Return of the Big Damn List, Kyle/Connor, part 12.
I don't THINK I've posted this. I can't find it if I have.
Title: Walk Through Walls
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke
Prompt: 078 - WHERE
Word Count: 5170
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Weirdness is perfectly normal for a Green Lantern. Really.
Author's Notes: Part 12 in the Acyl Chloride series. Slash.
Fanfic 100 - Green Lantern Corps - Walk Through Walls
Why am I soaking wet? Kyle Rayner was acutely aware of several things in the moment after waking, the first of which was possibly the least pertinent. Aside from the matter of being drenched in a liquid that he fervently hoped was only water, there was someone else pressed closely against his back. Furthermore, as far as he recalled, he shouldn’t have been asleep at all, much less in a bed that smelled distinctly musty. “Painting,” he muttered. “I was painting.”
Kaaterskil’s Notch was the last clear memory he had - moving a few things into a room, setting up a canvas, and picking up a paintbrush. He didn’t remember what he’d been about to paint, but the first color he’d chosen had been green.
“Okay, Kyle, where are we.” He bit down on his tongue to stop the nervous and barely audible monologue. Verbalizing his thoughts probably wasn’t a particularly good sign. Opening his eyes slowly and peering through his lashes got him a darkened room. A huge window above him and not more than a foot away showed a starry sky and patches of darkness he thought might be trees. The only part of this knowledge immediately relevant was that he was trapped between the wall and the person behind him. Very slowly, Kyle inched towards the wall. He wasn’t quiet enough, or careful enough, because whoever it was jerked awake.
“Who are you and what are you - Where have you taken me?” There was an edge of panic in the very familiar voice, so well suppressed that if Kyle hadn’t known better, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
“Connor!”
“Kyle? Kyle Rayner?”
At precisely this moment, Kyle realized that he not only had no link to the Central Battery on Oa, the source of his powers as Ion, but he had no access to any of the energy of Ion, either. He had intended to create a simple light, but not even the smallest spark formed. It wasn’t a lack of mental concentration, either - he’d been subjected to various types of mental chaff over his years as Green Lantern and all of them carried distinct side effects.
“I can’t - my - the Central Battery, it’s gone,” he said, trying to reach the internal reservoir. It was as if the Ion powers had never existed at all.
“What are you doing here? And why am I here?” Connor, as always, kept straight to the point, refusing to be distracted, although Kyle was more worried about being cut off from Oa than he was about waking up in odd places. It had happened before. Hell, it happened to Jack Knight all the time.
“Dunno,” Kyle muttered, still searching for Ion. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was like having the ground drop out under his feet, without warning, and the ceiling simultaneously smashing down.
“Where is here?”
“I don’t know!” Kyle struggled for control of his voice. “I’m sorry, Connor. I didn’t mean to shout.”
“It’s good to see you again,” Connor said softly, and Kyle thought he was smiling.
“You, too.” They’d been close, once, when Connor had been learning what it meant to be Green Arrow and Kyle had been struggling with the legacy of the Corps. Time, and space - not just ordinary earthbound distance, oh no - had pulled them slowly apart, and Kyle found himself regretting it. “How’ve you been?”
“Same old, same old,” Connor said, and chuckled. “It’s not a normal month if someone isn’t shooting at me at least once.”
“I hear that,” Kyle said, finding himself smiling as well.
“We should probably figure out where we are,” Connor said after a moment. “Please tell me that this is water,” he added.
“You’re all wet, too? I thought it was just me.”
A vague sense of movement was followed by the sound of water splashing onto the bed. “That came out of my mask,” Connor said.
“Your mask is tiny,” Kyle said. He might not have seen Connor much recently, but he did know that his friend’s mask had not changed - it was a narrow strip of cloth with holes in.
“Yes,” Connor answered drily.
“Hey, I’m in street clothes.” Kyle ran his hands down his body, squeezing the water out of his shirt and swiping it across his bare chest. It didn’t really get him any drier, and the wet denim of his jeans wouldn’t squeeze out anyway. “How come you’re in costume?” Another thought occurred to him. “Hey, have you got your bow?”
“No weapons, at all,” Connor said after a moment. He sounded faintly surprised, which Kyle supposed meant that even the tiny darts Connor kept around in case his more obvious weaponry was removed had been taken. “You don’t have your ring?”
“Don’t need one,” Kyle said. “By which,” he added, “I mean that I should be able to access the Central Battery without one, but I can’t feel it.”
“Ion, huh?” The bed shifted as Connor climbed off. “The floor’s lower than it looks. Be careful.”
How Connor could see anything at all in what appeared to Kyle to be pitch black was a mystery, but Kyle was willing to follow. He wiggled his foot off the edge of the bed, but it was lower than he’d expected, and the floor higher. He still managed to trip putting his other foot on the ground, and when he stood up, the mattress was above his waist.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, bruised ego and all that.” Kyle shuffled forward a few steps, hands in front of him. Maybe he’d hit a wall, and a light switch, and that would be an acceptable first step in figuring out where they were and how they’d gotten there.
“Um, Kyle?” Connor sounded a little worried now.
“Yeah?”
“What do you see?”
“A really, really dark room.” It figured that Connor would have really good night vision, which would be more useful if he’d find a light switch with it.
“The sun is shining in the window.” There was definite worry in Connor’s voice.
“Isn’t,” Kyle retorted. “I see stars.”
“Let me check your eyes,” Connor said, and Kyle realized Connor thought he meant little fuzzes of light consistent with a blow to the head.
“Not those -“ he started, and then felt Connor’s bare hands on his face. The room blurred slightly around him and the floor seemed to tilt. Kyle staggered, but so did Connor, and they ended up hanging onto each other for balance. When Kyle’s vision cleared, the room was considerably lighter, and the window over the bed displayed a sunset in the most glorious shades he’d ever seen.
“That was weird,” Connor said, pulling his attention away from the sky.
“Weird is not the word,” Kyle replied, letting go of Connor and pulling back. It was colder than it had been a moment ago, and he buttoned up his wet shirt. It didn’t help ward off the chill much, but anything was better than nothing. Now that he could see it, the room looked like an ordinary bedroom, double bed under a window and a chair and desk in one corner. Dust lay thick over everything, and their booted - in Connor’s case - and sneakered - in Kyle’s - feet had left prints in the pale carpet. Connor’s face was smudged with sticky wet dust, too, and his clothes. Kyle didn’t even want to look at his shirt - it was probably filthy, too, although that wasn’t really pertinent to the dilemma at hand. “Is that a door?”
The door in question was set flush against the wall, frame melding so smoothly with the floral wallpaper that Kyle wouldn’t have seen it if it had been papered, too. Connor eyed it for a moment, before motioning Kyle to one side. “In case it’s boobytrapped,” he said softly. Kyle felt his eyes widen and he flattened himself against the wall as Connor instructed.
“There’s nothing in the ceiling,” he offered quietly, belatedly scanning above their heads. If his years as a flying hero had taught him one thing, it was that nobody ever looked up, and he wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
“Thanks,” Connor returned just as quietly, conducting an investigation of the door. Kyle didn’t know what he was looking for, but Connor had produced a tiny flashlight from inside his boot and was determinedly searching for something, cupping his hand around the beam so that no stray light escaped. “Stand back,” he said eventually, returning the flashlight to his boot. Kyle was fairly sure Connor should have had a neat little belt with pockets on, but it appeared to be missing.
“You sure you don’t want me to do that?” he couldn’t help offering. Connor was the one more likely to be able to avoid any traps, but Kyle had been invulnerable - or close to it - for so long that it felt odd to have someone else protecting him.
“Stay there,” Connor said. Kyle put up his hands in a show of surrender and then covered his ears, just in case. Connor eased the door open from behind it, crouching down well below the average position one might expect from someone operating a doorknob. The door swung inwards with a squeak of rusty hinges, horrifically loud in the silence.
Nothing happened.
Connor probed the empty doorframe for a tripwire, just on the off-chance, but nothing happened. “I feel a little silly,” he said, standing and pulling the door all the way open.
“Better silly than dead,” Kyle said, joining him in front of the door.
“True,” Connor agreed, peering into the hallway. A window was directly on the left, outside shutters closed. On the right, the hallway stretched down into half-lit darkness, candle-shaped lights fastened to the wall in old-fashioned bronze sconces. Most of them were flickering or dim, only a few shining brightly. Some were out altogether. There was enough light to see that there were doors at regular intervals down the hall and that they, too, were set into the wall. Wood paneling ran halfway up the wall and stopped, giving way to wallpaper of the same floral print that had graced the room in which they had awoken. It made Kyle wonder if the place had been redecorated at all since the 70s.
“I’m not sure if this is an improvement,” he said.
“Pick a direction and start walking,” Connor suggested.
“Right, or right?”
“I’d say… right.” Connor grinned at him, and despite not knowing what the hell was going on, Kyle was glad of the chance to go through it with his friend.
“After you,” he said.
“Sure, make the archer take point,” Connor deadpanned.
Kyle grinned. “Not at all,” he said. “Age before beauty.”
“In that case, shouldn’t you be going first?” Connor asked innocently.
“Touche,” Kyle muttered, but he stepped through the doorway first. “It’s a door,” he announced. “Leads to a hallway.”
“You’ll be a detective someday, with that keen sense of observation.” Connor joined him, rapping his knuckles on the window. “It’s painted shut, did you notice? Just like the one in there.” He motioned to the room, but the door was closed.
“It was?” Kyle hadn’t noticed.
“Otherwise I would have suggested we go out that way,” Connor said.
“Painted shut, then,” Kyle repeated. He started down the hallway, Connor following. After perhaps thirty feet, it branched to both sides.
“Which way?” Connor looked down both hallways, but they looked identical to the one in which they were standing. The doors were at the same intervals as well, which meant that on each corner was a room with two doors, and that the building couldn’t be square, or any kind of quadrilateral; the window to the outside of their room had been directly opposite the door. He shared these conclusions; although he was fairly sure the information wasn’t relevant, he’d learned the hard way that sometimes it was the most innocuous piece of knowledge - or its lack - that got you killed or worse.
“You’re the one with a sense of direction.” Kyle had had the same thoughts about the shape of the building.
“Go straight,” Connor said after a moment. He started across the hall, but Kyle was poking at the wall with something. “What is that?”
“Pen,” Kyle said, holding up a drawing pen. “It was in my pocket, and this way, we know where we are.” He’d drawn a circle with an arrow pointing straight down. Across the hallway, he drew another one. “See? Roadsigns.”
Connor wasn’t convinced that the building would be enough of a maze to warrant graffiti on its wallpaper, but it didn’t hurt anything. Besides, they’d been kidnapped. Their kidnappers could deal with a little graffiti. As they moved on, it occurred to him that if anyone else happened to be in the building, they’d just made themselves that much easier to find. He told Kyle so.
“Oh.” Kyle hadn’t thought of that. “I’d rather fight than be lost,” he offered after a moment. Connor couldn’t argue much with that.
The hallway branched twice more before coming to a T-intersection, and Kyle marked the walls both times. None of the halls looked any different than the one they were currently following, and the T-intersection was no exception. “Which way?” Kyle whispered.
“Left,” Connor said. Kyle dutifully marked the wall with an arrow, and they continued. This time, the corridor bent sharply to the right, ending in a double swinging door. Kyle glanced at Connor, shrugged, and walked through the doors. “Wait!” Connor hissed sharply, but Kyle was gone. He’d only seen darkness through the doors in that brief moment, and the doors had swung shut with a heavy viscosity, as if the air around them was denser than it should have been. Connor stood for a moment, weighing the alternatives, but there was really only one thing to do. He stepped through the doors.
For a very brief moment, Connor fell. He landed on something softer than he’d expected, and a brief examination via flashlight proved it to be Kyle. His friend was out cold, something that did not bode well, particularly since Connor couldn’t find any sign of injury. He shone his light up towards the doors, but there was no sign of them. The walls were painted white, grimy and smudged with years of smoke. A half-door directly behind Connor had been nailed shut, boards criss-crossing it and determinedly fixed to the wall.
The hallway in front of them bore no resemblance to the one they’d fallen out of, except for being a hallway. The ceiling was low, and there were exactly two doors before the hall abruptly ended not far away. The floor was an incongruous linoleum, an indeterminate color and as grimy as the walls. Actual torches with flames were fixed to the wall at irregular intervals, burning slowly and steadily. Their smoke rose straight up, collecting on a ceiling that was all but black. Connor put his flashlight between his teeth and tried to rouse Kyle.
“Get off me-“ Kyle came awake swinging, but it was uncoordinated and ridiculously easy to dodge.
“It’s just me,” Connor said around the flashlight. “Hold still,” he added, and shone the flashlight in Kyle’s eyes. The pupils dilated normally, and Kyle answered three when Connor held up three fingers, so he figured that was good enough.
“I see spots now,” Kyle complained, rubbing his eyes. Connor’s flashlight had gotten brighter.
“Complain later,” Connor suggested. He started down the second hall, but the house started to shake back and forth, dancing as if in an earthquake. Connor braced himself against the wall for stability as the shaking got worse, and Kyle clung to Connor for dear life. The torches knocked against the walls, but none of them fell or went out, although Kyle was expecting that they all would. As abruptly as it had started, the shaking subsided, but as it did so, something behind the nailed over door started pounding. It was a very regular beat, three taps in rapid succession, a pause, and one more. Both Kyle and Connor swung around to stare at the door as the pattern repeated itself, once, twice, three times.
“Hello?” Connor said loudly. “Is someone in there?”
The knocking stopped, halfway through a repetition, and then started up again as a steady series of single blows.
“Hello?” Connor said again, taking a step towards the door. The knocking sped up almost imperceptibly and the torch closest to the door flickered. Connor took another step, Kyle sticking close to his side and glancing behind them periodically. Without warning, the flickering torch died, the flame vanishing and the embers glowing brightly for a bare second before dying. The smoke rising from the ash darkened and slowed to a halt. “Are you hurt?” Connor said more loudly. The knocking sped up again, and Connor made as if to start walking, but Kyle tugged at his arm and pointed mutely at the bottom of the door.
Frost crept out from beneath the door, sparkling in the flickering light remaining in the hallway and creeping up over the wood of the door and the dirty paint indiscriminately. It spread along the floor, too, and Kyle pulled Connor away. Whatever was behind that door didn’t need their help. The line of frost reached the next torch and it went, out, too. Connor was moving on his own, now, and the two of them reached the curve of the hallway just as the last torches flickered and died. The hall swung into a staircase leading down.
Kyle caught the barest glimpse of a set of stairs before the last torch flickered out and he could feel a chill on the back of his neck. A strong hand encircled his wrist and pulled him downwards, and he followed Connor without hesitation. The stairs were spaced oddly and he stumbled on the third one down, sure he was going to fall and take Connor with him, but although he’d been sure he’d seen an entire flight of steps, flat ground met his questing feet. Momentum propelled him ahead of Connor and through a doorway, and once again the flickering of firelight met his eyes.
“Didn’t we -“ Connor turned around the check the stairs, but there was only a blank stone wall behind them.
“I’m getting damn sick of this,” Kyle growled. The current room was huge, walls of stone and a vaulted ceiling. A fireplace big enough to walk into without ducking his head held a hot blaze smelling of pine, but there were almost no furnishings in the room itself. A rug that looked to be made of some kind of dead carnivore was in front of the fire, and various lamps without cords dotted the walls. There was nothing else. Kyle stalked over to one of the lamps, picked it up, and threw it into the fire.
“I am done playing your games!” he shouted to the ceiling. Nothing happened, so he went to the next lamp, and the next, smashing them against the wall. The ambient light in the room, oddly, did not decrease. “Show yourself!” Kyle shouted, somewhere around the sixth smashed lamp. Connor remained by the fireplace, two shards of more or less flat glass in his hands, eyes scanning the walls and ceiling.
Shattering the twelfth and last lamp plunged the room into darkness. Kyle clenched his hands into fists and put his back to where he thought the wall should be. “I hate magic,” he muttered. It never ended in anything good. The scent of dust and mold filled the air, and Kyle sneezed. Light filtered dimly through his eyelids, and when he opened his eyes again, it was to see a the living room of what would have been a perfectly normal North American suburban house if it hadn’t had sheets over all the furniture. Intact light bulbs would also have gone a long way towards fostering the illusion of normalcy.
“Door’s locked,” Connor said. He was standing at a wooden door with two locks and no windows. There were curtains over what looked to be a picture window between two armchairs, but they wouldn’t budge when Connor pulled on them.
“This is getting ridiculous.” Kyle picked up one of the chairs, sheet and all, and threw it at the window. It crashed through, shattering the glass and landing with a crunch of snow. Cold air blew in through the hole in the glass. Kyle picked up a lamp, yanked the cord out of the wall, and knocked the rest of the glass out of the frame. “All right, let’s go.” He grabbed the frame and pulled himself up onto it, but as soon as both his feet left the ground, vertigo swept through him and he pitched backwards. Connor caught him, but it wasn’t until Kyle had both feet on the ground that the dizziness receded.
“I don’t think -“ Connor started, but Kyle wasn’t about to let a lack of balance stop him. He took a running leap at the window, but this time the vertigo kicked in before he could properly push off and he nearly crashed into the wall. Connor caught him that time, too. “Bad idea,” he said succinctly.
Kyle shook his head irritably. “There has to be a way out of here.” He had more to say on that subject, but his words were forestalled by another familiar figure tumbling through the broken window.
“Alex Nero,” he said. “So this is your doing?” It all made sense - Nero could create constructs that rivaled Kyle’s for complexity and realism.
“What have you done to me?” Nero roared, and launched himself at Kyle. Kyle braced himself against the impact, but Nero went straight through him and faded before he hit the ground. Kyle staggered, staring at the spot where Nero had vanished.
“Who are you talking to?” Connor asked, puzzlement writ over his features.
“I-he was right there!” Kyle pointed. “You didn’t see him?”
“You must’ve been banged harder than I thought.” Connor tried to shine the flashlight in Kyle’s eyes again, but Kyle pushed him away.
“I know what I saw.”
“If you say so.” Connor was clearly humoring him.
“I’m checking the other rooms.” Kyle stalked towards the doorway. Opposite the front door, it led to a dining room complete with table and hutch of dishes looming out of the shadows, kitchen on the left and ending with a small living room area occupying the far wall on the right. The kitchen’s one window was locked and too small to climb through, so Kyle left it alone. There was nothing else of interest in the kitchen - empty cupboards and dust - but there was something unquestionably eerie about the whole situation. A tapping at the window made him jump, but it was only a tree.
An unlocked door, at right angles to the kitchen doorway, proved to lead to a set of stairs winding down to the left and an outside door straight ahead. The outside door was locked as well. Kyle briefly considered trying to smash it, but it probably wouldn’t do any good. He left the basement alone for the moment, as well; cold rolled up from it in waves and he’d never gotten out of a building by going underground. Except maybe in New York, where they had subways, but he sincerely doubted there was any kind of public transportation here. Trying to convince himself that not going down to the basement had nothing to do with nervousness and everything to do with the fact that he could see his breath when standing at the top of the stairs, Kyle returned to the kitchen and carefully closed the door.
“Find anything?” Connor called from the living room. He was at the front door, poking at the lock with something or other.
“It’s freezing,” Kyle replied, and exited the kitchen. Going around the table in the dining room gave him another doorway and a hallway so short it barely merited the name, just long enough for a door on the left and one on the end. The door on the left opened into a bathroom, and for just a moment, Kyle thought someone was standing in the bathtub. He struck automatically, and the shower curtain wrapped around his flailing hand and came crashing down.
“Kyle!” Connor’s footsteps pounded towards him.
“It’s just the - I’m fine,” Kyle called back. “Get the door open.”
“Fine, fine.” Connor reversed direction before he came into view and Kyle disentangled the stiff plastic from his hands. It flaked off, coating his skin with grime, and he turned to the sink to wash it off. The water was cold at first, but he stuck his hands under the flow anyway - he’d half-expected there to be no running water at all. The water warmed quickly, and somehow seemed more viscous than it should have been.
“Wait, I didn’t turn the hot water on,” Kyle muttered and looked down to see dark liquid flowing over his hands. He suppressed a shout and jerked his hands out of the sink, grabbing the nearest towel and scrubbing. As soon as he looked back at the sink, though, the water was clear again and his hands clean. He cleaned off every drop with the towel before switching off the tap anyway, wiping his dry hands on his damp shirt.
The last door in the hallway - the last room on the first floor - held more furniture, indeterminate shapes under white sheets. Kyle stepped into the room, heading for the window. Halfway there, something brushed his head, and he reached up absently to push it aside. He froze when his hand encountered the smooth leather of a shoe, and he looked up slowly and unwillingly to see a body swinging from a ceiling that was much higher than it had been when he’d walked through the door. Kyle did shout, then, and searched frantically for a way to cut the body down. It plummeted to the floor as soon as he tugged unthinkingly on one leg, rope slithering from the ceiling to coil over a chest Kyle knew all too well.
“Hal,” he whispered, and Connor came crashing into the room.
“What’s wrong?”
Kyle tugged the rope away from Hal’s neck, listening for a heartbeat and not finding one. An ugly mark circled Hal’s throat, but his face was curiously untouched; it was still and peaceful in a way that anyone who hadn’t known Hal would say was like sleep. Hal was never still, not even when he slept. His skin was still warm, and maybe there was still a chance. Kyle started CPR, locking his elbows like he’d been taught and pushing. “…four, five, breathe. Come ON, Hal.”
“Kyle, what are you doing?” Connor looked disturbed, edging slowly into the room as if there was something he didn’t quite want to approach.
“It’s Hal!” Kyle said between thrusts. Three, four, five, and breathe. “Help me, Connor!”
“Kyle, there’s no one there.”
Kyle opened his mouth to tell Connor that he could go to hell, but his hands crashed to the floor, and when he looked down again, Hal was gone. “What the…”
Connor pulled him to his feet, peering in his eyes with the flashlight, and Kyle let him do it. “You seem normal,” he said.
“But he was there,” Kyle insisted. “It was Hal!”
“Like it was Nero in the living room,” Connor said.
“I know what I saw!” Kyle climbed to his feet and shoved at the window. It opened easily, letting a blast of freezing air carry snowflakes into the room. Outside, a blizzard had started, snow swirling heavily enough to obscure the sight of the houses Kyle had seen across the street earlier.
“We really have to get out of here.” Connor reached out and shut the window. “You go in the other room where it’s warmer, and I’ll get the door open.” Kyle let himself be herded out of the room, but he stopped as soon as they got to the end of the hallway.
“This doesn’t add up,” he started to say, but the house shook as another earthquake hit. More severe than the last, it threw Kyle to the ground. Connor landed heavily on top of him, and Kyle could hear furniture toppling and glass breaking.
“Stay down!” Connor said, but Kyle could see the ceiling starting to cave over Connor’s head and there was no way a human could survive that. No matter how skilled Connor was, no matter how much training he’d had, it was meaningless in the face of an entire house collapsing on top of him. Kyle pushed Connor off and crouched above him, hands raised. Desperately he reached for Ion, for the energy that he knew was there, and cool green fire rushed through him. He flung up a bubble just as the ceiling crashed inwards, no time to think of anything more complex, barely enough time to reinforce it.
The weight of the house never hit. The shaking and the sounds stopped as soon as the bubble sealed around Connor and himself, the world outside going dark. “Connor?” Kyle said, but as he looked down, Connor faded into green transparency before flickering out, and Kyle found himself face down on the bed in his room at the Kaaterskill Notch. “Huh?” His throat felt as if it had been violated with sandpaper and his eyes were almost too heavy to keep open.
“Our apologies, Ion.” It was a Guardian voice, if not a Guardian face. “Despite our approval of how you handled these abilities the first time you possessed them, circumstances have changed. We had to be sure.”
“You…” Kyle pushed himself over so he could stare at where the Guardian should be. “You were testing me?” He couldn’t put the anger he felt into his voice; there wasn’t enough energy.
“It was necessary.” The Guardian’s voice faded on the last syllable, but Kyle wasn’t ready to finish the conversation. There was absolutely no call for the Guardians to test him by throwing him into a pile of crappy meaningless illusions. He summoned the Ion energies, willing his uniform on and intending to fly all the way to Oa and pound down the doors if he had too. He hurled himself into the air…
…only to find himself sitting straight up in bed, morning sunlight pouring through the windows and a nasty headache building behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples with his palms, but it didn’t help. He had the oddest impression that just before waking he’d been about to go somewhere, but now he couldn’t remember where or why. Only a fading memory of fury remained. For some reason, he had a strong sense that he’d been talking to Connor, and it made him wonder exactly what his friend was doing. “Should go visit him,” Kyle said to no one in particular, squinting at the sunlight.
FINIS
Title: Walk Through Walls
Fandom: Green Lantern Corps
Characters: Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke
Prompt: 078 - WHERE
Word Count: 5170
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Weirdness is perfectly normal for a Green Lantern. Really.
Author's Notes: Part 12 in the Acyl Chloride series. Slash.
Fanfic 100 - Green Lantern Corps - Walk Through Walls
Why am I soaking wet? Kyle Rayner was acutely aware of several things in the moment after waking, the first of which was possibly the least pertinent. Aside from the matter of being drenched in a liquid that he fervently hoped was only water, there was someone else pressed closely against his back. Furthermore, as far as he recalled, he shouldn’t have been asleep at all, much less in a bed that smelled distinctly musty. “Painting,” he muttered. “I was painting.”
Kaaterskil’s Notch was the last clear memory he had - moving a few things into a room, setting up a canvas, and picking up a paintbrush. He didn’t remember what he’d been about to paint, but the first color he’d chosen had been green.
“Okay, Kyle, where are we.” He bit down on his tongue to stop the nervous and barely audible monologue. Verbalizing his thoughts probably wasn’t a particularly good sign. Opening his eyes slowly and peering through his lashes got him a darkened room. A huge window above him and not more than a foot away showed a starry sky and patches of darkness he thought might be trees. The only part of this knowledge immediately relevant was that he was trapped between the wall and the person behind him. Very slowly, Kyle inched towards the wall. He wasn’t quiet enough, or careful enough, because whoever it was jerked awake.
“Who are you and what are you - Where have you taken me?” There was an edge of panic in the very familiar voice, so well suppressed that if Kyle hadn’t known better, he wouldn’t have noticed it at all.
“Connor!”
“Kyle? Kyle Rayner?”
At precisely this moment, Kyle realized that he not only had no link to the Central Battery on Oa, the source of his powers as Ion, but he had no access to any of the energy of Ion, either. He had intended to create a simple light, but not even the smallest spark formed. It wasn’t a lack of mental concentration, either - he’d been subjected to various types of mental chaff over his years as Green Lantern and all of them carried distinct side effects.
“I can’t - my - the Central Battery, it’s gone,” he said, trying to reach the internal reservoir. It was as if the Ion powers had never existed at all.
“What are you doing here? And why am I here?” Connor, as always, kept straight to the point, refusing to be distracted, although Kyle was more worried about being cut off from Oa than he was about waking up in odd places. It had happened before. Hell, it happened to Jack Knight all the time.
“Dunno,” Kyle muttered, still searching for Ion. There was nothing, absolutely nothing. It was like having the ground drop out under his feet, without warning, and the ceiling simultaneously smashing down.
“Where is here?”
“I don’t know!” Kyle struggled for control of his voice. “I’m sorry, Connor. I didn’t mean to shout.”
“It’s good to see you again,” Connor said softly, and Kyle thought he was smiling.
“You, too.” They’d been close, once, when Connor had been learning what it meant to be Green Arrow and Kyle had been struggling with the legacy of the Corps. Time, and space - not just ordinary earthbound distance, oh no - had pulled them slowly apart, and Kyle found himself regretting it. “How’ve you been?”
“Same old, same old,” Connor said, and chuckled. “It’s not a normal month if someone isn’t shooting at me at least once.”
“I hear that,” Kyle said, finding himself smiling as well.
“We should probably figure out where we are,” Connor said after a moment. “Please tell me that this is water,” he added.
“You’re all wet, too? I thought it was just me.”
A vague sense of movement was followed by the sound of water splashing onto the bed. “That came out of my mask,” Connor said.
“Your mask is tiny,” Kyle said. He might not have seen Connor much recently, but he did know that his friend’s mask had not changed - it was a narrow strip of cloth with holes in.
“Yes,” Connor answered drily.
“Hey, I’m in street clothes.” Kyle ran his hands down his body, squeezing the water out of his shirt and swiping it across his bare chest. It didn’t really get him any drier, and the wet denim of his jeans wouldn’t squeeze out anyway. “How come you’re in costume?” Another thought occurred to him. “Hey, have you got your bow?”
“No weapons, at all,” Connor said after a moment. He sounded faintly surprised, which Kyle supposed meant that even the tiny darts Connor kept around in case his more obvious weaponry was removed had been taken. “You don’t have your ring?”
“Don’t need one,” Kyle said. “By which,” he added, “I mean that I should be able to access the Central Battery without one, but I can’t feel it.”
“Ion, huh?” The bed shifted as Connor climbed off. “The floor’s lower than it looks. Be careful.”
How Connor could see anything at all in what appeared to Kyle to be pitch black was a mystery, but Kyle was willing to follow. He wiggled his foot off the edge of the bed, but it was lower than he’d expected, and the floor higher. He still managed to trip putting his other foot on the ground, and when he stood up, the mattress was above his waist.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, bruised ego and all that.” Kyle shuffled forward a few steps, hands in front of him. Maybe he’d hit a wall, and a light switch, and that would be an acceptable first step in figuring out where they were and how they’d gotten there.
“Um, Kyle?” Connor sounded a little worried now.
“Yeah?”
“What do you see?”
“A really, really dark room.” It figured that Connor would have really good night vision, which would be more useful if he’d find a light switch with it.
“The sun is shining in the window.” There was definite worry in Connor’s voice.
“Isn’t,” Kyle retorted. “I see stars.”
“Let me check your eyes,” Connor said, and Kyle realized Connor thought he meant little fuzzes of light consistent with a blow to the head.
“Not those -“ he started, and then felt Connor’s bare hands on his face. The room blurred slightly around him and the floor seemed to tilt. Kyle staggered, but so did Connor, and they ended up hanging onto each other for balance. When Kyle’s vision cleared, the room was considerably lighter, and the window over the bed displayed a sunset in the most glorious shades he’d ever seen.
“That was weird,” Connor said, pulling his attention away from the sky.
“Weird is not the word,” Kyle replied, letting go of Connor and pulling back. It was colder than it had been a moment ago, and he buttoned up his wet shirt. It didn’t help ward off the chill much, but anything was better than nothing. Now that he could see it, the room looked like an ordinary bedroom, double bed under a window and a chair and desk in one corner. Dust lay thick over everything, and their booted - in Connor’s case - and sneakered - in Kyle’s - feet had left prints in the pale carpet. Connor’s face was smudged with sticky wet dust, too, and his clothes. Kyle didn’t even want to look at his shirt - it was probably filthy, too, although that wasn’t really pertinent to the dilemma at hand. “Is that a door?”
The door in question was set flush against the wall, frame melding so smoothly with the floral wallpaper that Kyle wouldn’t have seen it if it had been papered, too. Connor eyed it for a moment, before motioning Kyle to one side. “In case it’s boobytrapped,” he said softly. Kyle felt his eyes widen and he flattened himself against the wall as Connor instructed.
“There’s nothing in the ceiling,” he offered quietly, belatedly scanning above their heads. If his years as a flying hero had taught him one thing, it was that nobody ever looked up, and he wasn’t about to make the same mistake.
“Thanks,” Connor returned just as quietly, conducting an investigation of the door. Kyle didn’t know what he was looking for, but Connor had produced a tiny flashlight from inside his boot and was determinedly searching for something, cupping his hand around the beam so that no stray light escaped. “Stand back,” he said eventually, returning the flashlight to his boot. Kyle was fairly sure Connor should have had a neat little belt with pockets on, but it appeared to be missing.
“You sure you don’t want me to do that?” he couldn’t help offering. Connor was the one more likely to be able to avoid any traps, but Kyle had been invulnerable - or close to it - for so long that it felt odd to have someone else protecting him.
“Stay there,” Connor said. Kyle put up his hands in a show of surrender and then covered his ears, just in case. Connor eased the door open from behind it, crouching down well below the average position one might expect from someone operating a doorknob. The door swung inwards with a squeak of rusty hinges, horrifically loud in the silence.
Nothing happened.
Connor probed the empty doorframe for a tripwire, just on the off-chance, but nothing happened. “I feel a little silly,” he said, standing and pulling the door all the way open.
“Better silly than dead,” Kyle said, joining him in front of the door.
“True,” Connor agreed, peering into the hallway. A window was directly on the left, outside shutters closed. On the right, the hallway stretched down into half-lit darkness, candle-shaped lights fastened to the wall in old-fashioned bronze sconces. Most of them were flickering or dim, only a few shining brightly. Some were out altogether. There was enough light to see that there were doors at regular intervals down the hall and that they, too, were set into the wall. Wood paneling ran halfway up the wall and stopped, giving way to wallpaper of the same floral print that had graced the room in which they had awoken. It made Kyle wonder if the place had been redecorated at all since the 70s.
“I’m not sure if this is an improvement,” he said.
“Pick a direction and start walking,” Connor suggested.
“Right, or right?”
“I’d say… right.” Connor grinned at him, and despite not knowing what the hell was going on, Kyle was glad of the chance to go through it with his friend.
“After you,” he said.
“Sure, make the archer take point,” Connor deadpanned.
Kyle grinned. “Not at all,” he said. “Age before beauty.”
“In that case, shouldn’t you be going first?” Connor asked innocently.
“Touche,” Kyle muttered, but he stepped through the doorway first. “It’s a door,” he announced. “Leads to a hallway.”
“You’ll be a detective someday, with that keen sense of observation.” Connor joined him, rapping his knuckles on the window. “It’s painted shut, did you notice? Just like the one in there.” He motioned to the room, but the door was closed.
“It was?” Kyle hadn’t noticed.
“Otherwise I would have suggested we go out that way,” Connor said.
“Painted shut, then,” Kyle repeated. He started down the hallway, Connor following. After perhaps thirty feet, it branched to both sides.
“Which way?” Connor looked down both hallways, but they looked identical to the one in which they were standing. The doors were at the same intervals as well, which meant that on each corner was a room with two doors, and that the building couldn’t be square, or any kind of quadrilateral; the window to the outside of their room had been directly opposite the door. He shared these conclusions; although he was fairly sure the information wasn’t relevant, he’d learned the hard way that sometimes it was the most innocuous piece of knowledge - or its lack - that got you killed or worse.
“You’re the one with a sense of direction.” Kyle had had the same thoughts about the shape of the building.
“Go straight,” Connor said after a moment. He started across the hall, but Kyle was poking at the wall with something. “What is that?”
“Pen,” Kyle said, holding up a drawing pen. “It was in my pocket, and this way, we know where we are.” He’d drawn a circle with an arrow pointing straight down. Across the hallway, he drew another one. “See? Roadsigns.”
Connor wasn’t convinced that the building would be enough of a maze to warrant graffiti on its wallpaper, but it didn’t hurt anything. Besides, they’d been kidnapped. Their kidnappers could deal with a little graffiti. As they moved on, it occurred to him that if anyone else happened to be in the building, they’d just made themselves that much easier to find. He told Kyle so.
“Oh.” Kyle hadn’t thought of that. “I’d rather fight than be lost,” he offered after a moment. Connor couldn’t argue much with that.
The hallway branched twice more before coming to a T-intersection, and Kyle marked the walls both times. None of the halls looked any different than the one they were currently following, and the T-intersection was no exception. “Which way?” Kyle whispered.
“Left,” Connor said. Kyle dutifully marked the wall with an arrow, and they continued. This time, the corridor bent sharply to the right, ending in a double swinging door. Kyle glanced at Connor, shrugged, and walked through the doors. “Wait!” Connor hissed sharply, but Kyle was gone. He’d only seen darkness through the doors in that brief moment, and the doors had swung shut with a heavy viscosity, as if the air around them was denser than it should have been. Connor stood for a moment, weighing the alternatives, but there was really only one thing to do. He stepped through the doors.
For a very brief moment, Connor fell. He landed on something softer than he’d expected, and a brief examination via flashlight proved it to be Kyle. His friend was out cold, something that did not bode well, particularly since Connor couldn’t find any sign of injury. He shone his light up towards the doors, but there was no sign of them. The walls were painted white, grimy and smudged with years of smoke. A half-door directly behind Connor had been nailed shut, boards criss-crossing it and determinedly fixed to the wall.
The hallway in front of them bore no resemblance to the one they’d fallen out of, except for being a hallway. The ceiling was low, and there were exactly two doors before the hall abruptly ended not far away. The floor was an incongruous linoleum, an indeterminate color and as grimy as the walls. Actual torches with flames were fixed to the wall at irregular intervals, burning slowly and steadily. Their smoke rose straight up, collecting on a ceiling that was all but black. Connor put his flashlight between his teeth and tried to rouse Kyle.
“Get off me-“ Kyle came awake swinging, but it was uncoordinated and ridiculously easy to dodge.
“It’s just me,” Connor said around the flashlight. “Hold still,” he added, and shone the flashlight in Kyle’s eyes. The pupils dilated normally, and Kyle answered three when Connor held up three fingers, so he figured that was good enough.
“I see spots now,” Kyle complained, rubbing his eyes. Connor’s flashlight had gotten brighter.
“Complain later,” Connor suggested. He started down the second hall, but the house started to shake back and forth, dancing as if in an earthquake. Connor braced himself against the wall for stability as the shaking got worse, and Kyle clung to Connor for dear life. The torches knocked against the walls, but none of them fell or went out, although Kyle was expecting that they all would. As abruptly as it had started, the shaking subsided, but as it did so, something behind the nailed over door started pounding. It was a very regular beat, three taps in rapid succession, a pause, and one more. Both Kyle and Connor swung around to stare at the door as the pattern repeated itself, once, twice, three times.
“Hello?” Connor said loudly. “Is someone in there?”
The knocking stopped, halfway through a repetition, and then started up again as a steady series of single blows.
“Hello?” Connor said again, taking a step towards the door. The knocking sped up almost imperceptibly and the torch closest to the door flickered. Connor took another step, Kyle sticking close to his side and glancing behind them periodically. Without warning, the flickering torch died, the flame vanishing and the embers glowing brightly for a bare second before dying. The smoke rising from the ash darkened and slowed to a halt. “Are you hurt?” Connor said more loudly. The knocking sped up again, and Connor made as if to start walking, but Kyle tugged at his arm and pointed mutely at the bottom of the door.
Frost crept out from beneath the door, sparkling in the flickering light remaining in the hallway and creeping up over the wood of the door and the dirty paint indiscriminately. It spread along the floor, too, and Kyle pulled Connor away. Whatever was behind that door didn’t need their help. The line of frost reached the next torch and it went, out, too. Connor was moving on his own, now, and the two of them reached the curve of the hallway just as the last torches flickered and died. The hall swung into a staircase leading down.
Kyle caught the barest glimpse of a set of stairs before the last torch flickered out and he could feel a chill on the back of his neck. A strong hand encircled his wrist and pulled him downwards, and he followed Connor without hesitation. The stairs were spaced oddly and he stumbled on the third one down, sure he was going to fall and take Connor with him, but although he’d been sure he’d seen an entire flight of steps, flat ground met his questing feet. Momentum propelled him ahead of Connor and through a doorway, and once again the flickering of firelight met his eyes.
“Didn’t we -“ Connor turned around the check the stairs, but there was only a blank stone wall behind them.
“I’m getting damn sick of this,” Kyle growled. The current room was huge, walls of stone and a vaulted ceiling. A fireplace big enough to walk into without ducking his head held a hot blaze smelling of pine, but there were almost no furnishings in the room itself. A rug that looked to be made of some kind of dead carnivore was in front of the fire, and various lamps without cords dotted the walls. There was nothing else. Kyle stalked over to one of the lamps, picked it up, and threw it into the fire.
“I am done playing your games!” he shouted to the ceiling. Nothing happened, so he went to the next lamp, and the next, smashing them against the wall. The ambient light in the room, oddly, did not decrease. “Show yourself!” Kyle shouted, somewhere around the sixth smashed lamp. Connor remained by the fireplace, two shards of more or less flat glass in his hands, eyes scanning the walls and ceiling.
Shattering the twelfth and last lamp plunged the room into darkness. Kyle clenched his hands into fists and put his back to where he thought the wall should be. “I hate magic,” he muttered. It never ended in anything good. The scent of dust and mold filled the air, and Kyle sneezed. Light filtered dimly through his eyelids, and when he opened his eyes again, it was to see a the living room of what would have been a perfectly normal North American suburban house if it hadn’t had sheets over all the furniture. Intact light bulbs would also have gone a long way towards fostering the illusion of normalcy.
“Door’s locked,” Connor said. He was standing at a wooden door with two locks and no windows. There were curtains over what looked to be a picture window between two armchairs, but they wouldn’t budge when Connor pulled on them.
“This is getting ridiculous.” Kyle picked up one of the chairs, sheet and all, and threw it at the window. It crashed through, shattering the glass and landing with a crunch of snow. Cold air blew in through the hole in the glass. Kyle picked up a lamp, yanked the cord out of the wall, and knocked the rest of the glass out of the frame. “All right, let’s go.” He grabbed the frame and pulled himself up onto it, but as soon as both his feet left the ground, vertigo swept through him and he pitched backwards. Connor caught him, but it wasn’t until Kyle had both feet on the ground that the dizziness receded.
“I don’t think -“ Connor started, but Kyle wasn’t about to let a lack of balance stop him. He took a running leap at the window, but this time the vertigo kicked in before he could properly push off and he nearly crashed into the wall. Connor caught him that time, too. “Bad idea,” he said succinctly.
Kyle shook his head irritably. “There has to be a way out of here.” He had more to say on that subject, but his words were forestalled by another familiar figure tumbling through the broken window.
“Alex Nero,” he said. “So this is your doing?” It all made sense - Nero could create constructs that rivaled Kyle’s for complexity and realism.
“What have you done to me?” Nero roared, and launched himself at Kyle. Kyle braced himself against the impact, but Nero went straight through him and faded before he hit the ground. Kyle staggered, staring at the spot where Nero had vanished.
“Who are you talking to?” Connor asked, puzzlement writ over his features.
“I-he was right there!” Kyle pointed. “You didn’t see him?”
“You must’ve been banged harder than I thought.” Connor tried to shine the flashlight in Kyle’s eyes again, but Kyle pushed him away.
“I know what I saw.”
“If you say so.” Connor was clearly humoring him.
“I’m checking the other rooms.” Kyle stalked towards the doorway. Opposite the front door, it led to a dining room complete with table and hutch of dishes looming out of the shadows, kitchen on the left and ending with a small living room area occupying the far wall on the right. The kitchen’s one window was locked and too small to climb through, so Kyle left it alone. There was nothing else of interest in the kitchen - empty cupboards and dust - but there was something unquestionably eerie about the whole situation. A tapping at the window made him jump, but it was only a tree.
An unlocked door, at right angles to the kitchen doorway, proved to lead to a set of stairs winding down to the left and an outside door straight ahead. The outside door was locked as well. Kyle briefly considered trying to smash it, but it probably wouldn’t do any good. He left the basement alone for the moment, as well; cold rolled up from it in waves and he’d never gotten out of a building by going underground. Except maybe in New York, where they had subways, but he sincerely doubted there was any kind of public transportation here. Trying to convince himself that not going down to the basement had nothing to do with nervousness and everything to do with the fact that he could see his breath when standing at the top of the stairs, Kyle returned to the kitchen and carefully closed the door.
“Find anything?” Connor called from the living room. He was at the front door, poking at the lock with something or other.
“It’s freezing,” Kyle replied, and exited the kitchen. Going around the table in the dining room gave him another doorway and a hallway so short it barely merited the name, just long enough for a door on the left and one on the end. The door on the left opened into a bathroom, and for just a moment, Kyle thought someone was standing in the bathtub. He struck automatically, and the shower curtain wrapped around his flailing hand and came crashing down.
“Kyle!” Connor’s footsteps pounded towards him.
“It’s just the - I’m fine,” Kyle called back. “Get the door open.”
“Fine, fine.” Connor reversed direction before he came into view and Kyle disentangled the stiff plastic from his hands. It flaked off, coating his skin with grime, and he turned to the sink to wash it off. The water was cold at first, but he stuck his hands under the flow anyway - he’d half-expected there to be no running water at all. The water warmed quickly, and somehow seemed more viscous than it should have been.
“Wait, I didn’t turn the hot water on,” Kyle muttered and looked down to see dark liquid flowing over his hands. He suppressed a shout and jerked his hands out of the sink, grabbing the nearest towel and scrubbing. As soon as he looked back at the sink, though, the water was clear again and his hands clean. He cleaned off every drop with the towel before switching off the tap anyway, wiping his dry hands on his damp shirt.
The last door in the hallway - the last room on the first floor - held more furniture, indeterminate shapes under white sheets. Kyle stepped into the room, heading for the window. Halfway there, something brushed his head, and he reached up absently to push it aside. He froze when his hand encountered the smooth leather of a shoe, and he looked up slowly and unwillingly to see a body swinging from a ceiling that was much higher than it had been when he’d walked through the door. Kyle did shout, then, and searched frantically for a way to cut the body down. It plummeted to the floor as soon as he tugged unthinkingly on one leg, rope slithering from the ceiling to coil over a chest Kyle knew all too well.
“Hal,” he whispered, and Connor came crashing into the room.
“What’s wrong?”
Kyle tugged the rope away from Hal’s neck, listening for a heartbeat and not finding one. An ugly mark circled Hal’s throat, but his face was curiously untouched; it was still and peaceful in a way that anyone who hadn’t known Hal would say was like sleep. Hal was never still, not even when he slept. His skin was still warm, and maybe there was still a chance. Kyle started CPR, locking his elbows like he’d been taught and pushing. “…four, five, breathe. Come ON, Hal.”
“Kyle, what are you doing?” Connor looked disturbed, edging slowly into the room as if there was something he didn’t quite want to approach.
“It’s Hal!” Kyle said between thrusts. Three, four, five, and breathe. “Help me, Connor!”
“Kyle, there’s no one there.”
Kyle opened his mouth to tell Connor that he could go to hell, but his hands crashed to the floor, and when he looked down again, Hal was gone. “What the…”
Connor pulled him to his feet, peering in his eyes with the flashlight, and Kyle let him do it. “You seem normal,” he said.
“But he was there,” Kyle insisted. “It was Hal!”
“Like it was Nero in the living room,” Connor said.
“I know what I saw!” Kyle climbed to his feet and shoved at the window. It opened easily, letting a blast of freezing air carry snowflakes into the room. Outside, a blizzard had started, snow swirling heavily enough to obscure the sight of the houses Kyle had seen across the street earlier.
“We really have to get out of here.” Connor reached out and shut the window. “You go in the other room where it’s warmer, and I’ll get the door open.” Kyle let himself be herded out of the room, but he stopped as soon as they got to the end of the hallway.
“This doesn’t add up,” he started to say, but the house shook as another earthquake hit. More severe than the last, it threw Kyle to the ground. Connor landed heavily on top of him, and Kyle could hear furniture toppling and glass breaking.
“Stay down!” Connor said, but Kyle could see the ceiling starting to cave over Connor’s head and there was no way a human could survive that. No matter how skilled Connor was, no matter how much training he’d had, it was meaningless in the face of an entire house collapsing on top of him. Kyle pushed Connor off and crouched above him, hands raised. Desperately he reached for Ion, for the energy that he knew was there, and cool green fire rushed through him. He flung up a bubble just as the ceiling crashed inwards, no time to think of anything more complex, barely enough time to reinforce it.
The weight of the house never hit. The shaking and the sounds stopped as soon as the bubble sealed around Connor and himself, the world outside going dark. “Connor?” Kyle said, but as he looked down, Connor faded into green transparency before flickering out, and Kyle found himself face down on the bed in his room at the Kaaterskill Notch. “Huh?” His throat felt as if it had been violated with sandpaper and his eyes were almost too heavy to keep open.
“Our apologies, Ion.” It was a Guardian voice, if not a Guardian face. “Despite our approval of how you handled these abilities the first time you possessed them, circumstances have changed. We had to be sure.”
“You…” Kyle pushed himself over so he could stare at where the Guardian should be. “You were testing me?” He couldn’t put the anger he felt into his voice; there wasn’t enough energy.
“It was necessary.” The Guardian’s voice faded on the last syllable, but Kyle wasn’t ready to finish the conversation. There was absolutely no call for the Guardians to test him by throwing him into a pile of crappy meaningless illusions. He summoned the Ion energies, willing his uniform on and intending to fly all the way to Oa and pound down the doors if he had too. He hurled himself into the air…
…only to find himself sitting straight up in bed, morning sunlight pouring through the windows and a nasty headache building behind his eyes. He rubbed his temples with his palms, but it didn’t help. He had the oddest impression that just before waking he’d been about to go somewhere, but now he couldn’t remember where or why. Only a fading memory of fury remained. For some reason, he had a strong sense that he’d been talking to Connor, and it made him wonder exactly what his friend was doing. “Should go visit him,” Kyle said to no one in particular, squinting at the sunlight.
FINIS