Chapter Text
Half a lifetime ago
“Really?” said Dinah. “That guy?”
“He’s got killer aim,” said Hal. “Does this thing where he can plug the barrel of a gun from the far side of a field.”
Dinah looked resoundingly unimpressed.
“And he made an arrow that turns into a parachute.”
“Oh, well, in that case.”
They both looked down from the balcony to the training room floor, where Green Arrow was talking to J’onn, gesticulating wildly with his hands as he pointed to this arrow or that. He did look, admittedly, like a bit of a putz.
Green Arrow caught their movement and gave them a cheeky little wave. Hal nodded back, raising his coffee mug in acknowledgment.
“Lotta swagger for a guy wearing tights and a weapon that went out of fashion three hundred years ago,” said Dinah.
“You’re one to talk about tights,” said Hal.
“Didn’t hear you complaining about them last night.”
“Doesn’t much matter what you’re wearing when it’s coming off, does it?”
“Aren’t you a gentleman.”
“Thought you didn’t want me to be.”
“Like it’d make a difference if I did.”
Hal wasn’t sure if that was true or not, so instead of answering he pointed down to where Green Arrow was flourishing a complicated-looking contraption. “Hey, what do you think that one does?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Extinguish fires?”
“No, no, you gotta think bigger. How about, reverse gravity?”
“Could be a nuclear warhead, for all I care,” said Dinah, rolling her eyes.
Below them, Green Arrow turned away from his makeshift target and fired an ostentatious shot behind his back. The arrow sank easily into the target’s center and hissed, releasing a cloudy-looking gas. Green Arrow looked very pleased with himself, until the gas started drifting back in his direction and he had to beat a hasty retreat to avoid getting caught in his own plume.
“Room’s a bit small. I usually fire the Gas Cloud Arrow from more of a distance,” he shouted, busily fanning the smoke away while J’onn looked on impassively.
“The Gas Cloud Arrow,” whispered Dinah, capturing every capital.
“Fine, you’re right. He’s a bit much.”
“He’s a jackass. I’ve never seen anyone so full of himself. And I hang out with you.”
“Hey,” objected Hal.
“Who’s a jackass?” asked Barry curiously, appearing between them out of thin air.
“Gnargh,” said Hal as he spilled his coffee all down his front. “Dammit, Barry, you know I hate it when you do that.”
“Sorry,” said Barry, not looking particularly sorry. “Who’s a jackass? Not me, I hope.” He grinned — that broad, sweet grin of his that promised it was okay, really, if the joke was on him.
“Obviously not you. Wanna-be Robin Hood down there,” said Hal.
“Well, that’s a little unkind,” said Barry mildly. “C’mon, let’s give him a chance.”
“Right, you like everyone to play nice,” said Dinah.
“Course I do. We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
“What else would we be?” said Hal, not looking at Dinah.
“Well, good,” said Barry, a little perplexed. “C’mon, stop skulking around up here, let’s go down and give him a proper Justice League welcome. You never know, he might surprise you. I hear he does this cool thing with a parachute.” And then he was gone, already downstairs shaking Green Arrow’s hand with earnest enthusiasm.
Dinah gave Hal a speaking look.
“Oh, Barry’s right, just give him a chance,” said Hal. “Honestly, what’s the worst that could happen?”
&&&
When the dome goes down, Hal feels it.
The shockwave ripples through the cell, shaking the stones and sending pain shooting up his elbow as the casing on his arm vibrates wildly. He doesn’t move, except to pull that arm away from Ollie. He can’t bear the thought of anything hurting him more.
Something might be burning somewhere, or maybe he’s only smelling himself. The odor of burnt flesh always lingers too long.
In his arms, Ollie goes on breathing.
The insides of Hal’s nostrils are singed.
Beyond the cell door, metal shrieks across metal. A second shockwave shakes the walls. The yellow globe lights on the walls flicker off and then back on.
Hal doesn’t know how to do this, how to exist outside the action. He was built for noble sacrifice, the heroic last stand. He wasn’t meant sit here, helpless, with his best friend cradled to his chest. His world has narrowed to Ollie’s skittering heartbeat and shallow, rattling breaths. He doesn’t know how to stand it.
“Ollie,” he says, again.
Another explosion that Hal feels in his bones. Closer, this time. He should put Ollie down, ready himself for whatever comes.
He can’t make himself let go.
Outside, a scream, and then the wall explodes. Hal throws himself over Ollie. Debris and rubble rain down on his back, dust settling on the parts of Ollie’s face he can’t cover.
When the wreckage stops falling, Hal twists his body around to look over his shoulder at the gaping hole that used to be the cell wall. Dinah staggers through, gasping for air. She scrabbles through the mess, heedless of her feet slipping on the broken stone, and drops to her knees beside them.
“Ollie,” she croaks, and her voice is worse than it had ever been with the collar on — jagged, utterly spent. Her hands flutter over Ollie’s battered chest, tenuous, like she doesn’t know where to start.
“He’s alive,” says Hal. “But he won’t wake up.”
Dinah spares him one wrecked look and then she’s leaning down to slide one arm under Ollie’s shoulders. “We gotta go,” she says. “There’s wardens everywhere, and more coming. Help me get him up.”
“Do my hand first.”
“There’s no time.”
“I can’t help like this! Just do it fast.”
“Might not work. Might just crush your arm.”
“Won’t crush the ring. Do it.”
They move to the side, away from Ollie’s still body. Hal holds out his arm and turns his face away. Dinah aims at the golden casing covering his hand and screams.
The force of the shockwave knocks him backwards into the wall. Every dead nerve of his hand comes alive at once, twisting and vibrating in a tangled mass of pain. For a moment his vision whites out. Hands grip his shoulders and he blinks up at Dinah’s blood-covered face. Her mouth is moving, but he can’t hear her over the ringing in his ears.
Then his ring slams its way back into his head and the universe restores itself to his finger tips.
“I’m good,” he says. He can barely hear his own voice, just the way it echoes in his throat. Dinah gives him a long, searching look, then nods, grabs him under the shoulders, and hoists him back to his feet. Her mouth forms more words but he shakes his head in incomprehension and follows as she stumbles back to Ollie’s still body. She’s trying to gather him up, crouching down with her hands under his shoulders, her movements jerky and frantic.
“Wait, wait, I got him,” says Hal, but maybe her ears are blown out too, because she doesn’t even look up at him, just starts hoisting Ollie up, ready to carry him out of this place on her own.
Hal pries the ring off the throbbing mess of his right hand, slides it onto his left index finger, and gets to work. He wills up a stretcher under Ollie’s body, gentle as he can. Only then does Dinah release Ollie’s shoulders, easing him back down onto it. “Ollie,” she keeps saying, “Ollie,” and Hal’s hearing must be coming back, or maybe it’s just that he already knows the shape of that word so intimately. On his own lips. On Dinah’s.
Ollie stirs a little, moans. An awful, thready sound. A sign of life.
Dinah’s face crumples. “We gotta move,” she says, but for a long moment she doesn’t — just crouches there next to him, that terrible look on her face. Then she carefully adjusts Ollie’s arms so they lie straight on the stretcher, and stands up. “I’ve got point. Whatever happens, keep him out of it.”
“I got him. Stay close. I got you too.”
She nods, eyes never leaving Ollie. Reaching down, she grazes one hand soft against his face, leaving behind a streak of blood, and then she turns and climbs out of the cell.
He follows her.
They smash open the other cells on their way out. Hal’s ring is still useless against these walls, but at least he can catch the rubble from Dinah’s blasts. The group around them grows — the winged Vrang, ready to fight; three belligerent Khunds who have to be convinced not to attack the others; the Criq warriors, already carrying their own injured, who accept charge of the Valenniri children without argument. The children themselves seem mostly unharmed — Hal’s relief at seeing them comes with a sharp pang of guilt, because he can’t help but wonder if the cost of their well-being was too high.
The antechamber to the arena has been emptied out; its cages stand open. Viscous liquid covers the floor, spreading around two curled bodies, and through the arena doorway comes the sound of full-pitched battle: screams and cries and the ringing and blasting of weapons.
“There’s no other way out?” Hal asks, already knowing the answer. He doesn’t want to take Ollie back into the arena, but in the long weeks of being escorted through the prisoner areas, the only other doors he’s seen are for cells.
Dinah shakes her head, grim. “Only way I can see is through. Stay behind me and keep him out of it.”
“Enough cowering!” shouts one of the Khunds, pushing to the front. “Now is the time to take back our freedom! Attack!”
The Khunds rush forward through the arena doors and launch themselves straight into a wall of the implacable wardens, their long electric pikes at the ready. Dinah follows fast behind. Her cry knocks the line of wardens back and saves the lives of the overeager Khunds. Beyond them battle rages. The sandy arena pit is overrun with wardens, while the freed prisoners fight in small clusters, armed with teeth and claws and rusty weapons snatched from the arena floor.
It’s not a fair fight. It’s never been a fair fight.
With the dome gone, Hal can see for the first time the tiered seating that stretches up on the arena sides, that invisible audience they’ve all been bleeding for since the first day. Whoever they are, they’re fleeing now, pushing their way as a crowd towards the upper levels, away from the fight. Cowards, every one of them, and blocking the exits in their rush to escape. Some small groups of prisoners are trying to fight their way through the crowd of them, scuffles of fighting on the edge of the fleeing mass, but the wardens are quick to protect, and the doors are blocked. The other prisoners are dying up there just like they’re dying on the arena floor, where they’ve always died.
Hal’s not waiting in any lines today. He gathers their little group into a green bubble, even the protesting Khunds, and starts flying up to the nearest exit. They’ll go through by force, regroup outside. Once he’s gotten Ollie somewhere safe he can go back for the other prisoners.
They’ve barely risen above the height of the surrounding battle when a flash of yellow arcs towards them from one of the warden’s staff. It goes through Hal with a sickening jolt that he feels to the pit of his stomach. His construct bubble dispels under his feet and they fall heavily back to the sand floor of the arena. The Vrang catches one of the Valenniri children: the other falls with an awful wail. Dinah rolls, tries to soften Ollie’s landing. Hal lands hard on his hands and knees, and looks up into the faces of the advancing wardens. His ring is useless against them. He spits out sand and raises it anyway.
Dinah leaps in front of him.
Back in the cells Hal had thought her spent from her previous battles, from taking down the dome, from blasting her way through the prison walls. There’s no sign of exhaustion now as she sprints forward over the uneven arena ground. She screams, so loud and high and clear that even the arena lights flicker. The wardens fall under the blast of her cry. They shake apart, like the dome itself must have — they’re no more than some kind of construct themselves, then, just tools of some more powerful master.
But if they’re tools, they’re in seemingly endless supply; more swarm forward to replace those that have fallen. Dinah spins and leaps and screams, lithe and alone among the enemy.
And then not alone. There are Khunds on either side of her, and Criq on either side of them, and another Criq puts a hand on Hal’s shoulder. “We will bear your fallen with our own,” she says, and Hal can see over her shoulder that they’re gently lifting Ollie onto their makeshift blanket stretcher, next to their wounded companion. “Lantern, our faith is with Oa. You must find us the way.”
There is no way, Hal wants to scream, through his mouth of sand and ash, because nothing he has tried in this murderous pit has led to anything but death. Five arena doors. Three open to the maze of prison cells, one to the animal pens where the great beasts are held, and one to what must be the wardens’ quarters, out of which ever more golden figures are spilling. The upper exits are their only option, but they are blocked by spectators and an impossible numbers of wardens. His ring is useless. Dinah fights on, unflagging, but even her strength will not last forever.
For just a moment Hal wavers. He looks at Ollie, gaunt and bloodless on the makeshift stretcher. How much time does he have?`
Once Hal stood with Barry looking down at the marbled earth, all cloud and ocean.
“When everything slows down around me, it’s like I have all the time in the world,” Barry had said. “I could play out a thousand possible futures before anyone said a word. I could tear a city apart in the space of a breath. One blink and the whole world changes.”
They’d still been young men then. Hal never had the chance to know Barry as anything other than a young man. But in that moment, Barry hadn’t looked it. The grief in his face had turned him into someone strange and alien and old. All the joy leeched out of him. He’d said, “And there’s still never enough time.”
Hal feels it now: the thousand futures flashing by. A thousand ways for his world to end. The one where they retreat back into the cells to wait for help that may never come. Where Ollie dies here, in Hal’s arms or in Dinah’s. The one where they fall together under the swarm of wardens, somewhere halfway up the arena stairs. The one where he somehow uses Dinah as a distraction to fly Ollie out, where he gets Ollie home and has to look him in the eyes and admit to leaving Dinah behind. Where Ollie never forgives him.
Where Hal never forgives himself. It’s Dinah.
If there’s even a chance, we save each other, she’d said to Ollie.
There’s no choice, not really.
He does what he always does: he goes on. He climbs to his feet. He throws up a green barrier, useless though it may be, around the Criq stretcher bearers and the Valenniri children. Then he calls out, feeling the tingle in his head as the ring amplifies and translates his voice: “Gather together, don’t let them divide us. Up the stairs to the south.” Farthest from the warden’s gate, closest to the animal pens; it’s the safest route he can see.
Slowly, slowly, they begin carving their way along the arena side towards the stairs. The shape of the battle shifts, reforming itself around Dinah. Warden after warden goes down under her cry, and the weary prisoners rally towards her in the space she makes. They inch towards the southern stairs, their little party growing bigger with every yard gained. The wardens are emerging more slowly now, and Hal starts to let himself hope.
Then there’s a booming from the gates above, and a phalanx of guards marches through, pushing their way through the fleeing spectators — not just the golden wardens, though they come too, but living guards with blasters and gleaming yellow armor marching down the stairs, waves upon waves upon waves of them. Blocking their chosen exit.
At least now Hal has something he can fight. He raises his hand and green energy arcs from his fingers. Dinah falls back into line with him and the two of them hold to a loose circle, the children and stretcher bearers in the center. Dinah takes the construct wardens and Hal the living guards. Other prisoners move to flank them — the Khunds and Criq to his right, a group of Vaikeans to Dinah’s left. The Vrang circles above, hurling energy bolts down into the fray. The guards keep coming, but their ordered ranks are broken, and the fighting spills out across the pit and up into the stands.
More prisoners burst into the arena from the cells; someone must have gone around freeing the other hallways. And there from the nearest doors come spilling the great fighting beasts — an immense serpent, a towering mammoth-creature with tusks the size of a grown man’s body, the three-headed brontosaurus. They rage indiscriminately, and prisoners and guards alike scatter in front of them.
There’s no time for pause, or breath, or anything except the roar and surge of the fight. Dinah swirls in and out of his vision, the whirlwind of her body never still. She’s picked up a sword somewhere, and she saves her cry for the wardens; her voice is turning into something like shattered glass, but it still does its work.
Maybe too well — the guards and wardens start to converge on her, identifying the greatest threat. The distance between her and the other prisoners starts to widen, and the space between her screams gets longer and longer.
Desperately, Hal starts carving his way back to her, but there are too many bodies in between, pushing them further apart. Guards and prisoners are twined together too close for him to use a larger construct, so he’s forced to go after one at a time. He bashes a guard in the face with a hammer, uses a green hand to pluck another from the fray and throw them towards the ceiling. But he’s too slow, his attention spread too thin.
The guards have made a full ring around Dinah now and he keeps losing her in the thicket of it. One of the Khunds goes down, then another, leaving her alone in the horde, the flailing mess of limbs and weapons and blood. She’s gone silent, no canary cries piercing the noise of battle; either her voice is gone or she’s too winded to scream. Guards press in from all directions.
Hal sees the moment when Dinah drops to her knees, disappearing under the tangle of bodies, sword still flashing silver as she goes down.
“No,” he screams, throwing himself against the throng, walls of energy erupting from his hands. Too slow. Too many bodies between them. There’s no time.
There’s never enough time.
With a crack, the air above them splits open. White-hot energy arcs across Hal’s vision, followed by a slash of orange. When his eyes clear enough to see, Dinah is on her feet again, the Tamaranean at her back, the two of them carving their way towards him through the mass of guards.
Hal has time for a single gulping breath and then he has to throw up a shield to block a heavy swing from a guard’s energy staff. Control your position, you control the fight, Dinah would say, but this has been a losing battle from the start. They’ve made it almost to the foot of the stairs, but the way up is completely blocked by the incoming guards. There’s nowhere to go.
“Fall back,” roars the Tamaranean, and Hal repeats her words so that the ring translates them for the other prisoners, and they begin to converge into a narrow circle. “We cannot stay here in the open,” she roars at him. “Surrounded we have no chance.”
“There’s nowhere to go but up,” gasps Hal, fending off another wave of guards with a giant baseball bat. “We’re dead if they trap us in the cells.”
“Underneath,” says a Dryadian, their voice slow gravel. Their granite skin is badly chipped and fractured, and when they raise their slow arm to point towards the animal pens, it grinds in a way that doesn’t sound natural even for a silicate-based being. “Tunnels,” they say. “I feel their echoes.”
Whatever faint hope it is, it’s better than the alternatives. “Good enough for me,” says Hal, and yells, “Through the animal pens!”
It’s easier said than done. The dozen yards separating them from the gate might as well be miles, crowded as it is with guards and wardens. Hal cracks out a whip of green energy. Dinah and the Tamaranean lead the charge into the space he’s cleared, a whirlwind of bright blades.
Slowly, slowly they move, until the gates to the animal pens are before them. The Dryadian goes through first, the Tamaranean with them for protection, and then the children and stretcher bearers — Hal wants to grab Ollie’s wrist as he’s carried by, check for life, but there’s no time — and then Dinah and Hal guard the gate as the other prisoners stagger in. Too few, and all of them wounded, and some still trapped in little pockets and groups back behind the line of advancing guards.
“We’ll hold as long as we can,” shouts Hal. Then, to Dinah, “If there’s nothing down there, it’s over.”
“I’m not done yet,” she rasps in her ruined voice. She takes out a guard at the knees and another with the backswing, and even staggering, her greatest weapon gone, he can see the shining steel core of her. That stubborn little girl with the braids, who doesn’t know how to give up.
Another straggling group makes it through; one more coming, but the guards are thick in between. Hal’s not sure they can hold it, and he can see even Dinah glancing back, doing the math. Can they risk the ones who’ve already made it through?
More guards leap down from the stands above. Hal whirls, raising his hands, already too late. But before they reach him, a purple-skinned tripedal figure glides through, waving their tentacle arms and humming. The guards shriek and then fall, convulsing and gurgling. Liquid gushes from their mouths.
“Nice save,” says Hal in relief as the tripedal alien moves to join up with them.
“Get back or I’ll kill you,” snarls Dinah. Startled, Hal looks to her; her sword is raised at the alien, her body taut. “That’s the one who fought Ollie,” she says, even as she whirls to meet the next wave of guards. “I could hear him. Screaming.”
The guards felled by Ollie’s former opponent are still on the ground, still shaking. Hal’s stomach twists at the sight of them.
But there’s no choice, not really, and Dinah knows it — he can see it in the set of her shoulders as she faces off against the guards.
“Help us hold the gate,” Hal says, and the ring translates for him.
“We will hold,” hisses the alien, and hums, and this time Hal can see the wave of rippling energy go out. How the guards shriek and gargle and then go silent.
The last group of prisoners are scrambling through the gate to the animal pen now: an Andromedan, three Llarans, and a hulking Lizarkon, her mate draped over her mighty shoulders.
“Now!” says Hal, grabbing Dinah’s arm and trying to tug her back through the gate.
She tears herself away from him. “I’m not done yet.”
Then she screams one last time. An awful scream, like metal shrieking against metal, like her throat tearing itself apart. Hal looks around wildly, trying to find whatever threat she’s staving off, but there’s nothing. The next wave of guards is ten yards back, approaching cautiously over the still-writhing bodies on the ground. She’s not even aiming at them. She’s screaming up towards the arena roof, where the last of the fleeing spectators are still crowded around the upper exits, their panic lit by giant yellow light globes.
Light globes that start to flicker as Dinah’s scream goes on and on. Hal’s ears ache with it.
A loud crack. A bright flare of light. Then, with a scatter of short pops and the smell of burning sulfur, the arena plunges into darkness. Screams from the upper arena break the sudden, heavy silence. In the distance, a deep, thunderous boom. Hal catches Dinah as she crumples and drags her backwards through the gate.
Around them the waiting prisoners surge forward with rods and pitchforks and whatever else they’ve scavenged from the animal cells to barricade the gate. Hal pulls Dinah deeper in, out of their way. It’s dark, and the air is dank and cold. In his arms, Dinah isn’t moving. Isn’t breathing.
“Dinah. Dinah!” He shakes her wildly. He can’t help it.
She gasps for air. Hal’s heart starts again.
“Told you— I had— some tricks left,” she pants, in between awful, gulping breaths. Her voice is shredded, barely there, her gasps as sharp and short as knives.
“What the hell did you do?” says Hal, lightheaded with relief. He’d felt her breath stop as she went down.
“Not sure. Might have— blown out— the power grid. Saw the lights blinking. Before.”
“Damn.”
It’s utterly dark in the cells. Whatever she did, it’s holding. Hal holds out his ring and raises a glowing green orb up to the ceiling. Not much light to work with, but it’s enough for the panting, scrabbling sounds around them to resolve into the shadowy shapes of the other prisoners, still rushing to find more materials with which to barricade the cell door — sacks of animal feed, barrels of water, the torn out gates to the animal pens. The pens themselves are empty, the captive beasts still raging in the arena, with no one to fight now but their jailers.
A spidery Kriglo is binding the makeshift barrier with its heavy, sticky web. It won’t last forever — it might not last long at all — but from the sounds in the arena, their captors have other things to worry about.
Another distant explosion rumbles the stone.
Hal’s still got his arms wrapped around Dinah’s ribs. He can feel how every breath tears through her, the wracking of her desperate lungs. She’s already started twisting in his grip, trying to get up. “Ollie?”
“Up ahead. Can you walk?”
“We’ll find out.”
He pulls her up as gently as he can. She’s shaking, some combination of adrenaline and muscles pushed beyond the limits of endurance, but once she gets her feet under her she stays up. He wraps his good arm around her, just in case, and she leans on him as they limp deeper into the animal pits.
The two Criq stretcher-bearers have laid down their burden towards the back of the pens, and are checking on the other wounded as best they can. Hal spares one glance for them, and one for the Valenniri children huddled together in the corner. He’ll find words to reassure them when he can.
Ollie lies on the thin blanket next to the wounded Criq. His face is covered in blood. He’s terribly still. Dinah makes a small, choking sort of noise, and pulls against Hal’s shoulder. Hal realizes he’s stopped moving and forces his feet to start again, stumbling forward until they’re right next to the stretcher. Dinah sinks to her knees, or her legs give out, and Hal holds her shoulders to gentle the way down. He doesn’t kneel down himself.
It’s Dinah’s place.
He can’t bear to.
Dinah’s hands are on Ollie’s neck, her ear by his mouth. “He’s breathing,” she says, and starts to wipe the blood from his face with her hands.
Hal feels a strange sort of vertigo, like his first time up in a jet, the ground lost somewhere vaguely below his feet. The frantic scrambling sounds around him fade away under the pounding of his pulse in his ears. He stumbles backward until his back hits a wall and tries to remember how to breathe. Nothing seems to be working quite right.
The flickering of his little green light globe is what brings him back to himself. They’ve come too far for him to lose concentration now. If Dinah can go on, then so can he. He blinks hard and wills the light back into existence, the ground back under his feet.
The Tamaranean is staring at him, her burnt hair a ragged fringe around her face, her huge feline eyes mere inches from his own. “Are you hurt or something? We have to keep moving!” she repeats. “We’ll die if we stay here. The entrance is as blocked as it’s going to get. Tell the others to come. We’ve found a tunnel. ”
Hal pushes off the wall and lets the momentum of that carry him on. He calls the other prisoners away from the barricade and sends them limping down in the direction the Tamaranean had pointed, to the back of the animal cells where she and the Dryadian are clearing away the rubble blocking a narrow, dark corridor. He creates green stretchers and helps load the worst wounded onto them. The Vrang, whose left wing is badly torn. An Andromedan, struggling for air. The unconscious Criq, so faithfully carried the whole way by his companions, most of whom never made it through the gate.
He saves Ollie for last, and by the time he gets to him, Dinah’s back to herself, face set, purpose wrapped around her like armor. They lift him onto the stretcher together, and walk forward into the tunnel. Behind them, the Kriglo and a few others set to work barring the door. Sealing them in.
The tunnel is dark and musty, the air heavy with dust. Hal’s light globe is barely enough to make a dent in the darkness — the Dryadian must be leading them forward based on some sense other than sight, but they were right about the existence of a tunnel, so Hal lets himself follow, trusting. It’s not like they have any other choice.
The sounds of the arena die away. They stumble on, picking each other up when they fall. Time takes on a strange, alien quality, like a dream: a step and another step and another. Dinah leans on Hal’s good arm. The ring thrums on his finger. Ollie keeps breathing.
Slowly the light starts to rise around them. Hal doesn’t realize it at first, thinks it’s just his eyes finally adjusting to the darkness, until he reaches for balance against the wall and realizes he can see his fingers clearly. The rough stone of the tunnel is threaded with thin veins of some yellow ore, its soft glow building as they move deeper. It grows bright enough that he can see the exhausted curve of Dinah’s shoulders, and the blood on Ollie’s face. As they walk on the walls become more structured, interspersed with metal beams and supports. Old tools lie discarded on the ground.
“Looks like an old mine,” rasps Dinah. “They must have built the arena directly on top of it.”
That’s city planning for you, Hal imagines Ollie saying. Cover up the death pit with a bigger, fancier death pit.
Hal doesn’t say anything, just puts one foot in front of the next. Something terrible is building in his chest.
The tunnel slopes slightly down. It branches, and then branches again, and the Dryadian leads them without hesitation, first this way and then that. A steep descent and then an upwards scramble that leaves them breathless. Someone ahead is weeping.
A clear, cold air glides over his skin as they turn a corner, and he looks up to see an old ventilation shaft straight above. Too small to fit through, and covered with a grate of that awful, impassible yellow metal, but still, high above, is the night sky. The first sky he’s seen in a month, dark and clear and peppered with familiar stars.
Oan constellations are three-dimensional, meant to hold true across the parallax of countless star systems. They don’t come naturally to the human brain — Hal has spent years learning them, and still he relies on the ring to plot them out and rotate them until they resolve into patterns he can understand.
He doesn’t need the ring now. He knows the shape of these stars in a single glance: the bright eyes, the trailing robe, the single hand raised aloft. The Guardian, straight on, staring down almost exactly as he watches over the planet of the beings who traced him out in their own image. And there, shining strong and clear at his heart, the red shimmer of the planet Hal knows nearly as well as his own.
They aren’t stranded at the far ends of the galaxy, or in forbidden Vega, or in the strange fourth world realms claimed by the New Gods. They’re here at the center of everything, the galactic equivalent of a stone’s throw from Oa itself.
He doesn’t feel surprise. Maybe he’s known since he stepped into this mine. Maybe it’s been longer — maybe he’s known since he first laid his ringless hand on the yellow rock wall of his cell, flecked with shining gold. When the people with the power make the laws…
No. He’s upheld the Guardians’ laws since he was barely more than a boy; he put his faith in their justice when he had no faith left for himself. He’s followed them as best he could and accepted his punishment when he couldn’t. He’s stood by at times he thought he should act, and acted at times when he’d rather have been still, for the sake of the Guardians’ law. But this place is not any law he recognizes.
No evil shall escape my sight, he thinks. He might not be able to break those yellow bars, but all he’s ever really needed is the sky. Those spreading stars above him. He raises his ring high, focuses all his will, and sends a message.
“Who did you call?” Dinah asks hoarsely when he’s done.
“John. He’ll gather the others.”
“Will it be enough?”
Hal glances at her. She’s looking off to the side, not at him. Her face is smeared with blood and dirt, and she’s favoring her left side badly. The hand she doesn’t have over Hal’s shoulder is wrapped around Ollie’s wrist, like a lifeline. He wonders how much she’s guessed. He doesn’t ask.
“I told him to bring a bulldozer,” he says.
“Oh, well, in that case,” says Dinah, her mouth quirking into a ghost of her familiar teasing grin. It only lasts a moment before it fades. “You should tell them.”
“What?”
She gestures with her head, and he looks up to see that the procession around them has stopped. The other fleeing prisoners have gathered in a loose circle around them, watching carefully: for news, for hope, for a final chance.
“Our faith is with Oa,” says one of the Criq. Only the two stretcher bearers left standing now, of the whole band that had started. Hal’s chest aches.
Once, a broken man in a broken ship held out a hand and told Hal to be without fear, without anger, without corruption. To serve justice for the sake of an ordered universe. He’d allowed himself to believe that he could be a part of such an endeavor.
No evil shall escape my sight, he’d promised.
“The Lanterns will come for us,” he says, and as he says it he knows it to be true. Whatever else may be splitting apart, he has faith in John. In Kilowog, in Tomar-Tu and Larvox and Brik, even in Guy. He feels the ripple that flows through the crowd.
“Then they must come soon,” hisses the Lizarkon woman, leaning on the construct stretcher that bears her bonded mate. “We can’t go on much longer. Not without resting.”
She’s right. Even in the dim light, Hal can see that the other prisoners are struggling. No one has made it through uninjured. Several have used the brief pause to slide to the ground; others are supporting each other. The two Valenniri children are softly keening, the spider-like Kriglo hovering anxiously next to them, clicking its legs against the ground. Trying to comfort them.
“How much farther to get out of the tunnels?” Hal asks the Dryadian.
“Too far,” they say. “We must rest first. But there is a better place not far ahead. Water. I can feel it.”
Hal nods. “Just a little farther,” he translates for the rest of the group. “Then we rest and care for the wounded. The Lanterns will come.”
“I don’t know about any Lanterns,” says the Tamaranean. “But I will walk with you.”
They go on. Dinah leans on Hal’s shoulder; Hal supports himself on the wall when he needs to. The rock walls are craggy, rough-hewn, but the floor beneath their feet is worn smooth. How many centuries of footsteps, to wear away the jagged edges of rock? Or maybe he should be thinking in millennia. He doesn’t know.
John might. John always seems to know these things. He was the one who had explained to Hal how mountains rise and fall, thrust out of the molten earth by the shifting of the tectonic plates, only to be slowly sanded away by wind and water.
“I guess I assumed they were just always there,” Hal had said. “Never really thought of them coming or going.” They’d been standing together on a lost moon, a barren, beautiful landscape of jagged peaks and the bleached-bone skeletons of cities laid bare by some ancient, civilization-wrecking war.
“Oh, that we might read the book of fate,” mused John, half under his breath, “and see the revolution of the times make mountains level, and the continent, weary of solid firmness, melt itself into the sea.”
“What’s that now?”
“Henry the fourth, lamenting the coming downfall of his kingdom.” And when Hal still looked blank, he added, “Shakespeare.”
“Oh, obviously.”
John huffed a laugh. “It comforts me, sometimes. That the poets and philosophers of earth have words even for the things we see out here. The awfulness of it all. And the wonder.”
Hal envied him that — the ability to find words amidst the vast landscapes, to look towards the infinite and find something to hold onto. All Hal knew was how to go forward. He looked out across the stark mountains, silent.
“I wonder if the builders of those cities ever imagined they would end like this. Just twisted metal and empty sky.” John rubbed at the green ring on his finger. “Maybe it’s better not to know. To live without thinking of the ending.”
“How long do you think until everything here is gone?” Hal asked.
John shook his head and shrugged. “How many years must a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?”
“More Shakespeare,” Hal agreed, nodding wisely.
John laughed. “That one’s Bob Dylan.” He went on softly, half-humming under his breath. And how many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free?
Hal had recognized the song then, had remembered Dinah singing it over some campfire. And how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? And Ollie’s rough voice mingling with hers: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
“Dylan?” says Dinah now, a hint of a smile flickering around the edges of her weary face, and Hal realizes he’s been humming along to his own memory. “Never took you for a fan.”
“I’m not. Anyway, it’s your fault. All those campfires.”
“Oh, that’s all on Ollie.”
“It usually is.”
It’s true. So much of their lives has been Ollie barging in, changing things up. Wanting. Asking. Pushing them, this way and that.
“You know,” says Dinah, “he always says he doesn’t like Dylan.”
“Ollie says a lot of things,” says Hal.
They walk on. The veins of ore grow wider and brighter, their glow warm. Then, without any warning, the walls drop away and they enter into a long, bright cavern. The rock walls are laced with threads of gold, and four thick pillars circle the center, each of them made up nearly entirely of the shining yellow ore. The whole space must once have been a giant ore deposit, long since hollowed out and taken away for its sacred purpose.
At the far end are two openings, probably leading to more snaking mine tunnels. Water cascades down one of the side walls and gathers in a gold-glimmering pool, which must empty somewhere deep below. It’s beautiful, in the way of old forgotten places.
“Here we rest,” rumbles the Dryadian. “After sleep, I will talk with the stone. Find a way out.”
Something like a sigh spreads through the exhausted prisoners — not a single exhalation of breath, and yet somehow the feeling of dozens of different creatures all becoming slightly looser. A lifting of tension. Some of them collapse at the entrance to the cavern. Others rush to the water, cupping it in their hands or lowering their heads to drink. An amphibious, webbed creature submerges themself entirely.
They tend to the wounded as best they can. The spidery Kriglo, whom Hal had once seen single-handedly (eight-leggedly?) take down three horned beasts the size of rhinos, turns out to be quite a nurturing sort, bossy and careful. They take charge of the operation, using their silvery thread as bandages to bind wounds and staunch bleeding.
When they get to Ollie, they hover over him gravely, blinking down with their multi-faceted eyes. “The worst injury is inside,” they say. “There is little I can do here. If I were at my hospital…”
“Can you make him more comfortable?” asks Hal, a little wildly. Ollie’s face is twisted in pain. Hal can’t bear it.
“I will do what I can,” says the Kriglo.
Dinah hovers closely, watching their every move, holding Ollie’s hand in her own. Her strong fingers so gentle, her face full of desperate hope. How she holds onto him like something precious.
Hal can’t watch. He sinks to the ground next to them, pulls his knees to his chest and stares out at the water, splashing down the stone wall. At the other prisoners, drinking and bathing and sobbing and sleeping, alone or huddled in little, gasping groups, recovering their breath or tending their wounds or praying. At the vast columns of the yellow metal, glowing. The light is almost like sunlight, warm and clear.
Dust floats slowly through the shafts of light, like little shining stars, and Hal is struck with a memory he’d thought long forgotten. His father, home at last on leave from the sky, shaking a blanket and launching a great cloud of dust into the late afternoon sunlight. All day Hal had been waiting with his carefully guarded treasures — a spelling test, a baseball trophy, a rare penny. But there had been neighbors to greet, a broken window to repair, the door on the oven that didn’t close right. If only his mother would stop nagging. Who cared about the oven, when time was evaporating so quickly?
Already his father looked tired, rolling his shoulders and heading for the couch. Shaking the blanket and then coughing and coughing. “For the love of god, Jessie, the house is a god-damned pigsty. Would it kill you to pick up a god-damned dust cloth once in a while? Christ alive!” And eight-year-old Hal had looked through his father’s contemptuous eyes and seen for the first time the grime on the windows, the table still covered in this morning’s breakfast, the mud and mess of three boys strewn across the floor. He’d thought: no wonder he never comes home. Had put away his treasures and sat quietly while his mother wept, his knees drawn to his chest, watching the motes of dust drift in the sunlight like tiny stars.
God, what a thing to remember now, light years away, here in the center of the universe. His father thirty years buried. Hal shakes his head to clear it.
The Kriglo has moved on from Ollie, is tending to a group along the far wall. Dinah is on her knees next to his stretcher. She’s taken off her shirt and dipped it in the water, is using it to wipe the blood and grime from Ollie’s face. As Hal watches, she leans down and feathers a kiss onto his forehead. Hal’s chest aches with the gentleness of it.
Dinah looks up and sees him watching. “I think his pulse is a bit steadier,” she says. “Let me see your hand.”
“My hand?”
She gestures, impatient, and then takes his arm at the elbow. His right hand, the one that usually wears the ring. He’s somewhat surprised to notice that it hurts terribly.
“I told you it’d be crushed,” says Dinah, as if Hal cares about that. “Give it here.” He watches her bruised, efficient fingers as she bandages him up. She shouldn’t be standing. An hour ago — or three hours, or five, or a lifetime ago — she’d poured herself empty. He’d felt her breath stop.
“You need to rest,” he says.
“I will,” she says. “Soon. Oh, don’t give me that look, it’s not like you’re any better.”
He loves her rather unbearably, her iron spine and unquenchable spirit. In another world, if he’d known that sooner, maybe things would have turned out differently. Or maybe they’d still be right here in this cold and distant cavern, the air between them full of light.
“Your turn,” he says when she’s tied her last knot. She doesn’t argue, just turns so he can get to the gash going down the left side of her chest. She’s more bruise and blood than skin. She’s quiet as he works, but her hands are trembling.
“The Lanterns will come for us,” Hal says again, and he believes it.
When she looks up at him, her eyes are awful. “I don’t know how to do this. The waiting. I don’t know how to stand it.”
“Yeah,” says Hal, feeling the same itch under his own skin, just as he’d felt it every time he was thrown in his cell after a fight. The worst of it is the waiting. “I guess none of us are very good at it. Except maybe Ollie, sometimes.”
Ollie could crouch for an hour waiting for a single drop of melting water to slip from the tip of an icicle, just to catch it with an arrow on its way down. Hal used to go half out of his skin with boredom, watching him. It had always struck Hal as odd that Ollie — impulsive, bull-headed Ollie, who couldn’t hold his tongue if his long-lost fortune depended on it — could be so good at waiting.
“He’s had a lot of practice,” says Dinah.
“Learned it on the island,” says Hal rotely, since Ollie’s not awake to say it himself.
“Not just there.” But she doesn’t elaborate any further.
Hal doesn’t ask. He doesn’t, he finds, particularly want to think about Ollie waiting.
After a while, Hal gets up and does a circle around the cavern. He’s the only one here who can speak to almost everyone, and he’s a Lantern — no matter what else, that still means something to him. So he checks on the huddled groups as best he can.
The two Valenniri children are sleeping, tentacles intertwined, their fan-like lungs opening and closing with reassuring regularity. They’ve been covered by some kind of webbed blanket, and the Kriglo is still fussing over them, clicking its pincers rhythmically and making quiet, shrill sounds that Hal realizes, as he gets closer, are some kind of lullaby. It makes his chest ache.
Everyone here had been torn from their world and forced into the pit by their unseen captors, heedless and uncaring: healers and builders and fighters and children, all together. The thought of it takes his breath away.
“I’d hoped it was just us,” John had said years ago, back when he’d still been new to the Corps. “One miserable little planet of people fucking each other over. I thought I’d find something better out in the stars. But it’s just the same. I think there’s enough hate out here to implode the whole universe. A black hole of hate, pulling us all in. We’re drowning in it.”
“Yes,” Hal had said, because he felt it too. The cities laid to waste, the children bickering in the street. A solar system at war because two emperors claimed the same mineral-rich moon. The landlord raising rent on his slums to afford a second vacation home. A planet torn apart because the sea people believed the land had been promised to them by their god. A husband and wife screaming at each other because he’d come home late and she hadn’t had put the boys to bed. On every planet, at every scale — greed and violence and pain, without escape.
John had slumped forwards, his shoulders bent, anger giving way to brokenness. “So how do we go on?”
Hal hadn’t known what to say. What other choice existed? You went on because that was all there was to do.
It was Katma who had answered. Katma Tui, who had torn her home back from oppression, who had been hated and reviled for it and went on anyway. “Because there’s even more love,” she’d said.
Hal watches the Kriglo’s spidery leg readjust the spun silk blanket over the huge alien children. There’s even more love.
Suddenly, deep underground in this light-bathed cavern, that’s all he sees. The Lizarkon, bent over her injured mate. The two surviving Criq, bathing the companion they’d carried so long in the cool water of the pool. The stone-like Dryadian enveloped in the branching arms of a sentient tree. The Tamaranean, who has been moving from group to group picking up languages with alarming speed. She has apparently picked up enough Vrangari to be joking with the injured Vrang. One of her hands runs gently over the feathers of the Vrang’s untorn wing.
Hours ago, they could have torn each other apart in the arena.
Hal thinks again of the Kolmag, lying protective over the Tamaranean. Of Dinah, screaming at a purple-skinned alien. Of the guards’ bodies twisting and convulsing.
In a shadowy corner of the cavern the purple tripedal figure crouches, rocking slightly. Alone, Hal thinks at first, but then when he get closer he sees them: four tiny heads with huge dark eyes, poking their little curved beaks out of a cavity in the creature’s chest.
God. How many children have been sucked into this place, in all the years it has stood? How many have been cut down in the ring, unseen or unrecognized?
When he limps over, fifteen dark eyes turn to him. “We knew not,” laments the alien, their voice a wail inside Hal’s mind. “We were taken here by force, so we fought. We believed all others to be one, all others to be against us. We knew not that you, too, had the gift of language. We knew not.”
Hal is very tired. When he speaks, his voice comes out cracked and hoarse. “Yeah, seems like that’s going around,” he says. “There’s an awful lot of things here I should have known that I didn’t.” If he’d realized earlier, could he have done anything different? When he looks at the little three-eyed babies, all he can think of is Dinah, screaming. “Rest,” he says. “No one here will hurt you.”
“We thought the Anathari alone in the universe,” the alien hums in his head. “We rejoice to find understanding in the stars.”
Hal is already turning away. “I’ll send a Lantern by when we get out of here,” he says without looking back. He is bone weary, and he has no room in him for grace. He’ll ask John to go and handle the introductions. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to look at one of the Anathari without imagining Ollie convulsing in his arms. Choking on his own blood.
He walks to the pool and cups his hands in the water. Drinks. It’s sweet and cool against his burned throat, but it hurts to swallow.
He goes back to Dinah, hunched on the stone floor next to Ollie’s still body. “Your turn,” he says. “Get some water. Wash up a bit. It’ll do you good.”
Dinah’s hand rests lingeringly on Ollie’s shoulder, but she doesn’t argue, just climbs wearily to her feet and limps off.
Hal leans back agains the glowing wall, his good hand resting on Ollie’s chest so that he can feel the faint movement of his chest: breath and breath and breath. He watches Dinah’s limping progress towards the water, slowed by the aliens who stop her with touches and sounds, speaking words in languages she doesn’t know. Everyone here knows who got them out, and they all find different ways to show their thanks.
We save each other, she’d said, and she had. And then they all had, all of the other prisoners, just like she’d promised they would.
“Hell of a lady,” he whispers to himself, like an echo from a lifetime ago.
“’S’what I always say.”
Hal startles forward. “Ollie!” He looks down to meet hazy green eyes. “You’re awake!”
“Sure. Not really cut out — for the Sleeping Beauty thing,” says Ollie, in between ragged breaths. The sound of his rough, familiar voice goes through Hal like a shockwave. “Don’t got the bod. Or the face.”
Hal’s heart seems to be trying to beat out of his chest. His eyes are burning. He wants to gather Ollie into his arms. He wants to put tender fingers on his face, the way Dinah would. Instead, he blinks before the hot tears can start to rise, and lets his hand drift to Ollie’s shoulder. “Not with that beard you’ve got going, you don’t. Let’s get you to a barber, then we’ll talk.”
“Barber?” wheezes Ollie. “Would take a miracle worker. We get out?”
“Sort of. We’re underground, in an old mining system. Left our evil overlords with some serious damage, and haven’t seen a sign of them yet. I got a message out to John, so help is on the way.”
“Dinah?”
“Saved us all, like usual. She’s getting water. I’ll get her.” He starts to get up, but Ollie reaches for him. Just the smallest flap of a hand, but it’s enough.
“Stay,” Ollie says.
Hal stays. Drops back to the ground next to Ollie like he’s rooted there. Maybe it makes him selfish, but he can’t bring himself to step away even for a moment.
“The kids?” Ollie asks. He doesn’t try to lift his head to look around. His skin is like wax, so pale that the older bruises stand out like livid scars.
“They’re safe. Or as safe as they can be. You did good. And I think they’re halfway to being adopted by a giant alien spider, so there’s that.”
“That good?” Ollie asks, looking confused. Hal can’t tell how much he’s tracking what’s going on around them.
“Yeah, it’s good. The Kriglo — they’re the big spidery one — took them under their wing. Er. Leg. Made them a little silk blanket and everything. I won’t be surprised if they have toys by the end of the night.”
Ollie smiles at that, a little flickering ghost of a smile. Then he coughs wetly. Even his cough is faded, sapped of energy.
“Reminds me of you and Roy,” Hal says, brighter than he feels. As if by talking about good memories he might be able to strengthen the tenuous tether holding Ollie to his body. Keep him here, just a little longer. “The way you kept shoving stuff at him in the beginning. Here, have a bow and arrow, did I mention it’s the one from the original Robin Hood movie? Here, have a stamp book, I’ll help you start a collection, you can join a club. You’re reading Mark Twain in school? Oh, let me buy you a first edition. That’ll make you real cool.”
It’s an old, fond joke, the dumb enthusiasm with which Ollie had embraced Roy. He’s heard Roy tell the stories, too, his mouth quirked to one side in that way he picked up from Ollie. So he’s not expecting the way Ollie’s whole body winces at the words.
“Never shoulda taken him.”
“Hey, hey, what are you talking about?” demands Hal, alarmed. “Of course you should’ve.”
“Selfish,” Ollie murmurs. “Wasn’t about what he needed. Was what I wanted.”
“You’re the best thing that ever happened to that kid,” says Hal, and means it. He’s thinking of his own father. What it would have been like to have had someone like Ollie instead.
“You’re wrong,” says Ollie, with a wheeze that’s something like a laugh. The sound of it hurts. “Other way around. But. Thanks. For meaning it.” He takes a moment to catch his breath. Every inhale seems to rattle in his chest. “Hal—”
“Don’t.”
“I gotta. You promise me. You’ll—”
“I’ll watch over him with my life. I would’ve anyway. Lian too. You didn’t have to ask.”
“Yes I did,” says Ollie.
“Ollie—” starts Hal, his chest aching, but Ollie ignores him.
“Something Roy taught me. Sometimes you gotta say it.”
Hal’s not quite sure what he means, but it doesn’t matter, because then Dinah’s there, throwing herself to her bruised knees next to them.
“Ollie,” she says, her whole heart in her voice. “You’re awake!” Her hands find his face, his chest, his hands. He can see the tremble to them.
Ollie opens his mouth to speak, but chokes on a cough instead. “Hal,” he gasps in between coughs, flapping his hand a little.
“He wants me to tell you he’s not Sleeping Beauty,” says Hal resignedly. “He thinks he’s funny.”
Dinah visibly pulls herself together, drawing her shoulders back, her face into a warm smile. She doesn’t let go of Ollie’s hands. “Sleeping Beauty? Definitely not. At least not until we get you to a barber,” she says. “I hardly recognize you under that lumberjack growth you’ve got going on.”
“First thing I’ll do,” wheezes Ollie. “When we get back. Gotta fix the beard.”
“Well,” says Dinah. “Maybe not the first thing.”
Ollie doesn’t quite pull off an eyebrow waggle, but he manages to give the suggestion of it.
Hal tips his head back against the stone wall and focuses his gaze towards the ceiling, because he can’t stand to watch the unbearable tenderness of Dinah’s lips on Ollie’s forehead.
“Pretty bird,” says Ollie, and then chokes again on whatever liquid is slowly filling his lungs. He coughs and coughs, a horrible wheeze of a cough that goes on for too long as he fights his body for air. Dinah starts lifting him up slowly by the shoulders, trying to find a position that helps him breath, but then stops as he lets out an awful whine of pain as the movement jars something in his ribs or chest. Hal watches, hating his own helplessness, as Ollie gasps and gurgles and then finally goes quiet, his eyes closed.
“Ollie?” whispers Dinah, sounding breathless herself. Then, when his eyelids flutter back open “No, no, don’t try to talk. I’ve got you. I’m here.”
“Me? Not talk?” Ollie manages, after a long wait. “Now that’s just cruel.”
“Just rest, for a little while. Please. For me.”
“Anything, pretty bird,” says Ollie, and lets his eyes close. Dinah strokes his dirty, matted curls until his breathing levels out into a more regular wheeze. Hal puts his hand on Dinah’s shoulder and squeezes. She doesn’t look at him, just closes her own eyes and breaths too.
Ollie drifts in and out of sleep after that. Every time he comes back he seems to be tracking the situation around them less.
“You look upset,” he says to Dinah on one of his wakings, reaching up to touch her face. “Did I forget to screw the lid on again?”
Dinah lets out a long breath through her nose. Then she slips her fingers up over his battered hand, pressing it closer against her cheek. “You always do.”
“Orange juice on the ceiling?”
“Orange juice on the ceiling.”
Ollie sighs. “She shakes it. Before she pours,” he explains to Hal.
“If you don’t shake it, all the pulp stays down at the bottom,” says Dinah.
“I know,” says Ollie. “I’m sorry. Really meant to screw it on.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care about the juice.” Her hand on Ollie’s is soft, but Hal can see her other hand, how tightly she’s gripping her knee. Her fingers digging in.
“I always mean to. I’m trying to do better.”
“I know,” says Dinah softly. “You always do.” She guides his hand back down to lie at his side, very gently. Even so, Ollie groans a little.
“Don’t feel so good. Someone get a hit in on me?”
“More than one. It’s back to hand-to-hand training for you after this. Gotta get those basics down.”
“Don’t mind the basics. When they’re coming from you.”
“You say that now, but ten minutes in and you’ll be begging for a break.”
“Good point,” says Ollie. “Maybe I better rest first.” He lets his eyes slip closed.
“I think that’s a good idea,” says Dinah, smiling down at him. Hal can see the tremble to it. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
Sometimes when Ollie wakes up he remembers where they are. Others, he thinks they’re in Seattle, or in the old island camp, or on the road again. Over and over, he asks for Roy.
“Gotta check on him,” he tells them, trying to push himself up. “He might be in trouble. It’s been too long. I didn’t mean for it to be this long.”
“Roy’s fine,” Dinah and Hal tell him, again and again.
“I never mean for it to be this long. Trying to do better.”
Hal waits for Dinah to answer, but she’s turned her face away, staring resolutely at the wall. Her hands are shaking. So he says what he imagines she would say: “You’re doing good enough, Ol. You’re doing good.” It doesn’t soothe the worry out of Ollie’s forehead so Hal goes on, talking almost at random. “Roy’s gonna kick your ass when we get back, you know. Or maybe mine, for letting you get hurt on my watch. That kid’s got a protective streak a mile wide. Remember that time you busted up your leg showing off doing dumb tricks on a horse?”
“Saving a baby,” Ollie protests fuzzily.
“So you say, but I got the real story from Roy. It was very short. ‘Tried to stand on horse, fell off.’ And something about Robin, maybe?”
“Kid’s a menace.”
“Ah, I see how it was. Roy came home talking about the Boy Wonder and his Amazing Circus Tricks, didn’t he?”
“Two babies. Saved from a stampede.”
“Very heroic, I’m sure,” agrees Hal, giving in. “Point is, I’ve never seen anyone more fussed over. Roy called me up long-distance — collect, mind you — complaining about hang gliders and kites and fleets of hot air balloons and who knows what all.” He still remembers the sound of Roy’s voice, bashful and cracking and terribly fourteen, insisting, ‘But he’s not supposed to be standing on it!’
“Lies,” croaks Ollie. “Only one hot air balloon.”
“Don’t forget, I saw the carnage.”
“Always wondered… why you showed up. Guess that explains it.”
“What I’m saying is, that kid would do anything for you.”
“More’n I deserve,” says Ollie. His eyes are slipping closed again. It’s not the first time he’s said that, and Hal finds himself wanting to wipe those words away. He remembers an ice-melt waterfall, walking away with his chest heaving. How Ollie had reached for him. How Ollie had stood under the freezing water and watched him go.
He thinks: all that wanting. He thinks: what if I wanted something different, too?
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t think it’s like that at all.”
But Ollie has drifted back into that hazy half-sleep, his chest moving up and down too fast and too shallow with every labored, crackling breath.
After that, he doesn’t wake up again.
The night stretches on. Dinah and Hal watch, and wait.
Dinah looks like Hal’s never seen her before, gray around the edges, all her angles turned sharp. She looks, suddenly, horribly like her mother. All those years in awe of Black Canary, Senior, and he’d never realized that it was grief that had sculpted those lines in her face. Forged her into something bright and cold.
Hal thinks again of Barry. Of John, standing like a stone over Katma’s grave. Of his own mother, how the world had flattened her.
What shape will grief carve into him, if Ollie —
No. He won’t let himself think it. Anyway, that grief would be Dinah’s to claim. Dinah, who has Ollie’s head in her lap, who is looking down at him like her whole world hangs on his every rattling breath. Dinah, who chose to bind her life to his in every way that mattered.
Almost every way.
He asks, almost without meaning to. “Why’d you say no?”
Dinah’s dark eyes startle up to meet his. “What?”
“Back in the cell, before… He said you wouldn’t have him. That means he asked.”
Of course he’d asked. Ollie had never done anything in halves, especially not loving.
Dinah looks back down at Ollie, away from Hal. Her short, dark hair slips down over her forehead, shielding her eyes. “He did. More than once.”
“And you said no.” More than once. Hal knows, without wanting to, how Ollie would have looked to hear it. His eyes steady and unsurprised.
Dinah shrugs helplessly, still not looking at him.
Hal should drop it. It’s not the place or time, not with Ollie battered on the floor, Dinah’s bruised throat and trembling hands. Except maybe this is all the time they have. He needs very much to know. “But you love him.”
“Yes,” says Dinah, low and certain.
“So why?”
Finally she turns to him, dark eyes flashing. He remembers the girl that she was, staring alone into the storm. Maybe she’s never stopped being that girl. “You’re asking me that?” she says, and he can hear the steel in it. A dangerous, wounding voice. A voice that could knock a man to his knees. It’s more than enough to shut him up, because, of course, she’s right. They’re too similar, he and Dinah. Except that she’s always been braver than him.
Hal looks away from her too knowing gaze.
On the floor between them, the man they both love takes breath after halting breath.
Hal’s chest feels like something has knocked a hole through the middle. He leans forward and rests his head on his bent knees, like a child.
Water drips and splashes on the rocks behind them, the cold damp that sinks into their bones. On the other side of the cavern someone is chanting, a poem or prayer in some alien language that the ring doesn’t translate. It sounds like the half-remembered synagogue of Hal’s childhood.
Time inches on.
“I won’t be my mother,” says Dinah raggedly. “Make the same mistakes.”
“He loves you,” says Hal. He’s more certain of that than of anything in this whole cracking universe.
“I know.” Dinah’s voice is thick, like she might be crying. Hal doesn’t look. He doesn’t think he could bear it, if she were. Instead, he finds her hand where it rests on Ollie’s shoulder. Holds it tight.
They’re still sitting there when the Lanterns finally come.