Archive of Our Own ^beta

Mike breaks up with him on a Tuesday. This, Guy maintains, is a real dick move for a lot of reasons. One, that Mike did it on a Tuesday at all, when he knows (because Guy told him) that Tuesdays are Guy’s favorite day of the week because it’s the day that the little indie theater in Bakerline shows General Glory movies—and not the new shitty gritty ooh-look-how-dark-I-am reboot series, the good ones. Not that he can always sneak away to Bakerline (stopping intergalactic crime takes precedence) but he likes knowing that the movies are there for him to stop in and watch on the big screen if he’s got a Tuesday free. What kind of guy would even think about ruining the sanctity of General Glory Tuesdays? A dick, that’s who.

Second of all: who the fuck dumps him? He’s Green Lantern! Leader of the Justice Gang, deemed noble and fearless and thus worthy of Abin Sur’s power ring, charged with the power and authority to protect and serve the people of Earth. And yeah, sure, Mike’s got his big brain and his good looks and his T-spheres and all those other inventions of his on the market, but is Mike the five-time winner of Metropolis Star Magazine’s Most Charming Superhero Award? (Would’ve been more if not for Superman’s clean-cut dimpled hero schtick, but whatever.) No? Didn’t think so.

But the biggest dick move of the bunch is how Mike goes about it in the first place. Here they are on a Tuesday morning, alone in the Hall while Kendra drops by the local morning show to teach the Metropolitan masses how to make vegan omelets, and Mike comes strolling up to him in the kitchen while Guy is waiting for his Pop-Tarts to pop out of the toaster and says, point-blank, “I don’t think we should see each other anymore.” Just like that. Fucking yanks the rug out from under him without batting a lash. 

Guy gapes. He’s not proud of it. He was already sort of eyeing Mike from the minute he walked in, because Mike’s wearing a tank top that shows off his shoulders and sweatpants that show off his ass and he’s sweaty and a little messy from whatever he’d been tinkering with in his garage all night, and Guy was maybe thinking about sucking Mike off against the fridge and then taking a shower with him, because the only thing more fun than getting dirty together is getting clean together. But now all Guy can do is stand there like a deer in the headlights with his mouth half-open and his blood pounding in his ears and his heart in a death spiral, thinking, Wait, what? No.

The toaster dings, and his Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts jump out, startling the shit out of him. Not that he shows it. If Mike wants to play it cool, then so can he. Good fucking luck to Michael Mr. Terrific Holt in finding somebody better than him. “Sure, whatever,” he says. “Fine by me.”

“Fine, then,” Mike says. He walks past Guy to grab one of his stupid healthy smoothies out of the fridge and walks back out again, cool as a fucking breeze.

Guy shoves one of the Pop-Tarts into his mouth, chewing angrily. The filling is still burning hot from the toaster. His eyes water.

(Just because of the Pop-Tart. Obviously. No other reason.)

It’s not like Guy ever really thought this thing of his and Mike’s would last. He wasn’t spending his free time imagining himself and Mike in a house with a white picket fence and matching rocking chairs on the porch and a golden retriever running around in the yard. He’s not that fucking cliché, first of all; any dream he’d have would be way more rad than that. But more importantly, he’s a goddamn superhero. A member of the Green Lantern Corps. He took a vow. And that vow doesn’t leave room for anything other than fighting crime day in and day out until he goes out in a spectacular blaze of glory saving the world, permanently enshrining Guy’s legacy as one of the all-time greats. They’ll televize his funeral and cry for him on the air. People will try to fling themselves onto his casket. Elton John will perform a new version of Candles in the Wind in his honor. He’s got it all planned out.

The point is, even if Guy wanted to roll the dice and try for some cliché happily ever after pre-blaze of glory, there’s not a whole lot of people a guy like him (ha ha) could choose from to share it with. He fucks civilians now and then (the cape chasers are really enthusiastic, and great for his ego), but he’s never gonna date one and he knows it. What would that even look like? What would a civilian know about the kind of responsibility that weighs down Guy’s shoulders every day? Civilians who try to make it work with superheroes always end up as collateral damage. The target on their backs is too big for their love stories to end any other way but tragically. (Just ask General Glory and Agent Sharp.)

That sort of shit is why Guy’s fellow men and women of the cloth tend to prefer dating each other, if they date at all. Superheroes might have planet-size targets on their backs, but at least they know from the get-go that the targets are there. They chose this life. They know the struggles, the pressure, how high the highs are and how low the lows can go. Which is why what he and Mike had going on worked so well. For the last few months, they’d get their adrenaline up and their blood pumping saving Metropolis from an alien beast or a Metahuman thug with delusions of grandeur, and afterwards they’d go back to Mike’s condo or Guy’s apartment and have hot, wild, incredible sex on the nearest horizontal surface, followed by dinner, a movie, making out on the couch, round two, round three, round four, et cetera. The sky was the limit, and the order of all of the above wasn’t set in stone. Not once during that time did Guy have to think about what he said or explain himself or feel guilty when work got in the way of dinner plans, because he knew Mike would get it. It was fun, what they had. It was easy. It was so fucking good. Except now he doesn’t have it anymore, and Mike didn’t even bother to tell him why before taking it (and himself) away.

Obviously he’ll find something even better with somebody else eventually. There are plenty of other supers in the sky, and he’s a catch; he’ll have his pick of the bunch. Who needs Mr. Not-So-Terrific anyway. Not Guy Gardner. That’s for damn sure. 

So no, Guy’s not bothered by Mike dumping him. What bothers him is that for the last two weeks, Mike’s been acting like nothing ever happened between them at all—like he’s got no memory of all the mornings he woke Guy with his mouth, or the time Guy fucked him so good they broke the bed and Mike dragged him to IKEA the next morning and made Guy pay for a replacement with his own money, not the LordTech company card. Guy probably could ask for his money back now that they’re through—he’s definitely within his rights—but that would mean bringing up the elephant in the room, and like fuck is he gonna do that if Mike hasn’t. So he keeps his mouth shut too, and he doesn’t let his frustration bleed into his work one iota. Because he’s a goddamn motherfucking professional. In fact, he’s so good at keeping his shit locked down that when he hears Kendra coo, “Where’re you off to looking all sexy, Terrific?” Guy doesn’t choke on his gum by sheer force of will.

Mike turns. He’s traded in his Mr. Terrific mask and getup (and all the grime and sweat of a hard day’s work) for sunglasses, a leather jacket, a crisp white shirt, sneakers, and skinny jeans. Jesus fucking Christ. Guy doesn’t know what he wants to do more, gawk at how form-fitting they are or drop to his knees in front of Mike and unzip him with his teeth. Or so he would if he cared. Which he doesn’t. Not even at all.

If Mike notices Guy’s dilemma, he doesn’t let on. He’s as sphinxlike as ever when he says, “Nowhere special.”

“Uh huh,” Kendra says, grinning from ear to ear. “Well, give ‘nowhere special’ my best.”

Mike smirks. Guy thinks he might pass out. Probably just a low blood sugar thing. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Be safe!” Kendra hollers after him. “Use a condom!” After the door swings shut behind him, Kendra collapses into an empty swivel chair and spins around and around, giggling. “Ooh, our boy can get it.” She pulls out her phone and starts typing. “And if he’s gonna get some, then so am I. What time does that rooftop club in New Troy open up again?”

“You, uh.” Guy feels like somebody thumped him, hard, right between the eyes. “You think Terrific’s looking to get laid tonight?”

“You don’t wear pants like that to the grocery store, Guy,” Kendra says, rolling her eyes. “Not unless you’re looking to get some in the dairy aisle.”

Guy stares at the spot where Mike was just standing. He never wore those when he and Guy went out on the town together. Guy would definitely have remembered. And now he’s wearing them just for some fucking one night stand? Who’s gonna be peeling him out of those skinny jeans tonight? A civilian? Another fucking superhero? Somebody who isn’t Guy Gardner? How the actual fuck is that fair?

Kendra’s frowning at him. “What’s up with you?”

“Nothing,” Guy says automatically, and Kendra scoffs before returning her attention to her phone.

“Sure, Lan.”

Four hours later, Guy is what can charitably be described as drrrrrrunk, all thanks to the magical elixir known planetside as tequila. He doesn’t imbibe often—even taking out the fact that he’s a role model for children everywhere, saving the world on short notice is hard to pull off when you’re plastered—but those goddamn skinny jeans of Mike’s have proven to be the cherry on top of the shit sundae that is the last two weeks of his life. Ergo: booze.

“And he didn’t even say why he dumped you?” says the blonde sitting next to him at the bar. Guy’s not entirely clear on who she is or where she and her dog came from, but she’s really good at this whole righteous indignation routine. She can stay. “What a dick.”

“Right?” Guy exclaims, vindicated. “Like, just ‘cause you gotta great dick doesn’t mean you gotta be one.” He knocks back another shot and shivers. “And I thought, y’know, I thought we had something. Not just ‘cause the sex was great. Which it was, by the way. I mean, Jesus. You know?” He lowers his voice and leans in. “We broke his bed one time.”

“Nice,” says Blondie. The dog barks as if in agreement. “Up top, bitch.”

Guy tries to high five her, misses, and elects to pretend he never moved at all. “And guys like us,” he continues, invigorated, “guys like us, we don’t date unless we’re dating guys like us. Or girls, whatever. ‘Cause of the job. Only we get it. And Mike got it, you know? So I was like, yeah man, fuck casual, let’s do it, supers stick together, let’s touch dicks on the reg, ‘cause a guy like that, all that competence, and those biiiiig hands, I mean, you know he’s packing. And then we—so there was sex, a lot of sex, terrific sex, ha ha, but there was also, you know, going out for dinner, and breakfast sometimes, and seeing movies, all that dating shit, which, by the way, I liked doing all that dating shit together. I thought he did too. I thought we had a good thing going.” Guy sneers and sing-songs, “But somebody didn’t think so. Somebody, not naming names, Mike thinks he can just wear those fucking skinny jeans out on the town ‘cause Kendra says he wants somebody else to fuck him now. You know?”

Blondie nods solemnly. Guy relaxes.

“I knew it. I knew you’d get it. You’re like, you look like. Y’know. You get it. Yo!” He whistles for the bartender. “Another shot, compadre!”

“So,” Blondie says after shot number ten (maybe eleven) is downed and discarded. Her eyes are glowing with interest. And maybe glowing literally. Who’s to say. “What’re you gonna do about this Mike dude, huh? You gonna fuck somebody else to get back at him?”

Guy makes a face. He could, definitely, but now that he thinks about it he doesn’t really like the idea of bringing somebody new back to his place. Plus Mike wouldn’t be there to watch Guy move on, so. No point. “I just,” he begins dramatically, then slumps over the counter. “I just want him to know. You know? He’s gotta know what he’s missing. He’s gotta know that he’s never gonna do better than me.”

“For sure,” Blondie says, but she’s distracted by her dog, who’s got somebody’s handbag in its mouth. “Krypto, no. That bag is soooo last season. Put it back. Go on.” The dog barks and wanders off to do just that. Guy wonders if any part of that exchange would make more sense sober. “You know, I got dumped like, a really long time ago. He left me for some Martian girl. And I got myself this whole new look. New hair, new clothes, new everything. And that made him get just what he was missing. Well, that and me blowing up his house.” She gasps and claps her hands together. “You wanna blow up his house?”

“Maybe we just stick to the new look thing for now?” Guy says warily.

“Fine, if you wanna be boring about it,” Blondie says. “But actually, yeah.” Her eyes sweep over him. “You could use a new haircut. For you, not just for your ex.”

Guy is offended. “What’s wrong with my hair?”

Blondie exchanges a look with her dog (Klepto?). “Well,” she says, gesturing at his hair, which is a little shaggy and perfectly tousled in an effortless, windswept kind of way. There are men all over the country who’d die for hair like his. One guy even said as much in an interview with Star Mag. “I mean, it’s fine.” She sucks a breath in through her teeth. “But it makes you look a little…”

“A little what?”

Blondie shrugs, unrepentant. “Old.”

Horrified, Guy grabs both of Blondie’s hands in his. “We gotta fix my hair,” he says desperately. “We gotta fix my hair now. Right now. Is there a barber open this late?”

“Who needs a barber?” Blondie scoffs. “I can do it. Hey, everybody!” She stands up on her stool and raises her voice. “Who wants to see me give this old guy a haircut?”

“Please don’t give anybody a haircut in my bar,” the bartender says plaintively.

Blondie blows a raspberry at them. “C’mon, old guy. Let’s scram.”

“Just Guy, actually,” Guy says, stumbling after Blondie as she drags him out of the bar by the hand. He’s pretty sure he opened his tab with a couple hundred dollar bills, so he should be good. The bartender can keep the change. He’s nice like that.

They keep walking and walking until they end up back at Guy’s place, somehow, and Guy sits down at his kitchen table while Blondie and her little dog circle him like sharks. She’s got a pair of scissors in her hands that she keeps throwing into the air and then catching. Guy hopes she doesn’t cut her fingers off by accident. “You know what I’m thinking?” 

“That actually I don’t look old after all?” Guy says hopefully.

“You won’t after we bleach your hair.”

Guy almost swallows his tongue. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, all I agreed to was a cut, not a dye job!”

“But it’d look so good on you,” Blondie wheedles. “And look at me! I bleached my hair and I don’t look old.”

If Guy were sober, he’d comment that that probably has more to do with the fact that she’s maybe twenty-one years old tops. Drunk as he is, he can’t argue with her frankly unimpeachable logic. “Fair point.” Blondie claps excitedly, and Crypto.com Arena barks. Guy winces at the noise. “So about the cut…”

“I was thinking something like that guy,” Blondie says, pointing at the General Glory film poster (1943, Stars and Stripes Forever, dir. Cecil B. DeMille) he’s got framed on the wall. “He’s definitely got the young vibe you need.”

The only one whose hair is visible in the poster is Ernie the Battlin’ Boy, whose blond bangs end just above his eyebrows. The rest of his hair is the same length all the way around. Ernie never had any trouble getting laid in the movies, so… “You think I can pull it off?”

“Oh yeah,” Blondie says, already grabbing a bowl out of his dishwasher. She grins at him from ear to ear. “Trust me. You’ll rock it.”

When Guy swaggers into the Hall of Justice the next morning (only mildly hungover; the smell of bleach really sobered him up last night), Maxwell Lord and Kendra are sitting at the kitchen table chatting—or rather Lord is doing the sitting and chatting; Kendra is at the stove whipping up what smells like huevos rancheros. Guy is so here for huevos rancheros. Even the vegan kind. “I’ll have extra salsa on mine, Chef.”

“Get it your damn self,” Kendra says, and Lord snickers. He turns in his chair to greet Guy, lifting his cup of coffee in a toast, except the second he lays eyes on Guy the cup drops from his fingers and shatters on the floor, dark roast splashing onto his ankles and five hundred dollar Italian loafers. Kendra whirls around at the noise, shoulders back and teeth bared in preparation for some sort of attack or emergency. When she sees him, her eyes go so wide that Guy half expects them to fall out of their sockets. And then, to Guy’s further bewilderment, she bends over at the waist and starts cackling.

“What?” Guy demands.

Lord is blinking at Guy like he’s trying to wake up from a nightmare. “Holy Christ, Gardner,” he says. “What the fuck did you do to your hair?”

Guy sniffs and lifts his chin high. “You wish you could pull off a haircut like this, Lord.”

“The last time anybody bothered pulling off a haircut like that was 1975!” Lord says. “And nobody bleached their hair while they were at it—Jesus, you even bleached your fucking sideburns?!”

“What was I supposed to do, leave them as is? I didn’t want to look like an idiot.”

“Too late,” Lord mutters, and Kendra tips forward onto the floor, howling. “Goddamn it, Gardner, you realize we’re gonna have to do your promo photoshoots over again now? Solo and team! You know how hard it is getting Annie Leibovitz on short notice?”

“She’ll forgive you when she sees my new look.” Guy strikes a pose straight out of the General Glory comics. “Who better than the leader of the Justice Gang to bring Ernie the Battlin’ Boy’s haircut back into vogue?”

From the floor, Kendra wheezes, “You got a fucking bowl cut on purpose?”

“It’s an homage,” Guy says through his teeth. Honestly. He knew Lord has no taste—the Menswear guy apparently subtweets his suits on the regular, whatever that means—but he’d really expected more from Kendra, who’s always in on the latest trends, what’s in and what’s out. She taught him how to do a TikTok dance once. If she can’t see that his haircut’s cool as shit, she’s losing her touch. “And it looks awesome on me. You know what the super fucking cool girl who cut my hair said when she was done? She said to me,” Guy puts on Blondie’s not quite Valley Girl drawl, “Guy, you look bad.”

“She was right,” Kendra giggles, and Lord cracks up.

“Bad in a good way, Kendra! Jesus, you should know. Your generation came up with that slang.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Lord says. 

Guy scoffs. “Okay, boomer.”

“You’re older than me,” Lord says, but Guy isn’t paying attention. Mike just walked in wearing the same clothes he left the Hall in last night. His eyes pass coolly over Lord and his coffee-splattered shoes, and Kendra suffering the final stages of apoplexy on the kitchen floor, before finally landing on Guy and his spectacular new haircut.

Guy puffs out his chest and waits, eagerly, for a raised eyebrow, wide eyes, an exhale—some hint that now Mike gets just what a fucking mistake he made putting Guy back on the market. But the only thing Guy gets is a view of Mike’s ass in those jeans as he walks right back out of the kitchen and down the hall to his lab.

Guy’s eye twitches.

“Was Terrific wearing skinny jeans?” Lord says incredulously. “Goddamn. Who was he trying to pull last night?”

Seething—except not, because he doesn’t fucking care—Guy constructs a spare hand, snatches the pan of huevos rancheros off the stove, and stomps off into the gym. It’s a testament to how hard Kendra is laughing that she doesn’t come after him until he’s scraped the pan clean.

The important thing here, Guy rationalizes over the weeks that follow, is not what Michael Holt thinks of his hair. Guy likes his hair, and going by all the comments he gets when he swoops heroically onto the scene to save the day, everybody else in the greater Metropolis area does too. Especially the chicks. Three hundred and forty-eight have commented on his new look so far, in person and online. He’s been keeping track.

Even Superman eventually goes on the record that Guy’s the only man he knows who could pull this look off. Guy offers a couple times to give him Blondie’s phone number so she can give him a haircut that doesn’t scream cornfed farm boy (“Her dog took a shit on my sofa, but she’s cool as hell, she’ll do right by you.”) but Clark always gets a funny look on his face when Guy brings her up and makes some excuse and turns him down. His body, his choice, his loss, or however the saying goes.

Anyway, since Guy’s sexy new haircut isn’t enough to make Mike realize what he’s missing (yet), Guy goes back to the ol’ standby: being his usual charming, witty, sexy self. He butts into Mike’s business, calls him names, starts arguments he knows he’s wrong about just to see how long it’ll take Mike to go postal, claims he can’t meet with the press because it goes against his Green Lantern vow, so Mike has to do it instead. Pulling his pigtails. Shit like that.

It works. Kind of. Mike starts acknowledging his existence again, mostly just by rolling his eyes and calling Guy a fucking idiot. When, just for shits and giggles, Guy tells Kendra within Mike’s earshot that the sky is blue because it reflects the color of the ocean, Mike gives him a six minute lecture on Rayleigh scattering. Guy times it. And it’s good knowing he’s getting under Mike’s skin, that he’s capable of it with or without the sexy new haircut. That’s all fan-fucking-tastic. But whenever Mike rolls his eyes and insults him these days, there’s no hint of a smirk or smile, no laughter, nothing at all. Which is no big deal, obviously. Whatever. Guy doesn’t care.

Just—Mike used to laugh at his jokes, is all. Mike used to think he was funny. Guy remembers one night when they were at Mike’s place, maybe a couple weeks into that little thing of theirs. They’d been lying in bed together sweaty and fucked out with the blankets pooled around their waists. Guy propped himself up on one elbow, wide awake where Mike was already half asleep, and said, “Knock knock.” He scooted closer and rapped his fist against Mike’s abs for dramatic effect, cooing into his ear, “Miiiiiike. Hey, Mikey. Knock knock.”

Without opening his eyes, Mike said, “You do that again and I’ll knock knock your ass out.”

Guy gave a low whistle. “Ooh-hoo-hoo. You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“I kiss you with that mouth,” Mike said. “God knows why.”

Guy magnanimously chose to ignore that last bit. “You’re not kissing me now.”

“I’m not kissing anybody. I’m sleeping.”

“Wow, you don’t say,” Guy said. “Knock knock.”

Mike was silent for a while, probably calculating the odds of successfully tuning Guy out and going back to sleep. Right when Guy was about to knock again, Mike sighed, long and deep. He worked his eyes open, squinted at Guy, and said, “Who’s there?”

“To,” Guy said.

“To who?”

“Please, Michael,” Guy said, just a touch more snide than usual. “It’s to whom.”

Mike snorted. That wasn’t a word Guy used lightly; he kept it in reserve for occasions when somebody actually, truly, wholeheartedly, undignifiedly snorted, and hearing that sound from Mike of all people startled Guy into a fit of laughter. And soon enough they were both laughing, their foreheads tipped together, muttering to whom in silly voices just to set the other off again.

When Guy broke away to catch his breath, he saw Mike smiling at him. It was a smaller, softer grin than Guy normally got out of him, more than just a flash of white teeth with sharp corners. Not that he didn’t appreciate those grins, which were usually catalysts for and sometimes codas to spectacular sex, but this was different. This felt different. Like the first breath of air he took after sliding the power ring on his finger, the first energy construct he summoned, awed by and acutely aware of the power he now wielded. I did that, he marveled then, and marveled now. How do I do it again?

“Real interesting laugh you got there, Mikey,” Guy said, instead of any of that. He tweaked Mike’s nose and oinked, and effortlessly dodged Mike’s attempt to smack him. “Real sexy. You been holding out on me.”

Mike glared, but there wasn’t any heat behind it, not with that little smile still curving his mouth. “Fuck you, man.”

“Already did.” Guy batted his eyelashes, making his voice syrupy-sweet as he shamelessly palmed his cock. “You wanna take another ride on the Gardner Express, handsome? Refresh your memory?”

“What I want,” Mike said, low and intense, “is for you to put that smart mouth of yours to good use for a change.”

Guy’s brain short-circuited so hard the Windows start-up noise rang in his ears. He dutifully climbed over Mike, straddling his hips, and stole a long, slow kiss, humming as Mike’s hand slid into his hair. Then he drew back just an inch and breathed as sexily as he could, “You used to call me on my cell phone—”

Mike cuffed him upside the head. Guy flopped onto his side, howling with laughter even as Mike glared at him like he wanted to remove Guy from the gene pool. “You’re not even half as funny as you think you are, asshole.”

“That still makes me pretty damn funny,” Guy said. “And you think I’m funny too. Admit it.” He punctuated the challenge with a kiss to Mike’s hip, and licked a long line down to his groin, lapping up the taste of salt and sweat. “Whenever you’re ready, baby. I got all night.”

Mike’s hand found its way into Guy’s hair again. “Yeah, Guy,” he sighed, all fond exasperation. “You’re real funny.”

“Knew it,” Guy said smugly. He rested his cheek on Mike’s thigh and grinned up at him, and Mike grinned back like he couldn’t help it, and—

Anyway.

Not like Guy can’t have the same thing with somebody else. Obviously he can. But.

It was nice, is all. Having it with Mike in particular.

Like most Americans, Guy doesn’t give much of a shit about politics until it starts affecting him personally, so when Clark decides to get involved in whatever bullshit Boravia’s trying to stir up these days, Guy figures what the hell, sure, let Big Blue go over there and shake some hands, kiss some babies, blow up a tank or two. All in a day’s work. And if that day’s work ends in no casualties and no significant injuries, who gives a shit? When Superman’s red boots hit American soil again, he’s an even bigger hero than before. 

Except the Boravians don’t take too kindly to Superman meddling in their private affairs (or however the fuck that son of a bitch president-for-life of theirs puts it), and all of a sudden Guy’s gotta start dealing with Boravian threats on top of the extraterrestrials and Metahumans he’s already pretty goddamn busy saving the people of Earth from. So yeah, actually, Guy does wish Superman decided to mind his own business and stuck to saving squirrels and mitigating property damage on this side of the globe.

Guy says as much during a press conference, and only feels a little bad about it when he sees Hypno-Glasses Clark standing in the throng of reporters looking like Guy drop-kicked his dog into the sun. Luckily the next few questions he and the Justice Gang—really just Guy and Kendra; if Mike gets a question he deems isn’t worth his time, which in his eyes is most of them, he just sits there and stares the reporter down, so all of them but Clark just tend to pretend Mike’s not there—have to field are a lot lighter. Hawkgirl, who are you wearing? How’s the construction going over at the Hall of Justice? Green Lantern, is there a special someone in the picture?

The bubble Guy was blowing pops, and he swears and scrapes the mess back into his mouth with his teeth. He shifts in his chair and folds his arms behind his head, unable to resist the tiniest of glances in Mike’s direction. Mike is staring straight ahead like he doesn’t give a single fuck one way or the other, which pisses Guy off so much that he puts his feet up on the table and gives the reporter the biggest shit-eating grin he’s got. “Oh, I’m dating around,” he drawls. “Why should Green Lantern tie himself down to just one piece of ass, am I right?”

Half the room laughs; the other half rolls their eyes, including Kendra and Clark. “Ladies of Metropolis, watch out!” giggles the reporter who asked.

“And gents,” Guy reminds them, winking at the nearest camera. “I’m an equal opportunity lover.”

Guy comes to regret this comment too. Not because he’s ashamed of who he is (it’s 2025, seriously, who gives a fuck whose pants people want to get into), but because after the #SuperHarem news drops, Leslie Willis—a Metropolitan shock jock who made a name for herself dragging Superman on the regular and claiming the Justice Gang was funded by Antifa and the woke agenda—starts comparing Guy’s sound bite to the unearthed speech from Superman’s parents. Like Guy once again admitting on the record that he likes men and women is proof he’s just as evil as the people who told their baby son they hope he grows up to rule the planet and knock up as many women as possible. What the fuck ever. If it were up to Guy, he’d call into Leslie’s show and tell her that her pussy is way too dry to be riding his dick like this, but he graciously allows LordTech’s legal team to handle it instead. After all, between beating the shit out of another interdimensional imp and saving the day in Jarhanpur, Guy’s schedule is too full to be the one to sue for slander.

“So much for that vow of yours, huh,” is how Mike greets him when Guy gets back from Eastern Europe. Superman’s been missing for at least an hour—being ‘interviewed’ by his firecracker girlfriend, the sly dog—so Kendra and call-me-Rex are down the block doing the dog-and-pony show with the press in Clark’s stead.

“Ah, well, you know,” Guy says. He feels strangely lightheaded. Probably just the jet lag. “The vow’s pretty open to interpretation.”

“Yeah, I figured by how many times you bring it up to get out of taking out the trash.”

“That was one time, man, come on,” Guy protests, laughing. It feels good to laugh after the week they’ve all had. It feels good to laugh with Mike in general. “You have any trouble closing that rift?”

“Please,” Mike scoffs. There’s a smirk playing on his mouth, his eyes dancing with mischief. “I’m goddamn Mr. Terrific.”

“Damn straight,” Guy says, grinning, and loses his breath when Mike grins back, open and easy and—and beautiful, Guy thinks, dizzy with the realization. Really goddamn beautiful. Looking at Mike, at that smile, Guy feels like there’s a cord wrapped around him, tugging him a step forward, close enough to reach out and—

“Hey!” Guy whips around to see Kendra waving at them. From what Guy can see, a few of Luthor’s pocket universe prisoners have gotten into a scuffle. “We need your help over here, assholes!”

Mike sighs and wiggles his fingers, summoning a couple of his T-spheres over. “Once more unto the motherfucking breach,” he mutters. He’s not smiling anymore. He’s not Mike anymore, not really. Guy lost all access to that Mike when Mike dumped him.

Disappointment sticks in his throat like mud, but Guy hikes up a cocky grin and sets off after Mike. Even when they fall into step side by side—Green Lantern and Mr. Terrific, ready to save the day again—Guy still feels remarkably alone.

Metropolis is nothing if not resilient, so things get back to normal pretty fast. The rift never reached the Hall of Justice, so they’re finally able to finish construction and open the place up for business. Rex Mason moves in with his wife and son, who’s actually pretty cute once you get past the weird alien baby thing. The first and only time Guy holds him, Joey spits up hydrochloric acid on his jacket. (Naturally everybody finds this fucking hilarious.) 

Having a finished home base also means that they get to do press conferences and interviews somewhere other than LordTech Corporation headquarters. Lois Lane comes by to do an interview with the Justice Gang—a follow-up slash sequel to the interview Superman granted her after saving the day—and brings with her Jimmy Olsen (Daily Planet photographer) and Lex Luthor’s ex-girlfriend Eve Teschmacher, who gasps at everything, including the coffee cart, like she’s at fucking Disney World or something. Guy mostly ignores her up until Lois is talking to Mike about what else his little circles can do and Eve says, “Spheres.”

Lois turns in her chair. “What?”

“They’re called T-spheres,” Eve says. Behind her, Jimmy has his head tipped back like he’s praying for divine intervention. He’s got a pink lipstick mark on his cheek. “Spheres are three-dimensional, and circles are flat. But don’t worry, it’s a totally easy mistake to make.”

“That’s right,” Mike says, as Lois is too busy gaping to speak. He gives Eve a onceover like she’s a code he’s dying to crack. Guy’s stomach turns over. “You wanna see what else they can do?”

“Yes, that’s what I was—” Lois begins.

Mike cuts Lois off with a glare. “I was talking to her.” He gets up and walks over to Eve, summoning a dozen T-spheres as he goes. They start buzzing around her, and Eve claps in delight when the T-spheres scan her, beep, and beam a line of Eve-shaped holograms. Eve tries to high-five one, but pouts when her hand goes right through. “Yeah, I’m still working out the kinks there,” Mike says. “The goal is to interact seamlessly with the hologram, so for that I have to design a new type of diffuser for the T-spheres. If it’s too rigid, you won’t be able to interact with the hologram at all; your hand’ll pass right through. But if it’s too elastic—”

“You’ll be able to touch it, but eventually the hologram’ll get all messed up,” Eve says, nodding in understanding. “Like how I ran my favorite mug through the dishwasher too many times and now I can’t see the letters that were on it anymore.”

“Exactly right,” Mike says. Eve beams. “What’d you say you do at the Daily Planet, Ms. Teschmacher?”

“Oh, I don’t work there,” Eve says brightly. Jimmy Olsen’s jaw is hanging to his knees. Guy’s isn’t that far behind. “I used to work for Lex—well, I used to date Lex, but I worked for him too, I did social media stuff for LuthorCorp, that’s how we met—but I quit because of Lex wanting to start a war and kill Superman, and now I don’t have a job because I’m Lex’s ex and no one wants to hire Lex’s ex, which is totally fair, so now I just hang out with Jimmy all day.”

“Well,” Mike says. “It occurs to me that our team here could use an on-site social media manager. And I could use an assistant with my holographic experiments. How’d you like to help us out?”

Eve squeals. “Really?”

That jolts Guy into picking his jaw up off the floor. “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hold on a minute. Sweetheart, I’m sure you’re wonderful at your job, but who says the Justice Gang needs a social media manager in the first place?”

“Lord?” Mike says.

Lord, who’s been sprawled on one of the couches going through Justice Gang job applications for the last hour, shrugs. “It’d definitely be a perk. I hate having to outsource that shit.”

“See?” Mike says. “Lord says it’d be a perk.”

“Don’t you think this is something you ought to run by the whole team?” Guy hisses.

“I’m cool with it,” Kendra says.

“Me too,” Rex says.

“Majority rules,” Mike says. “Eve, you’re hired.”

Jimmy Olsen falls to his knees with his hands raised above his head in supplication. At the same time, Eve screams and takes a flying leap into Mike’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist. “Thank you soooooo much, Mr. Terrific! Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

Smiling so hard it hurts, Guy forms a giant hammer construct and starts beating the shit out of the helicopter Lord has parked on the roof. As far as he’s concerned, that motherfucker can walk home.

“So again, totally not mad that Mike dumped me,” Guy says. “It’s his fucking loss, and I’m better off without him. Actually, I’m glad I got off that sinking ship because recently Mike lost his fucking mind, probably when he and Superman’s girlfriend snuck into that pocket universe Luthor made, which I know Mike did just to piss me off, that’s so like him. Anyway, he got this wild hair up his ass to hire Luthor’s bimbo ex-girlfriend as his lab assistant, which is fine, whatever, but he also, get this, hired her as the Justice Gang’s social media manager without even asking me what I fucking thought of the idea, like I’m not the fucking leader of the group here! And now I gotta deal with this girl making matcha lattes in our kitchen and leaving her fucking what’s it called, the weird TikTok gentrified Furby toys all over the place and following me around with her phone and being all over Mike all the fucking time. Like, ooh, look at me, I’m Eve Teschmacher and I brought down Lex Luthor with my sexy selfies and for some fucking reason Mr. Terrific likes me enough to hire me and let me play with his T-spheres and help him with his experiments because he thinks I’m smart and pretty even though she’s not that fucking pretty; she came in wearing Birkenstocks this one time and her toes were all—like I can’t even say it, but I promise they looked fucking disgusting—and I swear to God Mike only brought this girl on board because he knew it’d piss me off and I don’t know why he wants to piss me off so much because he won’t fucking tell me just like he never fucking told me why the fuck he dumped me!”

Guy sucks in a deep breath and releases it. Around the room, the other Green Lanterns blink owlishly. Kilowog coughs.

“Anyway,” Guy says after a palpable silence. He clears his throat. “Nothing major to report from Sector 2814.”

“…Thank you, Mr. Gardner,” says one of the Guardians. “Tomar-Re?” 

While Tomar-Re gives his report, Hal Jordan leans over. “Hey, man,” he says. “You sure you’re alright?”

“Obviously.” Guy scoffs and pops another piece of gum into his mouth. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Guy doesn’t regret going corporate; the steady paycheck’s a huge plus, and between that and the name recognition it’s only a matter of time before he has what he needs to open the superhero-themed bar of his dreams. The downside is that unlike Superman, who’s free to save whoever he wants whenever he wants, the Justice Gang is only called in for what the city and LordTech deem dire emergencies. Which means that since the weeks that follow Luthorgheddon (or Luthorgate, Guy’s still figuring out a good name to encapsulate what happened) are all quiet on the Metropolitan front, Guy has to sit around with his thumb up his ass, waiting to be useful. He goes to Nebraska to help out Hal and the kid Hal’s training to replace him, but it turns out they’ve got the situation handled on their own, so it’s back to the Hall of Justice for him. And Guy can’t even enjoy needling Mike and Kendra or playing with Rex’s son or working out in their state of the art gym because Eve fucking Teschmacher is always. Fucking. There.

Case in point: Guy comes out of the gym one afternoon, toweling off after a great workout, and follows the sound of voices and the distant red glow of lasers to Mike’s lab. The door’s open, so Guy’s got a great view of Mike circling one of his holograms (faceless and featureless), studying it like he was commissioned to paint its portrait. “Alright, Eve,” he says, and Guy’s jaw clenches. “Give it a go.”

Eve comes clomping over in her four inch platform heels, her long blonde hair and the train of her lab coat fluttering behind her like she’s Sexy Scientist Barbie. Mike steps out of her way, and Eve squares her shoulders, takes a breath, and sticks out her hand. The hologram offers its hand in return, and Eve squeals when she makes contact.

“How’s it feel?”

“All staticky, but also kinda solid,” Eve says. “Like when I touch one of those really old TV screens. This is so cool! You’re a genius!” She lets go of the hologram’s hand so she can clap both of hers and jump up and down, giggling like an idiot. Then she spots Guy at the door and beams at him. “Hi, Guy! We can actually sort of interact with the holograms now! Isn’t that so cool?”

“Uh huh,” Guy says stiffly. “Real cool.”

“I’m gonna go tell Rex and Kendra!” Eve rushes for the door, then doubles back and throws her arms around Mike and kisses him on the cheek. Giggling, she slips past Guy and runs down the hall, her heels clacking against the linoleum.

Mike waves at the T-sphere projecting the hologram, which buzzes and winks out of existence. He goes back to his computers, takes a seat, and starts typing. Data and code fly across the screens. Not for a single second does he acknowledge Guy’s existence.

Calmly, Guy says, “What the hell was that?”

“What was what?” Mike says.

“She just kissed you.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. “She does that.”

Guy’s pulse beats very hard and fast, like a moth trapped under a glass. His blood is white-hot in his veins. “Are you fucking her?”

The room goes eerily silent, like the moments before a tornado touches down, or before an alien spaceship crash-lands in Midtown. Mike turns in his chair, stands up, walks over to Guy. Stops about two feet away. Dangerously quiet, he says, “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Guy says.

Mike’s face is terrifyingly blank. “She’s my lab assistant.”

Guy laughs out loud, the sound so harsh it hurts his throat. “Right. Sure. Because that’s what the third smartest man in the world needs, a fucking lab assistant—”

“You don’t know dick about what I need,” Mike says.

“—who just so happens to be some blonde bimbo half your age who’s all touchy and kissy and thinks you’re just soooo smart—”

“Oh, fuck you,” Mike snaps. Now he’s right in Guy’s face, looking so furious that it temporarily stops Guy’s anger in its tracks. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object. “Is that really what you think of me? Huh? You think I put so little stock in my work that I’d hire somebody to help me out just because they’ve got a pretty face?”

“Doesn’t hurt though, does it?” Guy says meanly.

Mike looks disgusted with him. Disgusted by him. It’s enough to make Guy’s kidneys shrivel. “For your information,” he says, each word clipped and deliberate, “Eve is incredibly intelligent and intuitive. You’d see that if you bothered to give her a chance.” He grabs his jacket off the rack and shoves his arms through it. “And if I were you, I’d remember what they say about throwing stones from glass houses.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Guy demands. Mike shoves past him and walks off down the hall. Incensed, Guy follows. “Hey! Are you calling me a bimbo? You think I’m a fucking bimbo?!”

“If the power ring fits!” Mike yells over his shoulder.

“Tell that to my two bachelor’s degrees, motherfucker! Magna cum laude! Distinction in the major!”

“Fourteen PhDs!”

“Fuck you!” Guy hollers after him, and storms back to the gym, slamming the door shut behind him. 

Mike doesn’t talk to him for the next week, which is fine by Guy. Gives him plenty of time to study Eve Teschmacher’s every high-heeled move. She gushes over Kendra’s cooking and peppers Kendra with questions about the Thanagarian lifestyle. She talks with Rex and his wife about all the archaeological expeditions they’ve been on, and touches Rex without flinching, and plays with baby Joey, cheering harder than anybody when he learns how to crawl. (She superimposes the Rocky theme over the video she took of Joey crawling and posts it on all their socials with the proud parents’ permission.) She films Guy’s workout routine and asks endless questions about his power ring and how it works, what the Green Lantern Corps do, how he got involved, and no matter what he throws at her, no matter how complicated he tries to make it out of spite, she just cocks her head and thinks it over and breaks his explanation down into much simpler terms without missing a beat.

Eve Teschmacher is no Mike. Hell, she’s no Guy. But she’s not stupid at all. Far from it.

It’d be a lot easier to hate her if she were. And if she weren’t so nice.

It’s Eve who ends up arranging for the Justice Gang (and Superman) to stop by an elementary school in Park Ridge the following Friday. It’s been thunderstorming all week, but today is sunny and clear, so they get to take the kids outside. The little guys go fucking batshit for Clark and Kendra, falling all over themselves begging for piggyback rides and free flights. Rex entertains another cluster who watch in awe (from a safe distance) as he turns his hands into crystals and flowers and shiny sunbeams. Guy lets the more adventurous boys and girls climb all over him and chase him around and wrestle him on the grass, then ropes them all into a game of kickball on the blacktop. Some of the kids are in wheelchairs, so Guy has them roll the ball down a ramp instead; one little girl is blind, so Guy constructs a ball that beeps so she can hear it when it rolls to her, and another kid guides her personally from base to base. Nobody’s playing for points or pride, just for fun. Guy loves to see it.

Eve spends the whole morning on the sidelines filming away and chatting with the teachers, parents, and some of the reporters who came to shoot B-roll for the evening news. After the kids run off for the picnic tables where their lunch is set up, Guy swallows his pride and walks over to her. “Hey,” he says. She looks up from her phone. “Thanks for setting this up. It’s nice getting out of the Hall for something that isn’t an emergency every now and then.”

Eve gives him a sunny smile. “You’re welcome.”

“Yeah. And, uh.” Guy bites the inside of his cheek and forces the words out. “You’re doing good work, Eve. Keep it up.”

Eve blushes and tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Thanks!” She darts over to him and smacks a kiss to his cheek, then bounds off to catch up with Kendra.

Guy doesn’t hear Mike approach, but doesn’t startle when Mike stops at his side. He’s quiet for about a minute before he says, “You’ve got grass in your hair.”

Guy automatically runs his hand through his hair. True to Mike’s word, he comes up with a few blades of grass. “Matches the rest of me,” he says, and the corner of Mike’s mouth twitches. Seeing that, plus the undeniable proof that Mike’s done giving him the cold shoulder, is enough to make Guy smile too. “Where’ve you been all morning?”

“Upgrading the equipment in their computer lab and giving the school better broadband access,” Mike says. “Courtesy of Holt Industries.”

“Holt Industries? Lord’ll have your ass for that. You know his name’s supposed to be all over this shit.” The Justice Gang T-shirts that all the kids are wearing have LordTech written on the front in almost as big a font as their team name.

“What Lord doesn’t know won’t hurt him,” Mike says, so primly that Guy huffs a laugh. “Saw that kickball game you organized. Good of you to figure out a way to get all the kids involved.”

“Not my first rodeo,” Guy says.

“No?”

“Used to be a gym teacher over in Coast City,” Guy says. Strange to think of that time in his life at all, when he was just Guy Gardner, former fuck-up, trying to get his kids active and involved any way he (and they) could. “Lot of my kids were special needs. Couldn’t give ‘em exactly what they needed back then just by snapping my fingers, but I learned to work around it.” He flashes Mike his best grin, the one that ensures his gold tooth will glint in the sunlight. “Always did believe in fair play.”

If Guy didn’t know any better, he’d swear Mike blushes. “Bet your kids just loved you,” he says. “Being that you’ve got the same maturity level.”

“Fuck you, Terrific, I’m plenty mature.”

“The amount of sugar cereal you consume on a daily basis says otherwise.”

“The commercials say that cereal is part of a balanced breakfast!”

“Only if you balance it with things other than an entire glass of milk.”

Guy is about to counter that his Froot Loops still look and taste a damn sight better than Mike’s healthy smoothies when someone says, “Excuse me, Green Lantern?”

Annoyed, Guy turns around. The voice belongs to a tiny forty-something woman with electric blue eyes. Guy’d swear in court that he’s never seen her before in his life, but there’s something about her that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He offers his hand and says cautiously, “Can I help you, Miss—”

“Willis,” says the woman, smiling coldly as she accepts his hand. “Leslie Willis.” And in the split second it takes for Guy to think oh shit, the glint in her eyes turns manic. “But you can call me Livewire.”

An electric shock rips through Guy’s body, blowing him backwards ten feet right onto the playground. His head slams against a wooden post, and his world goes white, ringing like a wine glass when you run a finger around the rim. Someone is screaming; multiple someones. That’s probably not good.

“—up, goddamn it!” A sharp slap across the face knocks him back into his body and unblurs his vision, turning the red and black blob hovering over him into Mike. “On your feet, Green Lantern! Move!”

Instinct takes over; Guy jackknifes back to his feet so fast that he trips on the way up. 

Mike grabs him by the elbow and hauls him upright. “You alright?”

“Yeah. Fine.” Guy smells burnt hair. He hopes it’s not his own. He shakes his head hard and presses his fingers to his cheek, which aches something fierce. He frowns at Mike, offended. “You slapped me.”

“You’re fucking welcome,” Mike snaps, but Guy’s distracted by a flash of lightning from above. Livewire. Leslie Willis. Shock jock turned literal shocker. “I got the T-spheres acting as a forcefield for the civilians, but—”

Guy doesn’t need a second invitation, or for Mike to finish issuing the first one. He whips up a protective construct around the kids and teachers huddled together around the picnic tables, which muffles their screams of terror, and launches himself into the sky.

Livewire’s waiting for him. Her white-blonde hair whips around her face, smoking at the ends, and her hands crackle with electricity. Little bolts of lightning arc up and down the sleeves and pants of her dark denim jumpsuit. When she sees Guy, her face breaks out into a maniacal grin. “Well hello there, Green Lantern,” she coos. “I see my arrival gave you quite the shock.”

“You come up with that opener all on your own?” Guy says. He hears wings flapping, T-spheres buzzing, matter metamorphosing: Kendra, Mike, Rex. “Don’t quit your day job, sweet cheeks.”

Her scowl is darker than the storm clouds gathering around her. “I don’t have a day job to quit,” she spits. “I spend three years of my life warning Metropolitans what’d happen to them if they put their fate in the hands of an alien and a bunch of woke DEI child-grooming Metahuman freaks, and what do I get for it? Fired! Just for telling the truth! All thanks to you hiding behind your little lizard cabal of lawyers instead of facing me like a man!”

“Wow,” Guy says. “Anybody else just get dogwhistle bingo?”

Whatever Livewire is about to snarl at him is lost when Clark tackles her right out of the sky. Electricity engulfs them both on the way down; Guy and Kendra and Mike and Rex plunge after them. Clark’s yelling in pain but doesn’t let go of her until they make contact with the blacktop. Chunks of asphalt go flying from the force of their impact. Clark lies on the ground winded, but Livewire doesn’t even look scathed. She just spits her hair out of her face and gets back to business.

Her next blast of electricity comes straight for Guy, who beams up a shield to protect himself. The electricity shatters it on impact. Kendra screeches and dive bombs Livewire, swinging her mace. Livewire grabs it out of the air, and sparks fly up the spikes to the metal handle. Kendra yelps and almost drops it. Mike’s T-spheres are the only things that even manage to get close to Livewire, but she’s still only treating them like they’re no worse than a bunch of gnats: something to swat at before going after the real problems.

After Livewire’s electric blasts makes one of the T-spheres spontaneously short-circuit and burst into flames, Mike swears. “We need something to insulate the electricity she’s producing!”

Guy, who’s busy blocking bolt after bolt of lightning with his constructs, snaps, “No shit! Any suggestions?”

“Rex!” Mike yells. “We need water!”

“Water, yep, can do!” Rex says. “Right, that’s two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen—”

Clark provides a distraction by grabbing a Toyota out of the adjoining lot and slamming it down over Livewire’s head. She tears it to scrap metal with her lightning and whirls on Clark. From behind, Rex charges into the fray. When he gets close, his limbs and torso explode into water, spraying her from head to toe.

Livewire screams like she’s been doused with liquid acid and collapses to the ground unconscious, jerking and twitching before finally going still.

Guy huffs a breath of relief. He clasps his hands over his head like an Olympic athlete and turns to face the kids and teachers (and Eve, filming away) under the construct next to the playground. Many of them are clapping. “That’s right, ladies and gents, another win for the Justice Gang!” He glances at Kendra, whose hair is spiky from all the static electricity. “What, no comment?”

“Hate to admit it, but the name’s growing on me,” Kendra sighs.

Guy preens.

“Like a fungus,” Kendra clarifies, and Guy pouts. Still. Progress is progress.

Mike’s T-spheres are hard at work scanning Livewire’s unconscious body, and Guy doesn’t want to bother him (or get snapped at for bothering him) so he goes to pull Clark back to his feet. “Doing alright?”

“Yeah.” Clark blows out a breath as he runs a hand through his hair, trying to get his curls back into order. “Golly. That was a heck of a thing.”

“You just never turn off, do you?” Guy says.

“The hell?” says Mike, cutting off Clark’s reply. Guy turns, mouth open to ask what the hell what, when he sees all the T-spheres drop to the ground one by one. 

“What, did you forget to charge them?”

“No, I did not goddamn forget,” Mike snaps, and Guy holds his hands up in surrender. “The T-spheres are designed to go weeks without a charge. They’ve been at full power for the last month. Including today.”

“Then why are they dead all of a sudden?” Rex says.

Mike squats down and picks up one of his T-spheres. “All systems are functional,” he says, mostly to himself. “Nothing that would indicate a sudden power drain except—” His jaw clicks shut, and Guy suddenly gets a horrible feeling. If Livewire can manipulate and create electricity from scratch, what if she can siphon it too?

All five of them look down just in time to see Livewire’s eyes pop open.

Mike drops the T-sphere and scrambles to his feet, but he’s not fast enough. Livewire’s electric blast sends him flying into the side of the school with such force that the wall crumbles and collapses on top of him.

Guy screams. He charges Livewire with nothing but his bare hands, and when she shoots up into the sky to avoid his fists, he launches himself up after her. Kendra follows, hefting her mace and screeching, her eyes black with rage. They attack Livewire in unison and stalk her through clouds, hitting her with everything they’ve got. Kendra still can’t make contact without getting electrocuted, but this time, Guy’s constructs are strong enough to withstand Livewire’s electric shocks. Of all the willpower he’s ever channeled into the ring, this takes the cake. He’s never wanted to take anybody down more in his life.

“Go get Rex and Big Blue!” Guy yells at Kendra. “We need more water!” His furious smile cracks his jaw. “I’ll keep the bitch busy.”

“Make her pay,” Kendra hisses, and dives back to earth.

Livewire is dry again and looks more robust than ever. Her skin glows so brightly Guy can see the electricity spiking in her veins like the blips on an EKG. She smirks at him and shouts over the wind and rumble of thunder, “One freak down, four to go!”

“You wanna talk freaks?” Guy snarls. “Try looking in the fucking mirror!” 

He constructs the biggest hammer he can think of and swings it at her with all his might. She comes right back at him with a lightning bolt the size of the Daily Planet building, and he dodges as well as she dodged him. Fucking bitch, fucking bitch, rings in his ears and thrums through him like a second pulse, even as every cell in his body howls oh God Jesus please no Mike Mike MIKE—

She comes flying at him with her arms outstretched, and Guy, his arms coated in green energy up to his shoulders, grabs her fists in both hands, squeezes tight, and twists. Livewire howls. Electricity explodes off her in waves of neon white light. Guy’s ears pop, and all the hair on his body stands straight up, but he grits his teeth through the pain and smell of burning flesh and doesn’t let go until he feels every bone in her hands snap crackle pop, Rice Krispie Treats style. See how well she can shoot lightning from broken fucking fingertips.

“DIE!” Livewire screams at him.

“Please,” Guy says. “After you.” He tackles her around the waist like she’s the Ohio State QB he sacked on homecoming night (go Wolverines) and hurtles towards the ground with her in his arms. She howls and kicks and bites, but she’s in too much pain from her ruined hands to remember her powers right now. Good. Over the rushing of the wind, he hears Clark scream his name and so he changes course, right for the water tower tank Clark’s got ready for him on the ground. He hurls Livewire into the hole Clark’s laser-eyes made and watches with satisfaction as the screaming bitch plunges into a million gallons of pure ice cold H2O and lights up like a motherfucking Christmas tree. Slowly but surely, the lights flicker, and fade, and eventually, finally, go dark.

Kendra is waiting for Guy on the blacktop. Her eyes go wide with horror when she sees him. “Guy, are you—”

Guy shoves past her. Later he’ll feel bad about that, but right now his priority is Mike, just Mike, who lies limp and still in the rubble of the school’s computer lab, the computers he donated and installed courtesy of Holt Industries just earlier today. He throws himself forward and trips and crawls the remaining feet and inches on his hands and knees to Mike. “Hey,” he says, the word half-raw, all terror. “Hey, Mike.” He taps Mike’s cheek frantically, not hard, not like the ringing slap Mike gave him earlier to wake him up and bring him back to awareness and the looming fight. Mike doesn’t stir. He looks so small. “No no no. Mike, come on, wake up.” Tears burn his eyes and nose; bile burns his throat. He’s burning, burning, burning. He clutches one of Mike’s hands and brings it to his lips. “Wake up, baby. Look at me, Mike; open those eyes for me, huh? C’mon, I’m not that ugly, am I?”

It’s what he said to Mike the second time they slept together. The first time was rough and fast, born from an argument and heated words that sparked and sizzled and culminated in them tearing each other’s clothes off and kissing like they were trying to swallow the other whole. The second time was slower, more deliberate. Mike looming over him. Guy sprawled on the bed wearing nothing but his personality. Insecure under the weight of Mike’s piercing, assessing stare and trying not to show it. What? I’m not that ugly, am I? He wanted to break the tension. It worked. It doesn’t work now.

“Come on, baby,” Guy whispers against Mike’s knuckles. Begs. Pleads. Mike’s face is placid and still, flecked with dust and blood. His lipstick is smeared. “Wake up, Mike. Please.”

“Guy.” Clark. Guy ignores him and keeps talking to Mike. Doesn’t even know what he’s saying. As long as he’s talking it’ll be okay. The silence will crush him otherwise. “Guy, you have to move.”

“Like hell.”

Clark crouches on Mike’s other side, a blue and red blur on the edge of Guy’s world. He doesn’t touch Mike or Guy, which is good, because Guy would have to kill him, and he’d have to stop touching Mike to do that, which he doesn’t want to do. “The paramedics are here,” he says, quiet and kind, the way he’s been talking to the kids all day. “They’ll help Terrific. You can stay here; you just have to give them enough room to work. Can you do that?”

In slow cascades, his thoughts fall together. Mike is hurt; Mike isn’t waking up; someone called the paramedics; the paramedics are here; the paramedics can help Mike; Guy has to move for them to help Mike. Guy nods.

The paramedics come over. Guy doesn’t let go of Mike’s hand until they arrive. He moves back just enough to keep an eye over the proceedings. Green Lantern, holding vigil. He watches the paramedics poke and prod Mike with clinical, practiced efficiency. They check his pulse, listen to his heartbeat, take stock of every breath. One of them digs around in her kit, grabs a white stick, and snaps it under Mike’s nose. Even from here, Guy can smell the ammonia.

Mike’s eyes blow open, and he inhales deeply. Jolted back to life, just like that.

Him and Guy both.

Mike’s fine, it turns out. Or as close to fine as he can be given the circumstances. Bumps and bruises, couple of electrical burns just short of nasty. A concussion that mandates a couple of overnight stays in the hospital, and since Mike can’t even look at the clock on the wall without getting a headache, he doesn’t argue. No brain damage; no memory loss. He got lucky. Terrifically so. Ha fucking ha.

They hang around Mike’s hospital room until Clark suggests that they ought to give Mike the chance to rest and recover. He leaves, and Eve follows suit after carefully giving Mike a hug and a kiss on the cheek and promising to get all his drained T-spheres back to the lab for some rest and relaxation of their own. Then Rex goes, and then Kendra. Guy stays right where he is.

Mike breaks the silence first. “You waiting on my permission to leave or what?”

Guy looks at him. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to shake the image of Mike lying there in the rubble, still and unreachable in the face of Guy’s pleading. Or the belief that it’ll become reality again if he lets Mike out of his sight. “Didn’t realize I needed your permission to stick around,” he says. “Last I checked, this was still a free country.”

“It’s my goddamn hospital room, man,” Mike says, looking annoyed. And tired. And beautifully, wonderfully alive. “You can’t claim squatters rights.”

Guy can probably keep this line of banter going for a while. He can bicker back and forth with Mike, rag on him, get ragged on in return. Not like Mike doesn’t have any material to work with. Tussling with Livewire up close and personal the way Guy did, all those electric shocks burned holes in his clothes and fried the hair right off his arms and just about singed off his eyebrows. Good thing his bangs are long enough now to cover them until they grow back in. 

Instead, Guy says, “Why don’t you like me anymore?”

Just like that, Guy accomplishes the impossible: Mike looks taken aback. “What?”

“Why,” says Guy, slowly and deliberately, “don’t you like me anymore?” 

In the time it takes Guy to repeat himself, Mike’s face has closed off completely. He could be chiseled from stone. Finally, quietly, he says, “I like you.”

“The fuck you do,” Guy snaps. He doesn’t know what the fuck is wrong with him, except that he can’t stand tiptoeing around the elephant in the room after the day he’s had—after the months he’s had, he can’t keep this in for another motherfucking minute. He feel like a bottle of Coke somebody dropped a handful of Mentos into, fizz rocketing everywhere. “If you still liked me you wouldn’t give a shit about me staying in here with you. If you fucking liked me you wouldn’t have dumped me! Or, Jesus.” He laughs, harsh and mean. “Maybe you still would’ve, but if you liked me you’d have at least done me the fucking courtesy of telling me why. So what happened, huh? What changed?”

Mike says nothing. He’s got the bedsheets fisted in a white-knuckled grip.

“Fuck it.” Guy shoves his chair back and stands up, the angry scrape of plastic on linoleum so loud it echoes off the walls. “Never mind. Forget I said anything.”

He’s almost at the door when Mike says, “You wanna know why I broke up with you?”

Guy turns. Mike is sitting up now. His shoulders are squared, his jaw tight. Guy doesn’t know how to read the look on his face. This expression is its own mask. “Yeah,” he says, because he can still recognize a challenge when he hears one. “Go ahead, Terrific. Lay it on me.”

“Because when I decide to go all in with somebody,” Mike says, “that somebody has to be serious about what we’ve got. You weren’t. You never were. So I ended it.”

Guy feels like he can’t get enough air. His world is shaking at the edges. “I never even fucking looked at anybody else when I was seeing you,” he says. Once he would’ve kept that to himself no matter how mad he was, not wanting to sound like a pussy, but if anything’ll make Mike shut up now it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Especially the kind of truth that he’s only just now finally realizing how true it really is. “I took you out to dinner and breakfast and the movies. I bought a spare toothbrush and your brand of body wash so you wouldn’t have to bring them with you when you stayed the night. I paid out of my own pocket for a new goddamned bed after we broke yours. I put my tongue in your ass—Christ, I let you fuck me! Exactly how much more fucking serious was I supposed to be to get to keep you?”

“Keep me for how long?”

“What?”

“For how long?” Mike repeats. “Where exactly did you see this relationship going?”

The mental image of him and Mike sitting in matching rocking chairs forty years down the line comes to mind unbidden. “Where’d you see it going?”

“I asked you first.”

“I—Jesus, man, I don’t know!” Guy says, frustrated. “We had a good thing going! I didn’t know how long it was gonna be good for. I was taking it day by day. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t serious about you.”

“Oh yeah. So serious that you can’t even call what we had a relationship.”

That yanks Guy up short. He rewinds months of mental footage, trying to find that word in there. It’s not. Not pre-breakup, not post-breakup. Not even in the privacy of his own head. “What difference does that make?” he counters, not liking the way Mike scoffs, or the sudden hollow feeling in his chest. “Doesn’t how I feel matter more than whatever label we put on things? On us?”

“Maybe,” Mike says evenly. “If you told me whatever it was you were feeling. But you never did, Guy. Because we never talked. That was the whole problem.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Guy thinks of nights and mornings tangled up together, memorizing the sound of Mike’s laugh, cataloguing every joke of his that did the trick. “We talked all the time!”

“About what to order for dinner or what to do in bed, sure,” Mike says. “But never about what we’re doing or where we saw it going or who we are outside of the job. Never about anything real.” He scrubs a hand down his face. He looks so tired. “How was I supposed to believe you were serious about us when you didn’t even let me get to know you outside of the ring you wear and the vow you took? When you didn’t even know me?”

“That’s not true.” Even to his own ears, Guy’s voice is weak and thin. So it goes when you’ve just been metaphorically kicked in the balls. “I know you.”

“Yeah?” Mike says. “Then what’s my wife’s name?”

The question is like being electrocuted all over again: that same blinding, burning, ear-ringing feeling. “You’re married?”

“I was,” Mike says shortly. He looks a thousand years older, every line of him rendered with pain and heartbreak. “Her name was Paula. She died.”

Guy has no fucking clue what to say to that. Other than— “You never told me that.”

“It’s public goddamn information, Guy. You could have looked her up. You could’ve asked.”

“I’m sorry, I was supposed to ask?” Guy says incredulously. “You wanted me to come up to you and say, Hey Mike, you got a dead wife you never told me about? That would’ve been easier for you than bringing her up yourself?”

“What would you have done if I brought her up?” Mike isn’t shouting. Guy wishes he was. “Would you have listened, or would you have said some smartass bullshit like you always do?”

Right now, Guy is angry enough to do the latter just out of spite. But not so angry that he can’t tell the truth. “I’d have listened.”

“Yeah,” Mike says. He doesn’t look like he believes him. “Maybe. Maybe not. After three years knowing you and three months dating you I still didn’t know for sure. That’s why I had to end it. How much I like you didn’t matter.” He takes a ragged breath. His eyes are rimmed with red. “Not if I didn’t think you could be serious about the important things.”

“Don’t turn this back on me,” Guy says. His voice is barely a croak. “This isn’t—I didn’t—goddamn it, you’re the one who fucking walked away!”

“And you’re the one who let me,” Mike snaps.

Guy is frozen solid. If somebody so much as breathes next to him he’ll shatter. “Mike—”

The door swings open, and Eve comes jogging in, balancing in her four inch heels as easily as if they were bedroom slippers. “I thought I left this in here!” She steps past Guy to grab her purse off the chair. It’s bright pink. Matches her lipstick. She looks between Guy and Mike, her sunny smile fading. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” Mike says. Already his face is wiped clean of emotion. “Guy was just leaving.”

Guy wants to stay. He wants to grab Mike by the shoulders and shake him and tell Mike that he’s wrong, goddamn it. That Guy can be serious. That Guy is serious. That Mike could have entrusted him with his heart and his mind and his past and his future and Guy would have summoned a construct to slit his own wrists before he ever intentionally hurt him.

But he didn’t do any of that when he had the chance. That’s why Mike cashed in his chips.

With no other recourse and a whirling mind, Guy does what Mike wants. He leaves without looking back.

Guy spends the rest of the weekend alone in his apartment. Nobody comes to get him. Kendra doesn’t call; Rex doesn’t text. Maybe they figure he needs space. Maybe Mike told them not to reach out. Maybe they don’t know what to make of him anymore after seeing him the way he was on Friday, wild-eyed and desperate and stinking of burnt hair and terror. Guy barely knows what to make of himself.

He passes the time looking up Paula Holt. Her name is all over research papers on artificial intelligence and machine learning; scholarship funds at MIT and Harvard and Stanford, where she earned some of her many PhDs; the Holt Industries website, where she is listed beside Mike as a cofounder; an article that has her down as the number one of 30 women under 30 to watch. Her obituary states she died tragically in a car accident. She never made it to thirty.

Guy watches grainy footage of Paula speaking at conferences, moderating panels, teaching underprivileged middle schoolers how to code. He scrolls through photos of her and Mike accepting awards and diplomas together, seated in crowds that include Bill Gates and Lex Luthor and the other tech geniuses du jour, hard at work in their respective labs. In one photo, they’re at a gala: Mike in a crisp black suit, Paula in a red dress, her hair a cloud of dark curls, a diamond ring glinting on her finger. Neither of them are looking at the camera. Paula has her hand tucked into the crook of Mike’s elbow and her mouth close to Mike’s ear, whispering something. Mike’s eyes are crinkled with laughter, his smile wide and true. His face is so open, so happy, it hurts to look at him for too long. Guy looks anyway.

The LordTech Corporation makes no mention of Paula in their profile on Mike. All they have are his headshots and promotional photoshoot pictures, followed by a brief bio that covers the greatest hits. Genius-level intellect. Third smartest man in the world. Founder of Holt Industries. Stepped away from his cushy C-Suite job and put the technology he invented to good use saving lives. Made his debut saving Metropolis from the Prodigy terrorists. Lord recruited Mike for the team not long afterwards. Guy Gardner, meet Michael Holt. Mr. Terrific, Green Lantern. It took less than thirty seconds for Guy to start wondering what the hell it’d take for that tall drink of water to loosen up, crack a smile, take that stick out of his ass. Only took him three years to figure it out.

What Mike had with Paula was serious. What he and Guy had was serious too. It was serious to Guy, at any rate, and he doesn’t understand why Mike thought otherwise, or what indication he’s ever given Mike that he can’t be serious about the things that matter. Guy committed his life to protecting and serving the people of Earth as a member of the Green Lantern Corps. He took a fucking vow, and he’s stood by it. Just like he would have stood by Mike if Mike hadn’t taken the opportunity away from him.

In fact, Guy is so sure that anybody can see how good he is at taking things seriously that on Monday morning, he goes to run the question by the best judge of character and gauge of truth he can think of. He comes in through the window, parks himself on her sofa and waits patiently for her to join him in the living room. When she comes down the hall in her pajamas, he greets her with a disarming and friendly grin. She greets him by shrieking and hurling her phone directly at his head.

“Ow!” Guy says indignantly.

“What the fuck, man?!” Lois Lane demands, which is not the apology Guy wanted, but whatever, he’ll let it slide. She’s red in the face and breathing heavily and looks like she wants to throttle him. “How the hell did you get in my apartment? How do you know where I live?”

“Tailed you and Superman here a while back, obviously,” Guy says. “You think I can be serious, right?”

“I think you’re seriously psychotic. I’m calling Clark.”

Guy snaps his fingers and constructs a vault to seal her phone in. “Ah ah ah,” he tuts, flicking his wrist so the vault floats up to the ceiling, out of Lois’s reach. “You can have it back as soon as you answer my question. Green Lantern’s honor.”

“Your question,” Lois repeats flatly. Now she looks less angry and more resigned to her fate. Guy can work with that. “What question?”

“Do I look like the kind of guy who you can take seriously?”

“Not with that haircut,” Lois mutters.

“You’ve got a serious case of bedhead right now, princess; I wouldn’t throw stones,” Guy says. “Come on. For real. It’s important.”

Lois folds her arms over her chest and looks Guy up and down, taking him in. Her silence isn’t encouraging. Guy scrambles to fill it.

“Like—objectively speaking. Not just out there when the cards are down and shit’s getting real and you need somebody to save the day. Outside of that. With other…important things.” Guy swallows. Speaking is suddenly very hard. “Do you think I can be serious about things that really matter?”

“Well,” Lois says, then stops. She bites her lip. “From what I know of you, from the, like, three consecutive minutes we’ve talked one on one…I don’t know. I’ve never seen you take anything seriously. I guess that doesn’t mean you don’t, but…”

Guy stares at his hands. For some reason they’re getting really blurry. “So you wouldn’t want to date me?”

“Date you?” Lois says with an incredulous bark of laughter. “Are you high?” Guy doesn’t dignify that with a response. “Are you—oh my God, are you crying?”

“No,” Guy pretty much bawls.

“Jesus Christ,” Lois says. She sounds thoroughly spooked; it seeps into the hesitant pats she starts giving him on the shoulder. “Hey, come on, don’t—listen, man, just because you’re not my type doesn’t mean that—”

“I don’t care if I’m your type,” Guy wails into his hands. He’s crying so hard he’s in danger of choking on his own snot, and there’s nothing he can do to make it stop. “I wanna be Mike’s type.”

“Mike?” Lois says. He can hear her realization dawning in real time. “That’s—do you mean Mr. Terrific? Michael Holt?”

“Mike,” Guy sobs.

“Right, sure, Mike. You—you want to be Mike’s type? You like him?”

Guy nods jerkily. “H-he doesn’t think I can be serious. That’s why he, w-why he,” Guy sucks in a sharp breath and sobs out the rest of the words in a pathetic wobbling rush, “why he broke up with me.”

“Broke up with you?” Lois says. “You were dating Terrific?” Then, somehow even more bewildered: “Terrific was dating you?”

Guy glares at her through his fingers and his tears.

“Sorry!” Lois says at once. “Sorry, I just. I guess I just didn’t think you were his—that either of you were the…dating type.”

“He was married,” Guy says. Paula Holt’s face swims in his line of vision; a beautiful genius, just like her husband. If she was still alive Mike never would have given him a second glance. Guy never would have been able to compete with her. Even now he’s losing the competition to her ghost. “He was serious about her. And he was serious about me.”

“Were you serious about him?”

“Yes,” Guy cries. “But he didn’t know it ‘cause I didn’t know he needed to hear it and we never talked about anything real and then he dumped me and it’s been months and I thought I could do better but I don’t wanna do better, I just want him back. I wanna be with him again. Fuck, I miss him.” It’s not even the sex he misses. Spectacular and mind-blowing as that was, Guy would give it up in a heartbeat just to sit with Mike in his kitchen and bump ankles under the table again. To listen to that stupid prog rock Mike claims is music as they argue about whose turn it is to wash the dishes. To hear Mike laugh and know it was Guy who made that happen. Rinse and repeat every fucking day forever. “I miss him so fucking much.”

“…Have you tried telling him that?”

Guy curls in on himself and shakes his head, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “No point,” he mumbles. “It’s over. I fucked up. End of story. Roll credits.”

Lois is quiet for some time. Her hand is more steady on his shoulder now, more soothing. “Look,” she says at last. “I don’t know what happened between you two. Hell, I don’t know either you or Mr. Terrific all that well. But if he was serious about you, and if you want to be with him again, then you have to fight for him. Maybe if you show him that you’re serious about him, that you’re all in, he’d be willing to give you another chance.”

Hope crystallizes in Guy’s stomach like an ulcer, sharp and spiky and impossible to ignore. I like you, Mike said. You’re the one who let me walk away. If Mike’s only problem with Guy is that he thinks Guy wasn’t serious about their relationship—if Guy gives Mike ironclad proof that that’s not the case—will Mike really take him back? Can it really be that easy? He raises his face from his hands and sniffles and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “How do I do that?”

“No clue,” Lois admits. Guy’s shoulders sag, and he slumps back onto the sofa. “But I know someone who might. If you give me back my phone, I can text him.”

Guy snaps his fingers. The construct vanishes, and Lois’s phone falls into her waiting hands. “It better not be Hypno-Glasses.”

“It isn’t Clark,” Lois says exasperatedly. Her fingers fly across the screen. “And since I’m helping you, maybe you should be a little less picky about who I bring in to do that.”

“Touche,” Guy mutters, abashed. Lois’s phone pings. “That him?”

“Yeah,” Lois says. “He’s still driving back from Gotham, but he’ll be here in a couple hours.” She sticks her phone into her pajama shirt pocket and runs a hand through her hair, messing it up further. “So,” she says. “Since I guess I’m not going in to work today, can I get you anything? What do people eat after they’ve been dumped?” She snaps her fingers. “Ice cream? You want some ice cream?”

Guy automatically opens his mouth to protest being treated like a jilted prom queen, but has to admit that that ice cream actually sounds really fucking nice right now. “What’ve you got?”

Lois gets up and goes to the kitchen. He hears her rummaging around in her freezer for a few minutes. When she comes back, it’s with two slightly freezer-burnt pints of ice cream. One is vanilla bean, and the other is—

“Seriously?” Guy says. “Rocky road?”

Lois stares him down.

Guy constructs a spoon and digs in. “My favorite,” he tries around a mouthful of chocolate and mini marshmallows. Lois rolls her eyes and stomps off to take a shower.

“You told me you weren’t bringing in Hypno-Glasses!” Guy hisses at Lois.

“I didn’t know he was coming!” Lois says, though she looks pleased as punch to see Clark standing in her living room in his alter ego’s ill-fitting suit and chunky black glasses. Jimmy Olsen, who she actually called in, is down the hall using the bathroom. “And will you be quiet? Jimmy has no idea that Clark is you-know-who.”

“If it helps, Jimmy didn’t tell me you were here,” Clark says. “He just asked me for a ride because his car broke down on the exit ramp. I’d go but I’m his ride back to the office.”

Guy grits his teeth. On the one hand, he doesn’t want to tell Clark shit about him and Mike. On the other hand, he can’t afford to piss off Lois by forcing Clark to leave. Plus he knows it’ll look suspicious to the Olsen kid if Guy specifically asks Clark to get out, and even if he does come up with some perfect excuse that Jimmy will buy, Clark will be able to hear him no matter how far away Guy sends him. “You breathe one fucking word of any of this to the Justice Gang and I swear on my ring I will neuter you in your sleep.”

Clark zips his lips. Lois rolls her eyes. Guy does too, significantly less affectionately, and plops back down on the sofa. He wants more ice cream. Lois stole the second pint from him when they were watching Jerry Maguire. (He only cried four times.)

Jimmy Olsen comes out of the bathroom and sits in the armchair across from Guy. Lois and Clark flank him on either side like bodyguards. Guy feels like he’s asking a favor of Don Corleone, if Don Corleone was a fresh-faced twenty-something who looks like he works at a soda fountain in his spare time. Guy’s hope is dwindling more and more by the second. “Explain to me again how this kid is supposed to help me out?”

“This kid,” Lois says with a glare, “has pulled more people in the last year than you have in your entire life.”

Guy laughs out loud. “Yeah, right,” he scoffs. To Jimmy, he says, “How many?”

Jimmy tells him.

Chagrined, Guy mutters, “Proceed.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy says, his cheeks a dusty pink. How can he say a number like that and sit there looking sheepish? Guy’s never had trouble getting people on board the Gardner Express (this instance with Mike notwithstanding), but Jesus. This kid’s gotta be packing a red sequoia down there. “So Lois says you want to get back together with your boyfriend?” 

The word ‘boyfriend’ makes something jolt in Guy’s chest, his whole body heating like he’s being slow-roasted over an open flame. Guy hopes he’s not blushing as much as it feels like he is. He fidgets with his ring and nods.

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Cool. Um. So. You wanna tell me what happened between you and…”

“Mike,” Guy mumbles. 

“What?”

“Mike,” Guy says again, louder this time. “Michael Holt.”

“Michael—wait, Mr. Terrific?” Jimmy says disbelievingly. “Your ex is Mr. Terrific?”

“Yes, goddamn it, my fucking ex is Mr. Terrific!” Guy snaps, shoving himself off the sofa so he can get right in that little shit’s face. “That funny to you, pipsqueak? Huh? You don’t think I got the game to pull somebody like him?”

“No sir,” Jimmy stammers, his eyes huge and panicked, “I mean, yes sir, I mean, sure, yeah, of course you do,” but Guy’s attention has already shifted.

“And you.” He jabs a finger at Clark’s chest. “Four-eyes. You don’t look surprised. Why the fuck don’t you look surprised?”

“I mean,” Clark says, swallowing. He glances at Lois, then back at Guy. “I didn’t know you two ever dated, but I did suspect that you, uh. Had feelings for him.”

That’s the last goddamn thing in the world Guy expected Clark to say. How the fuck did Clark figure it out before Guy even fully realized it himself? “Since when?”

“The other day at the elementary school,” Clark says. “When Terrific went down, the way you reacted…and afterwards, when you were trying to get him to wake up, I heard you—I mean I heard,” he corrects quickly, “uh, from Superman, about how you were talking to Terrific. You…” He clears his throat. “You called him baby.”

Guy would be less winded if Clark punched him in the gut. He remembers saying a lot of shit to Mike in his desperation, but there’s no fucking way that word slipped out too. Not in public. Did it? “I did not.”

“Yes, you did,” Clark says. “According to Superman. He heard you.”

The fucking super hearing. God fucking damn it. Then an even worse possibility occurs to him, and Guy narrows his eyes. “Did Superman tell anybody else that other than you?”

“He…may have discussed it with Hawkgirl and Metamorpho,” Clark says, wincing around each word. “Possibly.”

“Possibly?!” 

“Solely out of concern for you and Terrific! He’s a concerned guy!”

“Well, you better tell him to turn that goddamn concern inwards from now on, ‘cause the next time I see him I’m gonna drive his nose into his fucking skull!”  

“That’s enough!” Lois wedges a baseball bat (where the fuck did she get that?) between his and Clark’s chests. As soon as they’ve each taken a couple steps back, Lois points the bat menacingly at Guy. “You can either get the hell out of his face or get the hell out of my apartment. Your choice.”

Guy glares at Clark one more time, just to make sure his point’s been made. Then he gets the hell out of Clark’s face and sits down on the sofa again. Across from him, Jimmy looks like he wants to disappear. Guy can relate. More calmly, he says to Clark, “So when exactly did everybody have that little concerned discussion behind my back?”

The irony’s not lost on him that he and Mike are the ones who had (and ended) a secret relationship behind Clark and Kendra’s backs, and now here Clark and Kendra (plus Rex) are talking about him and Mike behind their backs. No wonder Kendra hasn’t called him. She’s probably making a conspiracy posterboard as he speaks. That or a voodoo doll in his likeness.

“Pretty much all weekend,” Clark says. “Starting at the hospital.”

Guy stares at him. He was in kind of a daze from the minute the paramedics carted Mike off in an ambulance to the minute the doctors let them into Mike’s room, but he’s pretty sure he’d remember Kendra and Rex and Clark talking about him. They’d all been in the same room for hours. “I don’t remember hearing any discussion there.”

“It was over text,” Clark says. He has the good grace to look embarrassed. “We have a group chat you and Terrific aren’t on.”

Fucking perfect. Now all Guy needs is for the Guardians of Oa to revoke his ring and his humiliation will be complete.

“Wait, you’re in a group chat with the Justice Gang?” Jimmy says.

“Uh,” Clark stammers. He looks like a deer in the headlights. So does Lois. “Yeah, uh, Superman added me.”

“Enough about Superman already,” Guy snaps. Not even to help Clark out of the hole he constantly insists on digging for himself (he doesn’t need an alter ego, for Christ’s sake; the Justice Gang gets by fine without them), but because this conversation has a purpose and that purpose is helping him. He snaps his fingers at Jimmy, who jumps in his armchair and sits up straight. Good boy. “You. Ginger twink. You gonna tell me how to get Mike to take me back or not?”

“I mean, sure,” Jimmy says, wide-eyed. “Sure, yeah. Just, you know, I might need a little more…context. First. Before I can give you my advice.”

“I told you already,” Guy groans, even though he knows he didn’t. He’s never said a single word of this story out loud. “It started ‘cause we hooked up.” They didn’t talk about it for two weeks afterward. Not until they found themselves alone together in the Hall late one night. The moonlight coming in through one of the windows shone on Mike’s face, making his skin look darker, almost blue, and Guy wanted him so bad he thought he’d die from it. “Mike said he didn’t do casual, so I said it didn’t have to be. I said I could do dinner and the movies and all that other shit on top of what we started with. So he said okay, and we started seeing each other. We didn’t tell anybody. And a few months later, a few months ago, he…” His voice hitches. “He broke up with me.”

“Did he say why?” Jimmy says.

“He thought I wasn’t serious about him,” Guy says to the floor, so Lois and Clark can’t see the look on his face. “Or what we—or our relationship. ‘Cause we never talked about it, or anything real.” He fiddles with his ring again, seeking the comforting hum of energy, the reminder that he’s got the willpower to keep going. “He said he didn’t know me. And I didn’t know him.”

“Is that true?”

Guy shrugs. How can he answer that? It’s true that he didn’t know Mike was married, and that’s just one chapter in the encyclopedia full of shit he doesn’t know about Mike: the real shit, the heavy shit, the experiences that shaped him into Michael Holt pre and post Mr. Terrific. But he does know how Mike likes to be touched and what he looks like in one of Guy’s shirts; that he likes Chinese food but can’t use chopsticks; that he appreciates the math and structure of music more than the beat or lyrics. Guy knows what makes Mike laugh, what makes him smile, what pisses him off. Aren’t those things worth paying attention to too? Aren’t they also part of the foundation you build a life on? 

They were important to Guy. That’s why he’d filed them away for safekeeping. And Mike did the same for him, Guy realizes suddenly. Mike knows which brand of cereal Guy likes, that Guy used to teach gym. He knows what turns Guy on, how to lead him to the edge and either keep him there or push him off. He knows about Guy’s love of General Glory, the comic books and the movies and the terrible TV adaptation in the early aughts. But Guy never gave Mike anything else to work with. He’s gotten good at keeping the real shit locked away and hidden from sight because nobody had ever gone looking for it with good intentions before. Not, apparently, until Mike.

“I like what I know about him,” Guy says at last. “I don’t know everything. But I want to. I want…” His voice trails off as the answer hits him. “I want him to know I was paying attention too.”

“Alright,” Jimmy says, like it’s that simple. “So prove it.”

Mike gets discharged from the hospital on Tuesday. Guy hears about it from Kendra, who calls him to say that they’re throwing Mike a welcome home party that night and Guy and his stupid haircut (her words, not his) better be there. When Guy is finished assuring her that neither snow nor rain nor extraterrestrial threats will keep him and his awesome haircut, thank you very much, from attending, he figures she’ll hang up on him, but she stays on the line, breathing in his ear. Then she says, “We gonna talk about the elephant in the room or what?”

The elephant in the room might as well be a whole goddamned herd. “Yeah,” he says, because thanks to Clark’s concern he’s got no plausible deniability to fall back on. “When there’s something to talk about.”

“Will there be?”

Guy stares up at the ceiling. “I hope so.”

“Me too,” Kendra says, “for your sake,” and ends the call.

Lord picks up Mike in his Jag (he still hasn’t gotten around to getting a new helicopter) and hand-delivers him to the Hall of Justice, where he’s greeted by Eve screaming in delight and running into his arms like she hasn’t seen him in weeks. Kendra reaches Mike next, hugging him one-armed around the waist, followed by Rex, who claps Mike on the shoulder, and Clark, who pulls Mike into a frat bro handshake turned hug, complete with back pat. When it’s his turn, because he knows if he doesn’t take a turn Kendra will castrate him, Guy swallows and offers his hand. “Good to have you back, man,” he says, and tries not to cling or shiver when Mike accepts his handshake. Firm grip, one quick pump, and then it’s over.

Lord pops a couple bottles of expensive champagne to go with the dinner Kendra ordered, and that’s how their little group passes the next couple hours, chatting about everything and nothing, ragging on each other. Guy contributes often, but doesn’t take control of any conversation. Occasionally, his eyes wander and find Mike, who’s deep in conversation with Eve or Rex’s wife Sapphire, and a jolt goes down his spine when Mike glances back. Only for a second, just a flick of eye contact, but it’s enough to hold Guy over, to fuel his resolve.

Eventually Rex goes off to give a fussy Joey his bath, and Lord heads out for some corporate fundraiser downtown, and everybody else gets up to clear the table and take out the trash and grab the good booze from the liquor cabinet in Lord’s on-base office to continue the party in the lounge. In the commotion, Guy approaches Mike for the first time all night. “Yo,” he says. He’s got his hands shoved in his pockets so Mike won’t see them shaking. “You got a minute?” 

Mike looks at him. Guy wonders if this is how people who are afraid of public speaking feel when they step on stage and look out at the crowd: that heady, jittery terror that whatever they have to say will be met with outright derision. He lifts his chin and holds Mike’s gaze, lets Mike see him. I’m serious, he tries to say with his eyes. I’m being serious. This is something that matters.

Maybe some of that comes through. Maybe not. Either way, Mike nods.

Guy leads him out back. It’s a warm night. The sun’s set and the fireflies buzz, dotting the darkness with the occasional glow. When they reach their destination, the motion sensors come on, a spotlight to showcase Guy Gardner’s last resort. If Mike is wondering why Guy brought him to the garage where he keeps the T-craft, he shows no sign of it. Doesn’t even fold his arms over his chest. He just stands there and waits.

In response, Guy takes the clicker out of his pocket, aims it behind him, and watches Mike’s face as the garage door rises at a steady clip. He gets it right away—Guy sees the recognition in his eyes, even if the rest of his face doesn’t change—but he doesn’t say a word. So when the motor stops running, Guy’s mouth starts. “I fixed your garage door.”

“I can see that,” Mike says.

“It’s faster now,” Guy says. He feels like a little kid again, running home to show his parents one of his art projects, the A he got on his spelling quiz, something he was proud of, something he wanted them to be proud of too. Didn’t take him long to stop trying. “Had to strip the grease and grime from the tracks. Brackets and the whaddya call ‘em, the hinges. Them too. Put some lube on them. The spray kind; that works better than Vaseline, it turns out. So. Now it’s faster. You’re welcome,” he adds, pointed. Not because he wants a thank you, but because he wants Mike to react.

He gets what he was angling for. Mike’s lips thin. “Let me guess,” he says. “Now I owe you one.”

“I didn’t do it because I wanted you to fucking owe me one,” Guy snaps, offended not only on his behalf but on Mike’s, that that’s the only fucking reason he thinks Guy would do anything nice for him. Tit for tat. Quid pro quo. “You kept talking all that game about how you were gonna get to it eventually—”

“I was gonna get to it eventually,” Mike says. 

“Yeah, well, you didn’t, so I did it for you,” Guy says. “I wanted to do it for you.”

Now he’s got Mike’s attention. Guy feels it in the air the same way he feels the energy housed in his ring: all that great power at his fingertips, and with it the great responsibility to not fuck up. Eyes narrowed, Mike says, “Why?”

And ain’t that the fucking million dollar question. “Because,” Guy says. There’s a hundred smart remarks lining up single-file on the tip of his tongue, ready to be deployed. He grits his teeth and ignores all of them. Prove it, Jimmy told him. Make him see you’re all in, Lois said. He’s gonna. “Because,” he says again, the truth snot-thick in his throat, phlegmmy like a smoker’s cough. “I know you. And I wanna be the one who gives you what you want.”

He means the words to land soft, but Mike takes them like a punch. His hackles go up; his jaw clenches, and Guy sees the look that passes over his face, recognizes it from a hundred times prior on and off the job: Not this shit again. “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do!” Guy says. “Listen—no, listen, Mike, goddamn it,” because Mike looks ready to counter either with a punch or a smart remark of his own, so he’s gotta talk fast. “Listen, I know you think I didn’t take what we had seriously—”

“Because you didn’t, Guy!”

“I know that!” Guy doesn’t mean to shout, but that’s just the volume the words come out at. It shuts Mike up, at any rate, and Guy takes advantage of the silence while he can. “You’re right, okay? You’re right. I wasn’t looking ahead, I wasn’t planning ahead because I never do. I take everything day by day and I took what we had day by day too. I didn’t know where it was going and I didn’t give a shit because I liked what we had. It was easy being with you. It was fun. Probably because we didn’t ever talk about anything real, like you said, but still. It was good. I didn’t treat what we had like a relationship. I didn’t take it seriously. You’re right.” Guy swallows. “But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t serious about it, or that I didn’t take you seriously. It doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to you too.”

“Guy,” Mike says. 

“Like the garage door,” Guy says. “You talked about the garage door; you wanted to fix it, but it wasn’t a priority, you’d get to it eventually. You like to stonewall the press because you think they’re morons. You take your coffee black with two sugars and nondairy creamer when you take coffee at all. You like those stupid healthy smoothies; you buy them in bulk from Whole Foods. You like Chinese food better than Thai and Thai food better than Japanese and you eat pizza with a fork because you don’t like it when the smell gets on your hands. You read research papers for fun and you only listen to music that doesn’t make sense and you can tell all your T-spheres apart even without your tech on. You like sleeping with the windows open even when it rains. You show your teeth when you smile and you snort like a pig when you laugh. I like your laugh. I like that I could make you laugh. I was always trying to. And maybe, maybe none of that shit’s important in the grand scheme of things, maybe it’s not that deep, but it was still important to me to know it. It was serious to me. I took it seriously. It mattered to me, Mike. You matter.”

All throughout this speech of his, Mike’s disbelief doesn’t disappear, but it changes shape, loosens its grip on him. Disbelief for disbelief’s sake, not anger, not annoyance. It’s something. It’s gotta be something. Please Jesus, let it be something.

“And I know I never gave you much reason to think I ever take shit seriously,” Guy continues. “But I swear to God, Mike, I can. I can if it’s for you, if it’s about you. You can be real with me. You can tell me about your wife. I want you to. I want to know about her. I want to know you. I want you to know me.” His laugh comes out a little wild, two clicks short of hysterical. “I mean, shit, who the fuck knows if you’ll like what you hear, but if you want me to be real with you, if you wanna know all that shit, I’ll tell you. Turnabout’s fair play, right? I can tell you some real shit right now if you want. My brother, Mace—I have a brother. Had one. He was the golden boy hero cop and I was always in and out of juvie and I coulda gone to jail for boosting cars but he got involved, and by got involved I mean he beat the tar outta me like our dad used to and gave me some money and told me to get my shit together—”

“Guy, that’s—”

“Except Mace never got his own shit together, right; he was dirty, he was on the take, and he got shot on the job and killed himself as soon as he got out of the hospital ‘cause he said he didn’t wanna live the rest of his life in a wheelchair but I think he was lying, I think that was only part of it, I think he just couldn’t fucking stand everybody knowing that all this time he was actually a bigger fuck-up than me—”

“Guy,” Mike snaps, and Guy shuts up so fast his teeth clack together. He’s breathing so hard his nose is whistling. He hates it when that happens. He hates talking about Mace. But.

“I can be serious,” Guy says once he has himself under control again. Stick the landing, Gardner. “That’s my point, that I can be serious. And if you take me back, I’ll be real with you, and you can be real with me. I’ll take our relationship seriously. I’ll spend every fucking day of however long I’ve got left trying to do good by you, Mike. I’ll be all in this time. You’ll see. All I’m asking for here is one more chance.”

The look on Mike’s face (or lack thereof) isn’t encouraging. Even the fucking fireflies aren’t buzzing around anymore, like they got secondhand embarrassment and vamoosed as far away as possible. Like to another fucking continent. Maybe Guy can meet them there.

When they’ve stood so still for so long that the motion sensors go off and plunge them into darkness, Guy knows in his gut that it’s over. He gave it his best shot, poured his fucking heart out, and it wasn’t enough. Mike doesn’t want him anymore. Now all Guy can do is leave while his dignity is still intact.

He jerks a thumb at the path they took, reactivating the motion sensors and the light. “I’m gonna,” he begins, intending to finish with head back. But he doesn’t get a chance, because at the same time Mike says, abrupt, “You mean all that?”

The world sharpens, suddenly. Guy swears he can see the leaves on the trees all the way at the edge of the property. “Yeah,” he says. He puts a little swagger in the word, a little challenge, even as hope eats away at his insides like acid. Believe me or not, motherfucker. What you see is what you get. “What? You don’t buy it?”

Mike’s eyebrows arch, just a little. Then he says, “Maybe I will if you prove it to me.”

Guy almost explodes on the spot, almost goes fucking ballistic, because what the fuck was all that if not him fucking proving it, Jesus, what the fuck else does Mike want from him, his fucking blood? But then he sees the glint in Mike’s eyes, is sure he sees it, and his heart skips a beat. Cautious, he says, “How?”

“What’re you willing to do?”

There’s only one answer Mike will accept right now. Good thing it just happens to be the only answer Guy’s got. “Anything.”

Guy stands there, perfectly still, as Mike moves closer to him. Shoulders back, head high, expression closed off. Man on a mission. A yard becomes a foot becomes inches.

Slowly, Mike places both hands on Guy’s shoulders and pushes down.

Guy’s body reacts before his brain does. He sinks to his knees right where he’s standing, like a marionette whose strings were cut. Except Mike is holding his strings. Mike is touching him, one hand still gripping Guy’s shoulder, the other threading gently through Guy’s hair, brushing wayward strands into order with his thumb. Guy has to crane his neck to look up at him from this angle, and when he does, Mike grins, wide and true and teasing. “Just wanted to see if you’d really do it.”

“You motherfucker,” Guy says in awe, “you asshole, you fucking asshole, oh fuck, Mike, Mike,” with every word scrambling back to his feet and taking Mike’s face in both hands and at last, fucking finally, kissing him again, again and again and again.

Mike makes a rough needy noise and opens his mouth for Guy’s tongue, and Guy shakes and shivers and moans at the taste of him. Jesus, did he always taste so good, or is this one of those absence makes the heart grow fonder, don’t know how good you got it ‘til it’s gone things? Who gives a fuck, says the Guy Gardner in his head, and Guy thinks good point and gets right back to work exploring Mike’s perfect smart mouth as his hands roam down to clutch Mike’s shoulders, his chest, his hips, his ass, starving for all of him. Mine again, he thinks deliriously, biting at Mike’s neck. Mine mine mine mine mine.

“You missed me, huh,” Mike breathes against his temple, almost a laugh, all delight and wonder, like Guy’s a code he finally cracked.

It cracks something inside Guy, that’s for sure. He stops what he’s doing and grabs Mike by the hips, pulling Mike flush against him, letting him feel the hard line of Guy’s cock. He nips at Mike’s bottom lip, looks him in the eyes, and says, “Lemme prove it to you.”

They end up in the garage, pressed up against a wall before the door even closes behind them. Guy hurls the clicker somewhere and beams up a construct around the whole garage for good measure—nobody can come in, nobody can come out—and gives himself a second to admire Mike bathed in green light. Just a second. Then he drops to his knees again and gets busy shucking Mike’s pants and underwear so he can put his smart mouth to good use sucking Mike’s cock.

“Oh sweet Jesus fuck,” Mike says weakly as Guy goes to fucking town on him. It comes back to him immediately, what Mike likes, and Guy gives it to him, laving and sucking at the head, humming around the shaft, taking him in so deep his nose stings and tears prick at his eyes. It’s not long before Mike’s thighs start shaking and his hands thread into Guy’s hair and hang on for dear life, tightening when the slide of his cock in and out of Guy’s mouth gets smoother with spit and precome. “You gotta, fuck, Guy, you gotta stop that or I’ll come.”

“Yeah?” Guy has to pull off because he can’t talk with his mouth full, but keeps one hand busy stroking the shaft and puts the other to work fondling and cupping Mike’s balls. “So come.”

“Don’t wanna like this.”

“Then tell me how you want it,” Guy says desperately, fuck-drunk to the point of insanity on the taste of Mike already. It’s been so long. His thoughts, such as they are, are ricocheting in his head like a laser beam in a house of mirrors. “Anything you want, baby. Just tell me how and I’ll do it, Mike, I’ll make it happen, that’s a fucking vow.”

“Do me,” Mike says. “Right here.”

“Fuck yes,” Guy says, elated, and rockets back to his feet. “Fuck, lemme just—” He’s got about ten construct hands racing around the garage knocking shit off the shelves, searching for what he needs. One of them tosses him what he needs, and he grabs the container out of the air, looking at the label. Vaseline. Good enough. He lets his construct hands take the container back and take off his jacket for him while he gets to work divesting Mike of his. Funny how the first time they did this they were in uniform, Green Lantern and Mr. Terrific, and now they’re in civilian clothes, no masks, just Guy and Mike. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

He backs Mike up all the way against the wall and wedges his knee between Mike’s thighs, spreading them further apart. “Ready?” he says, and when Mike nods, Guy dips his fingers into the container of Vaseline, rubs them together, and watches Mike’s face as Guy gets to work opening him up. He’s so fucking gorgeous, so fucking expressive like this: eyelids fluttering, nostrils flared, chest heaving. He’ll get vocal later, Guy remembers. He can’t fucking wait. “So hot for me,” he breathes, watching Mike shudder, feeling his fingers dig into Guy’s shoulders. “So fucking tight, baby. Gonna get you ready for me and split you open, gonna make you come on my cock. That what you want?”

“You know it is,” Mike chokes out. “Give it to me.”

“Oh, I’m gonna.” Guy gets more Vaseline and adds a second finger and then a third, relishing every low moan and panted Guy of Mike’s. “You let them touch you like this too?”

“Who?”

“Whoever you pulled when you went out in those skinny jeans.”

“Didn’t pull anybody.”

That throws him for a loop. “What, nobody bit?” Thank fuck, but still. Does nobody in Metropolis but him have eyes or what?

“Wasn’t trying to pull,” Mike says through gritted teeth, squirming and trying to fuck himself on Guy’s fingers. “Didn’t even go out that night. Just wanted you to see me in ‘em. Was trying to, shit, to piss you off, see if I could make you jealous.”

Guy’s fingers still and slip right out of him. His heart pounds like a war drum. “You what?”

“I was trying,” Mike says again, out of breath, “to make you jealous.” He looks sheepish and somewhat apologetic in the face of Guy’s gawking. “Maybe that wasn’t the nicest way I could have gone about it, but—”

“I’m so fucking in love with you,” Guy blurts, and Mike’s jaw audibly clicks shut. “Shit, is it too soon to tell you that? You want me to table that for later?”

“Uh,” Mike says, his voice an octave higher than normal. His eyes are the size of T-spheres. “No? You…do you. I guess.”

Guy kisses Mike so hard his teeth catch on the inside of Mike’s bottom lip. At the same time, he shoves three fingers back into him, tasting Mike’s gasp. “Drove me fucking crazy seeing you in those jeans,” he says, hardly paying attention to what he’s saying. “Your ass looked so good. Wanted to peel ‘em right off you.” Another thought strikes him. “Will you wear ‘em for me now?”

“Now?” Mike says incredulously.

“Not now, Jesus, like now that we’re,” Mike clenches around him and Guy loses all train of thought, “uh, now that we’re—”

“Together,” Mike says. The word is a bolt of lightning all its own. Speechless, Guy nods, and Mike smirks. “I’ll think about it if you fuck me good enough.”

Guy doesn’t need to be told twice. He shoves his jeans (acid-wash, vintage, they better not get any spunk on them) and underwear down, letting his cock spring free. He’s so hard there’s no fucking way he’d last longer than a minute if he didn’t have something to work towards. He slicks himself up with another helping of Vaseline and grabs Mike’s ass with both hands, lifting him up. Mike starts to wrap his legs around Guy’s waist, but Guy clicks his tongue and urges him higher instead so Mike’s knees are resting in the crooks of Guy’s elbows, his thighs almost pressed to his chest, his whole body folded in half. Sweating from the strain, Guy plants his feet for better balance and fumbles one hand down to guide himself into Mike’s ass. When he starts pushing in, Mike throws his head back and moans, “Oh fuck.”

“That’s the idea,” Guy says with a flash of a smirk of his own. He rocks in and out, each thrust heaven on his aching cock. Mike braces his palms on the wall behind him and lets his shoulders fall back and his hips move forward, matching Guy’s rhythm. His cock is flushed and hard against his belly. He’s a fucking supernova. Guy can’t believe he ever thought for a second he could live without him. “Takin’ me so good, baby. Fuck, look at you.” He darts in for a kiss and then a second one, wet and hot and sloppy. “Like you were born for this, just for me. All mine. Tell me you’re mine.”

“All yours,” Mike gasps out, nodding frantically, knees tightening over Guy’s arms. “Yours. Guy, fuck me.”

Guy licks the sweat off Mike’s neck and fucks him faster, harder, until he’s seeing stars and they’re both sweating so much it makes his grip slick, making them slip against each other. “Lemme see you come, baby,” he begs. “C’mon, Mike, come all over me.”

Eyes heavily lidded like a porn star, Mike teases, “Say please.”

“Fuck, please Mike, c’mon, please, please—”

Mike takes one hand off the wall and shoves his fingers into Guy’s mouth, letting Guy suck on them until they’re wet and dripping. As Guy watches with drool dripping down his chin, Mike holds his gaze and wraps his wet fingers around his cock, jacking himself to the same rhythm Guy’s set for them. It doesn’t take long for him to get there, to come with a high-pitched noise and shoot all over Guy’s chest, his face, his hair. Even as he’s coming, Mike’s grabbing Guy’s hair tight enough to make Guy’s skull and balls throb and saying, “Look at me, Guy, look what you do to me, just you,” and that’s it, game over: Guy comes so hard he feels like he’ll turn inside out from the force of it.

When he gets a sense of the edges of his body again, he hears himself say, “Was that good enough for the skinny jeans?”

“Uh huh,” Mike says, his voice foggy and vague. He sounds like he’s trying not to move his lips very much. “Want me to go and grab ‘em?”

“Fuck no,” Guy says at once. Mike snorts, and Guy grins like an idiot. He can’t even help it. “Hey, there’s that laugh.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mike says, but he’s smiling, small and crooked. “Put me down before you pull something, man.”

“Where was all this concern for my body when I was fucking you?” Guy complains. Mike rolls his eyes and winces as Guy pulls out and helps Mike get his feet back on solid ground.

“Seemed to me you had things under control then,” Mike says. “Didn’t want to interrupt you.” He touches Guy’s face with his fingertips and laughs in delight. “Shit, I really came all over you.”

Guy hums in agreement and runs his tongue over his bottom lip. Part of him wants to wear Mike’s spunk like a letterman’s jacket, but doesn’t protest when Mike uses his own sleeve to try and wipe Guy’s face and hair clean. His shirt is definitely a lost cause. Good thing he’s got a change of clothes in his gym locker. “C’mere, you got a little something.”

“Where?”

“Right here,” Guy says, and feels the shape of Mike’s smile as they kiss. When they break apart, Guy licks his lips again, suddenly nervous. “Hey,” he says. Mike’s brows furrow. “We good?”

“Yeah,” Mike says, softer than a breath. “Yeah, Guy, we’re good.”

Guy exhales and nods and tips his forehead against Mike’s, months worth of tension melting off his shoulders. “About what I said earlier,” he says. “About, you know, how I’m, uh—”

“In love with me,” Mike says.

“Yeah. That.” Guy suppresses a shiver. Turns out those words hit all the more harder when you’re not fuck-drunk. “Well, I meant it. So. Do with that what you will.”

Mike nods solemnly. “Well,” he says, “I’m in love with you too. So.” His eyes glitter with mischief. “How’s that work for you?”

Guy’s stupid smile just about splits his face. “I can live with that.”

“Glad to hear it,” Mike says, and Guy steps forward to seal the deal with another kiss. It’s a while before they break apart again, this time with a sigh from Mike. He checks his watch. “Probably ought to clean up for real and head back in before they go sending out a search party.”

“Probably,” Guy agrees reluctantly. He’s not really looking forward to how absolutely fucking unbearable everybody in that room is gonna be, but fuck it. He’s got Mike back. Everything else is confetti. They go through the motions of cleaning up the best they can with the rags on Mike’s nearby workbench and pulling their pants back up. Guy banishes the construct keeping them here, and Mike gets two steps closer to the door before Guy grabs his hand. “Hey,” he says. “One last thing.” Mike raises his eyebrows in silent question. “What do you think of my hair?”

Mike is quiet for about ten seconds. “Honestly?” he says, and when Guy nods, he breathes a laugh. “I like it better now than what you had earlier.”

They don’t make it back to the party for another hour.