Chapter Text
“I’m busy,” Guy Gardner said. Firmly. The damp cloth in his hand as he polished the bar to a shine that would put most mirrors to shame was a mute testament to the truth of his words.
“The bar is clean, Guy.” Kyle stood in the doorway, arms crossed and foot tapping impatiently.
“I ain’t done yet,” Guy muttered. He knew Kyle was planning something – no, not planning. The appropriate word was “plotting.” Unless it involved football – something he strongly doubted, given the total lack of the sport on Oa – he wasn’t interested.
Kyle opened his mouth to protest again, but synchronicity intervened in the form of a mixed blessing. Both of their rings chirped simultaneously. “Lantern Rayner. Lantern Gardner. Your presence is required.”
One of the neatest tricks the rings performed – in Guy’s opinion – was making the Lantern uniform, which meant no wasted time changing into a spare costume. Thirty seconds was all he needed to be properly attired and on his way.
“This isn’t over, you know,” Kyle said, giving him a sideways look.
“Yeah, yeah.” Guy spared a moment of attention to again mentally curse himself for giving in to Kyle’s puppy eyes on that one occasion. Sure, the kid was cute, and he was a good buddy, and could be counted on in a fight, and Guy was absolutely not interested. Except that there had been that one time he’d let Kyle kiss him, and although he’d come to his senses before it had gone any farther, Kyle had taken it as a green light. Guy had been under a continuous onslaught of seduction attempts ever since.
“Lanterns Rayner and Gardner.” Salaak’s voice interrupted Guy’s thoughts and he pulled up to land lightly in front of his superior officer. “Sector 314 requires your assistance.”
Prodding for further information got them a bloody revolution on one of the planets in 314, which explained what its Lanterns were doing, and a trail of wreckage possibly connected with one or more members of the Sinestro Corps.
“Go kill the monster, Guy,” Guy muttered under his breath as they sped towards the site of the latest report from 314.
“Did you say something?”
“No.” There was no wind in space, although Guy wished there was; it would make enough noise to block conversation, and he didn’t really feel like talking. That didn’t stop Kyle from trying to strike up a conversation, although he gave up after the twelfth or so monosyllabic reply.
The ‘trail of wreckage,’ when they found it, turned out to be confined to a single planet. Guy’s ring informed him that the planet, due to an axial wobble, was unable to support long-term life and was currently in the throes of an ice age.
“Then why do we care if someone busts it up?” Guy followed his ring’s directions anyway, landing in what had apparently been a mountain range. “….oh.”
It looked as if something had ripped the bones of the planet through its skin and battered it with the pieces. Rubble was scattered haphazardly in a swath miles wide, straight through the only portion of the planet not frozen over.
“Wow.” Kyle whistled softly, hovering above Guy. “If this is what the Sinestro Corps’s been recruiting lately, we might have a little trouble bringing them in.”
“This is nothin’,” Guy retorted automatically, although he didn’t think he’d seen anything like this since the League had taken on Doomsday.
“It went that way,” Kyle pointed out unnecessarily. Guy could see exactly where the trail was heading.
“Lead the way, kid,” he said, and let Kyle go first. The trail progressed farther southward – didn’t this planet have any oceans, Guy thought, and then realized that they were frozen over – until it ended in a crater deep enough to crack through the seabed below the ice. Smoke eddied upwards, dark gray mingling with the white of steam, partially obscuring the depths of the crater. A tremor shook the earth as it settled against itself, and fresh steam hissed upwards.
“Do you see anything down there?” Kyle was floating towards the murky bottom of the crater before Guy had a chance to answer.
“MOVE!” he shouted, diving towards a flash of movement in his peripheral vision before he’d had the chance to see it properly. It moved more quickly than he’d anticipated, and Guy felt the wind of its passing brush his face before it knocked Kyle out of the sky. Green light sputtered out as Kyle fell, and Guy raced to catch him.
Blue sky flashed past Guy’s vision as an incredibly strong hand grabbed his ankle and swung him around. He reacted instinctively, sending a blast of pure power straight down into what had to be the creature’s face. It let go, and Guy got a good look at it for the first time. It was huge, muscled like an ape and grinning through a mouthful of now-broken razor-sharp teeth. Pale gray skin covered an elongated body ending in a fluted tail and stretched over a pair of gargantuan wings. The creature’s two sets of limbs both ended in clawed hands, and when it opened its eyes, they burned with a reddish light.
“Ugly motherfucker,” Guy said, and hit it with a giant fist. It moved with the blow and smirked at him, so he nailed it between two fists and slammed them down towards the ground. The impact shook the earth again, but the creature wriggled free and flew straight for Guy. He sent burst after burst of energy towards it, but it dodged more quickly than he could see, and only a quick last-second shield saved him from getting his throat torn out. The creature had him by the neck with one hand, though, which made the fact that Guy had caught its other three much less comforting. His own left hand was still free and without breaking eye contact, Guy balled it into a fist and slammed it into the creature’s throat. Its grip loosened as it doubled over and Guy pulled backwards, catching its fourth hand in another construct.
“All right, you –“ he started.
A whistling sound was his only warning before its tail slammed into the side of his head and Guy was momentarily stunned. He slipped downwards, the constructs losing shape and fuzzing out. The creature dove for him, top two hands balled together. Guy checked his fall just in time to see the blow coming, and knew he had no time to dodge or throw up a shield. In the split second before it hit, something flashed between him and it. The creature turned and vanished as Kyle tumbled downwards for the second time. Guy threw out a construct to catch him, watching for the creature.
The ground was less than five feet away when it came out of nowhere, but Guy knew how it moved now. He threw a wall between himself and it at the last possible moment and let it knock itself into unconsciousness. Folding the wall around it was easy, and Guy left it in a bubble while he finished putting Kyle down.
“Idiot,” he muttered. “What kinda dumbass with a power ring uses himself instead of a construct to block a hit?” Kyle was, thankfully, not dead, but he showed no signs of waking, either, and groaned alarmingly if Guy so much as touched his side. “Gardner reporting in,” he said into the ring, carefully lifting Kyle into another bubble and towing both towards Oa as quickly as he could. “Rayner’s down. Requesting medical assistance on return.”
“And the Sinestro?” Salaak’s voice came back.
“I dunno what this thing is, but it ain’t one o’the Sinestros. It ain’t dead either, so I’m bringin’ it back. Gardner out.”
Towing the bubbles was quicker than riding in one of them all the way back to Oa, but Guy didn’t want to leave Kyle alone. Basic first aid did not apply when the skin wasn’t actually broken, and Guy didn’t know how to do anything else. He could keep Kyle immobile, but it seemed pointless, as Kyle wasn’t even twitching. “Idiot,” Guy said again. For the first time he started to worry that Kyle might die, and the thought was actually frightening.
The creature woke and started throwing itself against the walls of its construct around the halfway point; Guy was tempted to let it break through and see how well it could breathe in space, but decided not to on the off chance that it would not, in fact, implode. The extra effort he had to spend to maintain the shield around the creature meant that he wasn’t able to keep as close of an eye on Kyle, and he missed it when Kyle opened his eyes.
Kyle’s shout of surprise was harder to miss, but Guy was navigating Oa’s atmosphere at that point and didn’t have much concentration to spare. “Guy, watch out!”
A poorly defined lance shot from Kyle’s ring towards the creature, surprising Guy enough that both bubbles nearly shattered. “Cut it out, Kyle!” he ground out, setting the bubbles down, but Kyle had passed out again and his construct dissolved. Guy let his bubble vanish, too, which the creature apparently took as a sign to rage harder.
“Lantern Gardner, what the hell is that?” Soranik Natu, serving both as Lantern of Sector 1417 and as medic for the Corps on Oa, materialized behind Guy.
“Fuck if I know, Natu. Don’t really care.”
“Watch your language,” Natu said absently, a construct folding into place around Kyle. “I’ve got him.”
Guy watched her bring Kyle into the medical center before taking his pet off to meet Salaak.
The next few hours saw something of a celebrity around the Oan capital – the violently destructive creature seemed to be the last remnant of a species thought dead for thousands of years. It was not actually sentient, and Guy wasn’t sure what use it was outside of archaeological curiosity. He turned it over to Sector 318 – the origin of the creature, although no one was sure how it had moved four sectors away – with the warning that if Kyle died he was going to come back and kill it, no matter how important a scientific discovery it was.
“You can chop it up and see what makes it tick if I kill it,” he said in response to 318’s protests and went to see if Natu had finished.
Kyle was awake and sitting on the edge of a hospital bed when Guy got there, and a wave of relief surprising in its strength washed over Guy. Kyle’s ribs were wrapped tightly, and a bruise was blossoming across the side of his face, but he seemed energetic enough. “Leggo, Natu.”
“Only if you promise to stay there.” Natu was physically holding him down, with no apparent effort.
“Will not,” Kyle said. “I’ve got plans. That don’t involve being here.”
“I don’t have time to sit here and hold you down,” Natu snapped. “You’re lucky your insides are still mostly intact, but if you keep moving, one of your broken ribs will more than likely poke holes in something and waste all my hard work.”
“Give her hell, Kyle,” Guy said, grinning.
“Don’t you start,” Natu said. “If I’d known you Earthmen would react to a sedative like that, I never would have given it to him.”
“Don’t look at me.” Guy raised his hands in protest. “Ain’t my fault.”
“Take him home, then,” Natu said, in a tone that suggested her patience was nearing its end. “I’m busy and I don’t want to have to patch him up again.” She narrowed her eyes. “How does a dumb animal like that get the best of two Honor Guard Lanterns, anyway?”
“I’ll take him, I’ll take him.” It wasn’t like he couldn’t keep an eye on Kyle and run the bar. It wasn’t likely to be that busy anyway.
“Keep him still.” Natu glanced down at Kyle and handed Guy his ring before vanishing into the hallway.
“I can hear you, you know.” Kyle yawned, covering his face with both hands and wincing as he moved.
“Yeah, yeah, let’s get outta here.” Guy pulled Kyle to his feet. “Or are you sure you don’t wanna sleep here?”
“Nuh-uh,” Kyle said. “I got plans.” He leaned against Guy heavily enough that Guy was supporting most of his weight, eyes closed.
“Right,” Guy said. “Plans. How about we start back at the bar.”
“The bar,” Kyle said distinctly, “is not part of my plan.”
“It is now,” Guy told him. “Can you fly?” It was a rhetorical question, but Kyle nodded against his shoulder, so Guy put his ring back on. Kyle automatically manifested his uniform, complete with mask, and Guy constructed a platform to bring them both back to the bar.
Kyle was quiet enough during the ride back that Guy thought he actually had fallen asleep, but once inside, he stiffened and stepped back. “No,” he said. “I told you, this is not in the plan.”
“What plan, Kyle?” Guy re-locked the door and set about checking his stock.
“The plan was for you,” Kyle informed him, moving slowly to the nearest table and sitting down carefully. That mostly counted as not moving.
“Uh huh,” Guy said, continuing with his preparations for opening.
“I’ve got a football,” Kyle said, waving both hands around a vaguely spherical piece of nothing.
“The real kind or one of them pansy European ones?”
“The real kind.” Kyle looked around, as if he expected the football to materialize. Guy wondered exactly what had been in Soranik’s sedative and if it meant Kyle would actually pass out at some point. While watching him ramble on wasn’t without amusement, Kyle acting drunk was a lot more fun when it actually involved alcohol as opposed to supposedly extinct monsters and broken ribs.
“And what are you gonna do with a football?” Guy asked, humoring him.
“Play football,” Kyle answered, in a tone that clearly said ‘What else do you expect me to do with it?’
“Kyle, you don’t know how to play football.” Maybe he’d just leave the bar closed this evening. It wasn’t likely to be busy, after all, and then he could more easily keep Kyle from doing something dumb.
“You’re gonna teach me.”
“You don’t even like football,” Guy said, reiterating Kyle’s answer every time he’d tried to get him to watch a game and trying to divert Kyle from his obvious path.
“But you like football,” Kyle pointed out, as if he’d presented Guy with the answer to the easiest puzzle in the world.
“That’s nice, Kyle,” Guy said after a moment of squishing the little twinge that had snuck up on him. “But I’m still not gonna fuck you.”
“You are impossible.” Kyle stared at him with a perfect semblance of total sobriety for approximately seven seconds before standing and moving towards the stairs in the back of the bar. He made it up three steps before the sedative finally had its intended effect. Guy, having expected something of that sort, managed to catch him and haul him up to the guest bedroom. Kyle slept through the entire process, up to and including the removal of his ring in case of nightmares. (Guy had seen what happened when the ring manifested nightmares. It wasn’t pretty.)
“It ain’t gonna work, kid,” he said before turning off the light, but he left the door open. Just in case.