any trace of the tribbles, Connor asked for transport up to the watchtower himself, thinking of a shower, tea, and a visit to Kyle. No new tribble sightings having been reported, he found himself on the transporter pad and waved to J’onn.
“Connor.”
Uh-oh. He stopped halfway to the door and turned around. “Yeah?”
“Make sure Kyle eats.”
Connor blinked. “Okay.” Relieved that he did not have to turn around and go back, he headed off to find his shower.
When he got to the infirmary, Kyle was bent over a sketchpad. Connor peered over his shoulder, but Kyle wasn’t sketching anything other than geometric shapes and random doodles. He wasn’t really sketching so much as listlessly pushing the pencil across the paper.
“Hey,” Connor said. “Temperature down yet?” Kyle had been spiking fevers on and off at irregular intervals, not that it seemed to have much bearing on how much he did or didn’t complain.
“Mm.” Kyle didn’t look up. “I’m bored.”
“Lucky,” Connor almost told him, and then caught himself. He’d been specifically instructed not to tell Kyle about the tribbles, because Kyle would probably go chase them. “Hang in there?” he said instead.
Kyle made a face. “You try being stuck here for days.”
Connor ruffled his hair. “Hang in there,” he said again. “You hungry?”
“No.” Kyle picked up an eraser and erased a shape that looked meaningless to Connor. “You want my fruit cup?” he said hopefully, groping around the other side of the bed and waving the aforementioned dessert at Connor. It hadn’t been opened.
“How about you eat the fruit cup?”
“I just got another dose of J’onn’s torture device. If I eat now, it’ll just come back up.” Kyle dropped the cup back onto what Connor assumed was a tray. “Later.”
“Are you sure?”
“Arrrgh,” said Kyle halfheartedly. He flopped backwards, abandoning the sketchbook. “I’m going to go crazy if I can’t look at something else.”
That was a blatant subject change if Connor had ever heard one, he went along with it. “The mo- promenade?” The monitor room would have tribble imagery. The promenade, on the other hand, was probably safe. Kyle grinned, and Connor wondered if he’d just missed something. Bringing the sketchbook and a number of pencils, they headed out of the infirmary. Kyle kept leaning on Connor, but when asked whether - his temperature had not, in fact, gone down, if the heat he was giving off was any indication - he shouldn’t be sitting still instead of walking, Kyle vehemently protested that he was fine.
“Your inability to support your own weight seems to contradict your statement,” Connor muttered, but Kyle ignored him. The promenade was empty, perhaps not surprisingly, and Kyle settled against a wall, sketchbook in lap, and started sketching out the curves of the hall. Connor sat near him, cross-legged, and began a period of meditation. He’d had all too little time in the past couple of weeks, between Kyle and the tribbles.
A muffled thud from the lower levels broke Connor’s concentration. He glanced over at Kyle, but Kyle had apparently fallen asleep over the sketchpad - which had a detailed drawing of Connor himself, now, framed against a half-finished starry sky - and Connor figured he’d be fine where he was. Climbing to his feet, he jogged down to investigate the sound. A few seconds later, a louder crash sounded and Connor broke into a run.
The noise had come from the tribble containment area. They were kept in one of the hangars, which had had the equipment removed and been depressurized. It was, at this moment, rapidly repressurizing through a rather large hole in the wall. Its outer doors were closed and the system was stable, so tribble-searching was the next order of business. One of the containment pods was open, and empty. Connor briefly checked the rest - safe - before following the sudden spate of crashes.
The single escaped tribble was wreaking havoc with the containment cells, and Superman was already chasing it. It managed to evade him and rocketed straight up through the ceiling, veering just slightly as it went out of sight. Superman followed it and Connor followed him.
By the time Connor reached the end of the tribble’s passage, Superman had subdued it. The promenade was distinctly worse for the wear, but as far as Connor could tell, structural integrity hadn’t been breached. At least, he hoped not; if the tribbles broke the Watchtower, someone would have to be pulled away from pest control to rebuild and the delicate balance they’d reached would tip. Someone would already have to rebuild the wall around the hangar, but Connor figured that would end up being the Flash, and it might not screw them over as far as the exploding tribble population was concerned.
“Arrow,” Superman said, arms full of tribble, and Connor’s wandering attention jerked back to the promenade. “Lantern’s been injured. Please see to him.”
Kyle was right where Connor had left him, sprawled over the sketchpad. Connor bent over him, checking for injury, and didn’t know whether to laugh or scream when he realized that Kyle had just slept through the entire fight. After a few moments of trying to convince Kyle to wake up and walk back to the infirmary, Connor gave it up as a bad job and carried him instead. It was easier than he’d expected; Kyle weighed less than he had the last time Connor had had the pleasure of dragging him around. Back in the infirmary, he couldn’t get Kyle awake enough to eat, either, despite J’onn’s request, and before he could think of something to do about it, another alarm went off. Tribbles had shown up in Star City, and Connor was the only one free.
“No rest for the wicked,” he muttered as he ran towards the transporter. “Or was that for the weary?” No rest either way. There had to be something they could do about the tribbles, something beyond damage control. Connor hoped that a plan was in the process of being created, because he had no idea what to do. Teleporting down, he checked his stock of arrows. He’d need to make more after this fight, assuming the tribbles didn’t eat him alive.
* * *
Kyle was fairly sure that he never wanted to open his eyes, ever again. No matter what J’onn’s space flu viruses would have done to him, it couldn’t possibly have been worse than the fiendish concoctions the Martian seemed to take gleeful delight in spreading through Kyle’s veins. He checked his train of thought; to be fair, J’onn probably wasn’t indulging in schadenfreude, but that didn’t mean his meds weren’t horrendous. Half the time he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t draw, didn’t even want to sometimes, and the rest of the time he spent plotting the most direct route towards the nearest porcelain god, right now being a case in point.
“I can’t,” he said, well aware of how petulant he sounded and not caring enough to try and modulate his voice. He wasn’t sure he could, anyway; every time his temperature spiked, his control over his emotions and voice went straight to hell. It was ridiculous, but there it was.
“Eat it, Kyle.”
No matter what it was, he wasn’t going to touch it. Connor was going to have to force it down his throat, and not only was Kyle pretty sure Connor was way too nice to try a move like that, he was also fairly certain that it would result in him puking all over both of them. Or it would, if he had anything to throw up. “Uh-uh. It’ll come right back up anyway.”
It was entirely possible that Connor was going to break a tooth grinding his jaw like that, or possibly throw whatever he was trying to get Kyle to eat at him instead. Kyle couldn’t bring himself to care, and that made him feel guilty. “I’m sorry,” he offered.
“Look.” This was clearly a last-ditch effort; he was almost home free, almost to the point of being left in peace with his complete and total misery. “If you just eat it, you’ll feel better.”
“How?” Kyle demanded, really trying not to sound as irritated as he felt.
“That’s what J’onn said.” Connor had reached the end of his patience; sick as he felt, Kyle could still read him like a book. Or maybe he was just making stuff up.
“Leave it and I’ll eat it later,” he countered. “Promise.” He had no intention whatsoever of keeping it, but it wouldn’t be the first time, and he hadn’t been caught throwing anything away yet.
“Fine.” Connor turned to go, and Kyle noticed what he hadn’t when Connor had come in - that Connor was limping.
“Is everything okay?” he asked.
“What?” Connor turned fluidly, but he couldn’t quite mask that he wasn’t putting his full weight on his left foot.
“You’re hurt.”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Connor said. It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t quite a lie either, according to the changes in his body chemistry as tracked by Kyle’s ring.
“Okay,” Kyle said, not willing to push the issue yet. Connor shot him a suspicious look, but Kyle just closed his eyes and tried very hard to not be awake. He heard Connor leave, and the door close, and was drifting in and out of a not-quite-so-icky place when the sudden knowledge that someone was standing next to him woke him up thoroughly. He was not pleased. The Bat-eared shadow lurking over him looked less pleased, though, so he just stared at it.
“Lantern.” That was the Bat-Voice.
“Batman,” he returned, somewhat shakily. Batman was just staring at him. “Um.”
With something of a flourish, Batman pulled a chair up to the side of Kyle’s bed, and sat down, managing to not catch his cape on anything or sit on it, or look like he was trying to avoid it.
“Did you need…” Kyle started and then trailed off. It sounded too much like ‘What the hell are you doing here’, and although that was exactly what he wanted to ask, it probably wasn’t polite.
“No,” Batman replied, and produced a paring knife from the depths of his utility belt. Kyle almost tried to grab it with the ring, completely sure that he wanted nothing to do with whatever Batman thought he was going to do with a tiny, curved, and probably very sharp blade. When Batman produced an apple from parts unknown, he was sure of it.
“I…” he started, but he couldn’t even get the syllable out against the reflexive wave of nausea. Batman ignored him entirely, apparently focused on peeling the apple. Kyle watched him for a few moments before he started drifting off again. This time, he was woken by something cool and wet pressing against his mouth. It smelled like apple, and he opened his eyes. Either he was hallucinating, again, or Batman was feeding him a piece of fruit. He waited a moment, and Batman didn’t dissolve into smoke, but he did start looking impatient. Batman was leaning over him and looking impatient. Despite himself, Kyle opened his mouth and accepted the apple.
Much to his surprise, it did not make a precipitous reappearance, and when Batman fed him another piece, Kyle accepted it. The second piece stayed down as well, and the third, and before Kyle knew it, the apple was entirely gone. The core was nowhere to be seen, but he wasn’t about to ask where it was. Between one blink and the next, Batman was gone as well. Kyle would have been sure that he’d dreamed the entire thing, except that for the first time in days, he didn’t feel so completely miserable, and there was one long perfect spiral apple peel sitting on the tray next to the bed.
The apple peel was still in one piece - Kyle was trying to decide whether or not he should get rid of it or not - when the earsplitting claxon of the general alarm sounded. There was only one way to react to that, no matter how he felt. Kyle had his uniform on and was headed for the monitor room before the first siren had faded. He reached the monitor room without being intercepted, which was a little surprising; not only should there have been someone on monitor duty at all times, he knew that Connor and Batman had both been in the infirmary only a few minutes ago.
The answer was on the screens of the monitor room - the entire team and some of the backup members were facing a swarm of fuzzy silvery balls that looked suspiciously familiar. Memory struck with the force of a sledgehammer and Kyle grabbed the back of a chair to keep his balance. The current swarm of not-so-cute little balls was of the same type as the alien invasion he and Wally and J’onn had put a stop to a few weeks before. The Leaguers were taking what amounted to potshots at the huge mass, but none of the aliens were acting aggressively. In fact, they were just swarming more tightly together, and starting to glow. For a brief second, the glow spiked, and Kyle put up a hand to cover his eyes. When the glow faded, the swarm of little round spheres had coalesced into a single shape. Its edges were fuzzy, and it looked wrong, somehow. Kyle wondered briefly if he might possibly be hallucinating, but then the alien lashed out and he decided it didn’t matter.
The transporter worked just as well by remote; it was quicker than flying. Kyle set it and ran to the tube. It deposited him just outside the battlefield, and he was airborne as soon as he could see the blue sky over his head. A writhing limb knocked him out of the sky; he barely managed to slow his momentum enough not to crash into the ground. Shaking his head to clear the dizziness, he sent a construct to hold the alien in place. The alien twisted oddly, pulling away, and it felt like something was dragging at the inside of his head. Kyle went down on one knee and the construct melted, but the alien had been distracted enough for at least three Leaguers to get a good hold on it and try to smash it.
“Oxygen!” J’onn shouted at him mentally, and Kyle realized that Superman and Wonder Woman weren’t trying to smash it, they were trying to get it out of the atmosphere. J’onn was down there as well, but none of them could so much as budge the creature. Kyle struggled to his feet, threw himself forward, and grabbed a flailing limb. It whipped him back and forth, but since it couldn’t really make him much dizzier than he was already, he gritted his teeth and hung on. He could see the alien, he could see it, and he poured a construct along its surface, all its twisty lines, until he could feel it meet with a pop on the other side. The alien struggled, but the construct moved with it, infinitely stretchable. The creature finally began to pull away from the ground under the combined efforts of several Leaguers, and Kyle added one more element to the construct.
Every bit of oxygen inside drained out. The creature struggled more wildly, nearly overbalancing its opponents, but it was still moving upwards, and it slowly grew still and started to shrink. Kyle gritted his teeth and held the construct in place, letting it contract as the creature shrank. The ground receded behind them until finally the stars shone brightly, and the alien was completely still.
“You can let go now,” J’onn said, and Kyle dissolved the construct, shivering as he realized for the first time how damnably cold it was in space.
The alien began moving again, and Kyle almost tried to grab it before he realized that Superman was carrying the corpse off somewhere. “I’ll scan for any left,” he said instead.
“None remain,” J’onn told him, and gave him an inscrutable look.
“I’m going, I’m going.” Kyle backed towards the Watchtower, hands in front of him. J’onn just kept staring at him, so Kyle finally turned around and headed for the moon. The airlock opened to his code, none of the alien gunk was sticking to his gloves, and the Watchtower was empty. It wasn’t any warmer inside than it had been outside, either. He wrapped his arms around himself and headed to the monitor room on the off-chance someone wanted to be teleported up, but he hadn’t been sitting in the chair more than a few moments before he fell asleep despite the cold.
He woke in the infirmary again, Connor staring at him. It was worse than J’onn. At least J’onn didn’t make inscrutable faces on purpose.
“Giant alien?” Kyle ventured. It could have been a dream. At least he was warm now.
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” Connor said. “Or that you’re not worse.”
“Luck of the Irish,” Kyle informed him solemnly. “Works every time.”
“Apparently.” Connor reached out, cupping Kyle’s face in one hand. “But they seem to think you did okay. For a rookie.”
“Ha,” Kyle muttered. He wasn’t ever going to be the one with experience, the way this was going.
Connor kissed him lightly on the forehead. “Next time, I’m going to tie you down.” He might actually do it, too, but Kyle was pretty sure he could get out of the ropes.
“Promises,” he said, just to see if he could make Connor blush. It didn’t work, but it did get him a proper kiss.
FINIS