#glga

“Hey, hey. Stay with me, Hal.” Green Arrow steadied his partner against the wall, one hand at his hip. The other found it’s way from the man’s shoulder to the side of his face, cradling it in his palm.

“C’mon, baby.”

He had the staring eyes of someone who’d been knocked for a loop. There were stars before his eyes and all sounds were a violent, cacophonous jumble of nonsense.

Except Ollie’s voice.

This pulled him back and, nauseated as he was, Hal managed to shake his head, groan, and lean into the hand on the side of his face. “...love it when… you call me that.”

As dawn breaks over Metropolis, the light begins to reveal the extent of the damage of Darkseid’s parademons. What they have taken from the people of earth is incalculable, but there will be restitution. Hauling himself from the ruins of a building, Hal Jordan pushes every ounce of will into his ring and begins digging furiously at the rubble nearby, his voice too broken to call for Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow, but his mind sharp enough and his heart hurting enough to call out a prayer that the smarmy archer still breathes.

“There,” grunts a gravelly voice from nearby. The Dark Knight has extracted himself and the Man of Steel from a similar pile of rubble, but he is pointing across what had once been a street to a broken bow and a pile of unused trick arrows. Green Lantern rushes to it, the tableau burnt into the back of his eyelids and growing more and more grim every time he blinks, like some kind of hellish stereoscope.

“Ollie?” He manages the name, hating the croak the comes from between chapped, cracked lips. Digging without another word, he is soon joined by another pair of hands, then another, then another, and presently, whomever is standing has begun attempting to unearth either the Green Arrow, or his broken body.

Dawn’s warm fingers have begun to caress the street where they are digging as the choking lump rises in Hal Jordan’s throat and he bites down on a sob. Lifting another pile of stones—his ring is tired; he can feel it flickering as his own will to continue begins a descent into absence—he feels his heart leap as a green-clad hand lays, limp and lifeless.

That the arm is attached is a blessing—that there is a body at the other end is nothing short of a miracle. That the body is breathing and alive takes Hal’s breath away. That Oliver “Ollie” Queen has the audacity to sit up and lay a long, deep kiss on the Green Lantern’s lips gives that breath back in spades as his heart thuds wildly.

"Drop an anvil on it." He holds a very serious expression for a grand total of five seconds before bursting into peals of laughter, grabbing his left pectoral and slapping the ever-loving SHIT out of his knee.

Once he is under control, the Green Lantern considers the question. "Ineffable, huh? I dunno about that. Everyone's got self-doubt. For me, I guess it's a little more tangible. It's kinda the antithesis of my whole... deal," he explains, waving his beringed hand about to indicate this, "so I've gotta keep a tight leash on that. Ollie says I haven't got enough imagination to doubt myself... I think I lack in the brains department, personally, but..." He shrugs, as if it doesn't matter. "I think it's just that my friends are the kind I can rely on, anytime, anywhere."

It had never occurred to Hal Jordan that he might have a crush on his best friend. In all honesty, it had never occurred to him that he could… or even that he might feel that way about anyone else after Carol Ferris. To say she had done a number on him would be the understatement of the century, which is a sentiment Ollie has just spoken aloud before pulling his friend—they are just friends, right? That’s what they must be; friends do this all the time—close to himself and holding tightly, as if they might both fly away without that pressure.

“Processing that takes time, my friend, and sometimes it just… comes back,” declares Oliver Queen in that flippant voice he reserves for really important moments. Hal has learned to interpret his companion’s varying degrees of facetiousness and this one is most definitely the serious kind. “We can’t control that… Just gotta build a good support network. Simple, right?”

They both know it is not, especially for people like them.

Hal feels himself curling into Ollie’s embrace on the modest bed in his equally modest home. How they’ve gotten here is a mystery perhaps to be explored later… or never. Does it even matter? The Green Lantern has begun to think that perhaps it doesn’t. That nothing has to change between them, not if they don’t want it to change. He continues to think that even as he feels himself tilt his face up and to press their mouths together. It is not the response he had been expecting, but he finds that he likes the way Arrow’s whiskers tickle his face.

Support network indeed.