LANTERN'S LIGHT.

me: Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I have an announcement to make but first you have to promise not to get mad

I AM LAUGHING SO HARD

10:38pm

dread weighs on him so heavy that kyle feels like he’s being crushed by it.  he’s on the ground because his ring is faltering – as hope withers in his chest, kyle finds the ring impossibly hard to control.  he looks at hal pleadingly, searching for some sort of answer or reassurance.  “ what’s – what’s going on ??  this is… ” unprecedented comes to mind, but he doesn’t know what to say anyway.  “ what’s going on with the league ??  what’s the plan ?? ”  there, that’s a safe question.  right ??

it’s not often that hal resents the responsibility of the role he has as leader when it comes to the lanterns, and perhaps even more so of being a founding member of the justice league, but it’s times like these that he does—times when they’ve failed, times when there’s the kind of catastrophic, devastating loss that no words and certainly no amount of bravado can brush off. “ no clue, ” he says, honestly, because he’s not in a position to lie to kyle of all people about pretending to have answers that he so clearly doesn’t. “ superman’s— ” what does he even say? bats might’ve been the brains of the operation, but clark was the face and the heart, and that heart got crushed in ways hal can’t even begin to fathom. he’d tried. tried imagining what it would be like in his place, to be tricked into killing barry with his own two hands, to let that murder trigger the bomb that destroyed eleven million lives you were sworn to protect. “ ...he’s grieving, ” hal finishes. “ we all are. ”

“ nothing useful. ” it’d been a day. hal already had to recharge his ring once. “ but you and the rest of your squad should stay on the ground. business as usual, blah blah, you heard bats. somebody’s got to watch out for central, no? ”

he pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose. hal can’t be wasting his time catching people up to speed just because they happen to be foaming at the mouth. the watchtower comms show that rogue activity in central’s been eerily quiet when usually the dunce caps over there like to take crises such as these as the perfect opportunity to rob a bank. do you understand what i’m saying? so you can go wail on your goons all you want if you really think that’s something batman hasn’t already tried. but i’m putting a moratorium ” —moratorium, a word he learned from lois’ damn word-of-the-day toilet paper, a fact that had once made him laugh but goddamn if today that doesn’t make his rage and anxiety ripple— “ on self-centered, bratty behavior until this situation is resolved. i might not be your quote-unquote daddy, but i can bench you. take a walk. come up with a better strategy. whatever you do with him after this is over is none of my business. ” it’s as close to an outright ‘ shoot him, for all i care ’ as hal’s willing to get, anyway.

“ yeah, we’ve checked crime alley, and amusement mile, and wayne tower, and what feels like every other seedy corner of this city, so forgive me for not being brushed up on my joker lexicon. i’m thinking more deep vault kind of information, kid, something you in your particular version of this obsession might be able to wrack your brain to find that the bat’s version couldn’t. so spare me the attitude. i don’t think bats would like it if i let you go running off mid-temper tantrum anyway. ” 

the likelihood that there’s a connection isn’t completely lost on him, even if it’s questionable; what would the joker want with lois, anyway? still, it’s worth asking. “ settle down, sparky. i’m here for some intel. ” hal’s already done a fly-through of areas joker could reasonably reach within the lapsed time and turned up nothing; he knows barry’s on the ground. “ typical haunts, for starters. or i guess with pennywise over here we should start with the last places you’d look. ”

“ wh— ” hal didn’t even know he was being photographed, but hey, look at him. can he blame her? he’s been told on several occasions that he always looks like he just walked out of a perfume ad, after all. “ sure, ” he shrugs, tilting his head as suggested. “ better? ”

technically speaking, hal is also a millennial, and also always on his phone, so he can’t hate. but apparently that weird voyage into adulthood that happened somewhere around the time he turned thirty has really heightened his standard of living. “ i don’t even remember why i came here now. ”