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Hal’s had a lot of bizarre sexual experiences over the course of his career as a Green Lantern.
It’s a byproduct of working so closely with so many different types of aliens. You will get propositioned eventually—despite how hard the Guardians try, Hal knows from a couple kinds of experience that it’s sort of impossible to stop members of the military from having sex with each other, no matter their gender or level of seniority or even what planet they’re from—and if you take up the offer, there’s always a chance there’s gonna be something really strange down there.
Hal generally prefers humanoids, but some of the most fun Corps members to hang out with off-hours happen to be the ones with tentacles or triple-jointed spines or gaseous forms or what have you, and he takes his hookups where he can get them. He’d once slept with a girl in Sector 1070 whose biological secretions were just not compatible with humans, and even though they’d used one of her heavy-duty condoms made for fragile squishy aliens without chitin plates he’d had a neon pink rash on his entire abdomen for, like, two weeks, and you know what? She was still bang awesome. He’d do it again.
And Hal has seen clones before, he’s not some kind of rube, he’s been at this for a while. There are lots of kinds of clones—magic clones, teleporter accident clones, time paradox clones, nemesis-stole-your-genetic-material clones—but the best type of clones are the alternate-universe ones, because they’re usually regular-born people instead of being made in labs or the product of supernatural accidents, and are therefore much less likely to have built-in heart defects or surprise brain aneurysms or to destabilize into biological sludge if you hit them too hard. They can take some manhandling, when the opportunity arises.
And, you know, sometimes it does. Arise, that is.
And the clones are usually humans, to boot. Or at least human-shaped. So the risk of coming into contact with bizarre alien genitalia without warning, it’s just not really there.
All this to say, Hal thinks scouring out his own mouth with his tongue probably isn’t the weirdest thing he’s ever done.
They’re calling themselves the Crime Syndicate, and one of them looks just like Hal.
He’s the same height, same basic shape. Hal’s not a particularly built guy himself but the other him is thin, not lean, with visible knobs at his wrists and ankles. His uniform is darker, more imposing, a common theme among all the—evil clones? Okay—and he has a green ring on his finger, too, though the glow of it is a good deal more sickly than the strong shine of a healthy Lantern ring. There’s a strange symbol on his chest in place of the Corps insignia, a big white triangle with an unfamiliar green glyph inside—a sort of sharp-winged butterfly, or maybe just a letter X. His face is semi-obscured by a black mask to match Hal’s own.
There are four more, too. Another Diana with a barbed lasso. Another Clark with terrifying shoulder pads. Another Barry with a bullet-shaped helmet. Another Bruce with an ostentatious birdlike cowl. They all have flinty eyes and hard sets to their mouths, but otherwise…
“Some sons of bitches Xeroxed us,” Barry says incredulously, out of the side of his mouth.
The other Clark makes some sort of nasty proclamation, the other Diana adding on, but Hal barely hears them. He barely heard Barry a second before. He can’t stop staring at the other Hal.
The other Hal stares back, and smiles. It’s a thin, mean thing, scoring itself across his face like an open cut, and it makes a shiver of unease crawl up the back of Hal’s spine. Not quite fear, but more than marked disquiet—something’s wrong here, with these people. With this one most of all.
The other Barry jolts forward, getting a handful of the real Barry’s costume and using it to drag him closer. Everyone leans into fighting stance, holding their breath, but Barry freezes in place, startled. He stares with wide blue eyes as the other him leans in, mirrored visor gleaming.
“Come on, Flassssh,” the other Barry hisses in his ear, voice like a snake’s, unoccupied hand pressed flat against the lightning bolt on Barry’s chest. It’s unrepentantly provocative, the way a hooker would proposition a pedestrian, and Barry’s face goes as red as the rest of his suit. The doppelgänger grins, and it’s missing a canine tooth. “Loosen up a little so we can have some fun, huh?”
“Gwuh,” says Barry, about so flustered his eyes have started to cross, but Diana moves to put hands on the other Barry and that’s immediately a mistake, because the corner of the double’s lip curls in annoyance and Hal’s ears pop and then both speedsters are gone in the space between blinks.
All bets are off after that. The barbed-wire lariat lashes itself around Diana’s stomach, squeezing the breath out of her, and her own golden lasso thwips itself in whorling loops around the other Diana’s neck and shoulders as they both attempt to pull. The other Clark lunges forward, eyes sparking, and the twin beams of his heat vision crackle and hiss as they collide with Clark’s, the two equally-intense gazes battering each other.
The two Bruces are—well, he doesn’t really know. They’ve sort of… vanished into the shadows between the buildings, taking their fight into the dark.
The other Hal, though. His phosphorescent glow pulses and throbs, almost like it’s breathing. The ring on his hand shines malevolently as a construct bulges to life around his hand—a spiked green ball like the end of a mace, though with a shifting texture that appears uncomfortably organic. He sets his shoulders, cocks his head toward Hal, a clear challenge in his eyes that Hal can read even through the whiteout lenses.
Hal forms a giant green brass-knuckled fist with his own ring, and then they’re whaling on each other, hurtling across the sky in the opposite direction from the two Clarks.
The other Hal hits like a tank, but he’s not quite as agile, so most of his blows glance off. A lucky hit lands on Hal’s lower leg and he feels the impact reverberate all the way up his body.
Damn it, he thinks. Gotta get this guy off me.
He immediately fails to do that, as he trips a little over a tall treetop and slows down enough for the other Hal to get ahold of him. The guy is grabby as fuck and pretty strong, his hands wrapping Hal’s forearms in twin vise-grips. Frustratingly, Hal can’t hit the doppelgänger with the construct fist without concussing himself, so he just attempts to wriggle free.
“Give up,” the other Hal snarls—the first thing Hal’s actually heard him say. He sounds like he smokes.
“No chance,” Hal volleys back, and levers himself backward for the space to get a leg between their bodies. Planting his bootsole on the other Hal’s chest, he kicks out hard, forcing his double to either let go or dislocate his shoulders. The other Hal chooses the first option, grip loosening enough for Hal to twist away from him entirely.
Hal takes the second of reprieve to pull up short in the air, finding he’s above an industrial park dotted with dilapidated-looking warehouses. They’d come to pass over the city while they fought, without Hal’s noticing, and he quickly scans the area below them just to make sure no one’s in the danger zone. He mentally declares the building they’re on top of to be empty just as the other Hal catches up and tries to grab him again—Hal seizes the front of his costume and spins them both around, using the doppelgänger’s momentum against him, and as he hurtles toward the ground Hal turns his construct fist into a baseball bat and lines up a swing.
“Hey, batter, batter,” he calls, and smashes the bat into the other Hal’s stomach, sending him flying through the glass window of the empty warehouse with a howl of pain and rage.
Hal dissipates the construct as he floats down to inspect the damage slowly, not wanting to be taken by surprise, but when he looks in the hole they’d made he spies the other Hal lying in a heap against the far wall, surrounded by splintered wood and shards of glass, apparently down for the count. He’s not unconscious, though—he lifts a hand as Hal approaches, the one without his ring, in a placating gesture.
“Hold on,” he rasps, shifting to sit up a little more and wincing in pain as he does. “Just—hold on a minute.”
“Nice try, freakshow,” Hal retorts, but he doesn’t attack again, either. He hovers closer warily, his perpetual green glow illuminating the dark, dusty space, throwing his doppelgänger’s gaunt, sharp face into dramatic shadow.
“Hold off a second, asshole, you broke a rib,” the other Hal snaps, using his ring hand to probe his own side. He’s even more unnervingly thin up close, his ribs plainly visible through his tight costume, and one of them shifts a bit sickeningly as he pokes it. He bites back another curse.
Jesus. Hal touches down and walks over to stand above him, feet on either side of his double’s outstretched legs. “You honestly think I’m interested in making this a fair fight? I should whip your ass while you’re down.”
“You won’t,” the other Hal exhales, head falling back and onto his own shoulder so he can stare up at Hal. A trickle of blood snakes down his cheek from a fresh cut, another one sliding over his top lip. “You have too much honor, I think.”
“You think.”
If you held a gun to his head, Hal couldn’t tell you what made him do it. Instead of pulling the other Hal up by the front of his costume, he drops to his own knees, straddling his dark-clad double at the waist to avoid his injured chest. Just to keep him down, Hal thinks.
Unbelievably, the other Hal relaxes into it, another one of those strangely-edged smiles stealing across his face.
“Oh, you should have told me this was what you wanted,” he drawls, tilting his head onto his other shoulder. “We could have skipped the fight.”
“Why, ‘cause you lost?” Hal can’t help but snark back, despite shivering at the way his double’s cold hands slide up to rest gently on his waist.
“Hah. No. This is just a bit more fun than war games.”
War games. Is that what this is? Not an invasion, but a play fight? Hal isn’t buying it.
The other Hal’s thumbs press against his stomach, spidery fingers wrapping around the sides. He smells like the cigarettes Hal hasn’t smoked in years. It makes it hard to think.
Hal settles down fully against his other self’s lap, taking his weight off his protesting knees. The other him makes a bitten-off shuddery sound and an aborted squirmy motion, tightening his grip on Hal’s middle.
Yeah, bet that hurts, Hal thinks. He shifts his weight a little, makes himself heavier, hoping to bruise. He doesn’t realize what he’s actually doing until he feels the hard length pressing up against the inside of his thigh.
“Dude,” he asks incredulously, “do you have a boner?”
The other Hal shrugs, not very apologetically. One of his hands slides down Hal’s hip.
“Been a while. And you’re not exactly hard on the eyes.”
He seems to have given up the menacing act, at least for the most part. All that’s left is his own inherent strangeness. Which seems to be not insignificant, actually.
Hal squints at him. “I’m you.”
“Ah, yeah?” The hand on Hal’s thigh slides back up, curving inward. The nerve of this guy. “What I say?”
Hal would not call the other him “easy on the eyes.” He’s built like a scarecrow, with cold skin and sharp teeth and dull dark hair scraped back from his pale, sallow face. He’s not ugly exactly, but he’s so far out of the ballpark of handsome that Mickey Mantle could have hit him. Hal lets him trail a hand closer and closer to his dick for some reason anyway, shifting to spread his legs across his double’s lap a little wider.
The fuck is wrong with you, Hal demands of himself, trying to conjure up an image of—the mildew on his shower curtain, Batman in his underwear, that time Carol tried to chop off his dick—anything to avoid getting hard from his evil clone looking like he wants to eat him.
The Lantern uniform gives everything away, though, and he fights a flush as the other him drags the flat of a thumb up the edge of his hardening cock. Something about the entire situation is unbelievably embarrassing. Hal tries not to get with evil interdimensional invaders, usually—he promises.
The other Hal lifts an eyebrow. “No complaint? I still like men on your planet, right?”
“I got your damn complaint,” says Hal, nonsensically, and notably does not stand up, lean back, or otherwise take their bodies out of contact. The ring on his finger feels hot, and he sees his own glow intensify out of the corners of his eyes, the way it always does when he’s turned on.
The other Hal notices, of course. Leaning in, he says on an undertone, “Are you going to let me up?”
“No,” mutters Hal.
His double smiles again, blood from his nose trickling into his teeth, and lifts his own ring hand to rest his fingertips against the insignia on Hal’s chest.
“Then, are you going to fuck me, Green Lantern?”
Hal exhales shakily. His cock twitches.
“That the only other option?”
The other Hal leans in even further, until Hal can feel soft breath against the side of his face, chapped lips brushing the skin.
“It’s the only one I’m in the mood for.”
Hal’s been concussed, somehow. Even though he doesn’t remember it. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t remember it. But it’s the only explanation for why he doesn’t stand up. Why he doesn’t snarl and push the other Hal away, maybe hit him again for good measure. Why, instead, he lets the goading get to him, and turns his head to let their mouths meet.
The other him doesn’t even have the courtesy to insult him or anything. He smiles against Hal’s mouth, catching Hal’s lower lip between his teeth.
“That’s it,” he says, a gloved hand snaking up Hal’s front to touch his face. It cradles his cheek for a moment before sliding under his chin, and Hal squirms in place with a half-disgusted, half-aroused hunnh? as the other Hal tightens his grip, jerks Hal’s face to the side, and drags his tongue roughly up the line of Hal’s jaw.
“Urrrrrggghh, the fuck is with you,” Hal demands, voice half an octave higher than usual, somewhat sickened at the way his own dick hasn’t flagged at all. Stupidly, he’d dissipated his mask and left his whole face vulnerable, and he tries to wipe his wet cheek off against his own shoulder. The other Hal laughs and wraps skinny arms around his neck, obstructing the attempt.
“You taste good, Green Lantern,” he says sweetly, pulling Hal down.
War games, the other Hal had said. Hal remembers the rest of them—remembers the other Barry, his obvious come-on—what’d they call him? Johnny Quick? Jesus—and wonders if the fight itself was a decoy. Maybe this is the game. Maybe it’d do to play along. As if he wouldn’t.
“Hal,” he says.
His double blinks, blankly responding, “What?”
“My friends call me Hal,” he clarifies. “It’s—if we’re—don’t call me Green Lantern.” That title means something, damn it. Implies he’s better than this.
“So, we’re friends, now? I find that hard to believe.”
“You’re not my friend. But you’re Hal Jordan too, right?”
The other Hal snorts in mocking disbelief. “You think I go by Hal?”
Hal pinches his side hard, satisfied when he flinches. “You can just be Jordan, then, asshole.”
“Fine,” the other Hal—Jordan, Hal supposes—says, impatience creeping into his voice. “Hal. Just—“
“Yeah,” Hal finishes, licking his bottom lip, “yeah, yeah,” and kisses him, a real, proper kiss.
Jordan doesn’t really taste like much, aside from the coppery tang of blood, like he’s been gargling with coins. Tobacco, too, maybe, way back behind his teeth. His mouth falls open immediately and Hal can’t be bothered not to put his tongue in it, and the strangled moan and jerk of the hips he gets in response is bizarrely rewarding.
It is so goddamn weird to get turned on while looking at, straddling, sucking face with himself, but the other him wears that face so strangely he might as well have a different one entirely. Hal’s decided to ignore it for now.
They part for breath. Hal looks down between them. Damn, Jordan’s costume doesn’t hide anything more than the Lantern uniform does—they’re both hard, now, faces flushed, and Hal can feel Jordan’s pulse racing where he has his hand pressed against the other man’s jaw.
He has an insane urge to bite down on the pulse point, feel the vein throbbing beneath his tongue and teeth, but he refrains, choosing instead to test his luck with an exploratory roll of his hips, grinding their erections together.
The friction is good, even through the fabric, and Hal shivers at the way they both moan at the exact same pitch.
Wanting to touch now that he’s apparently allowed, Hal splays out his hand against the curved plane of Jordan’s chest, feeling his fingers slot into the pronounced hollows between each rib. God, he doesn’t think he’s ever been this thin in his life, what’s this guy been eating? Or not eating?
He vaguely remembers the broken one to be somewhere around where his ring finger fits, but when he digs his grip in a little, nothing seems to shift or slip, and Jordan’s shuddering, bitten-off noise is clearly from pleasure, not from pain.
Pulling back for a breath, dodging Jordan’s attempt to chase his mouth, Hal mutters, “Didn’t I crack your rib?”
“Mmm, yeah,” sighs Jordan, his hand tightening in Hal’s hair to try to pull him back in, sticking out his tongue to try to lick his face again. Gross. “‘S fine now. Keep going.”
“It’s fine now?” Hal pulls back even further, ignoring Jordan’s irritated groan. He presses his whole hand against where the broken bone should be, and is met with perfect resistance. The man’s rib cage is completely whole again. What the fuck?
Jordan’s eyes are burning, half-lidded and big-pupilled, his hand an ice-cold weight behind Hal’s head. It feels like he’s got a tarantula on the back of his neck, waiting to bite.
Hal leans in again like he can’t help it, cock throbbing as he breathes damp warmth over Jordan’s mouth.
“You a meta or something?” he asks. Tactical threat assessment, he thinks.
“No,” sighs Jordan, mouth falling open slightly as Hal presses lips to his sharp jaw. “It’s, mmm. It’s Volthoom. The ring. He likes me better when I’m whole.” He punctuates the last sentence with an eerie little giggle, digging the nails of his ring hand into the meat of Hal’s side.
Christ, is this guy creepy. Hal sucks a bruise into the exposed sliver of skin under his ear anyway.
The hand in Hal’s hair creeps down his spine to the small of his back, urging his body forward, further into the sharp hollows of Jordan’s wiry frame. No injuries to spare thought for anymore, so Hal obliges, leaning forward far enough to brace his hands against the wall that Jordan’s propped up against, giving himself a little more leverage to grind down against the taut body under him, feeling the friction and heat where their hips align. It’s the only part of Jordan that isn’t cold to the touch.
“Good,” says Hal. He isn’t really asking.
Jordan moans in pleasure anyway, head tipping back against the concrete wall, breathing hard. Hal would feel that breath on his wrists if he took off his gloves. If he wanted to. He kind of wants to.
Jordan’s mouth is still half-open, lips red and wet and slick, pink tongue just visible behind his teeth. Hal’s cock pulses where it’s pressed against Jordan’s, the palpable warm throb of blood in his veins.
Hal wonders if they’re the only ones doing this right now. Wonders if Diana’s got her wrists tied with Superwoman’s barbed lariat, if Clark’s letting Ultraman tear his suit down the logo. He stifles an unmanly whimper at the thought.
Desire is overtaking the rational bits of Hal’s mind, now. His glow pulses brightly as he turns the both of them over, so that Jordan’s the one straddling him. Debris from the shattered wall pokes into his back—bits of wood and stone, digging uncomfortably into his spine—but he doesn’t even care because he’s got Jordan in his arms, sitting up all squirmy and eager, running chilly hands down the plane of his chest like he’s trying to read the Braille off it.
Hal should be worried. About the indignity of it. The optics, if they’re found. About letting an enemy get him on his back. But it’s so hard to worry. So easy to let it happen.
He loosens his hips, rolls them up and inward, like he would if he was inside of a woman. Not that Jordan could ever be mistaken for one—he’s not soft enough, got the wrong edges, the wrong smell—but it’s been a while since Hal’s been with a man and the same sort of thing usually works on both, at least for what they’re doing.
Jordan makes a pleased sound and swivels his hips in return, and Jesus, Hal can feel their hard lengths dragging against each other through the two damp layers, the heads catching on each other, sending pulses of pleasure through Hal’s entire body. No mistaking this for straight, that’s for sure, even if Hal’s sweating so much beneath his uniform that his thighs are probably slicker than a woman’s, anyway.
“Fuh—fuck,” he grits out, hips stuttering as the edges of his vision blur, zeroing in on the man above him, the man who wears his face. Imagines what it’d be like to have him for real—to push inside, to feel the tight warmth around him, to actually do it instead of just going through the motions—and he gasps as he tries not to lose it right then and there. Getting sent over the edge before his evil clone would be the last straw of this already-humiliating day.
The planet Exegar in Sector 1040 is a habitual hangout spot for the more adventurous Corps members—a sort of intergalactic vice den, only that the natives of the planet have no real concept of impropriety or sin, so everything’s surprisingly above-board. A planet full of sex hotels and gambling halls being run by responsible, honest people in a professional, businesslike manner sounds like a joke, but Exegar is the closest you’d get.
The planet’s full of interesting flora and fauna, most famous of which being the Fanuar flowers. Huge pink blossoms, with big leathery petals and stamen the length of your forearm dusted in shimmery blue pollen. The natives of the planet laud the flower’s pollen as a miracle drug, able to cure any ailment if the right dose is inhaled.
Well, Hal’d had a tweak in his back and he’s always been the adventurous sort, anyway. They’d made one of the locals babysit him in his hotel room, which had one of the sprawling plants confined to a massive urn-shaped vase in the windowsill, and Hal hadn’t been able to resist. He’d cracked a smile, leaned over one of the lush flowers, and inhaled as deeply as he could.
Only when Exegar started being frequented by interplanetary tourists, far after Hal’s first visit, did it become known that the Fanuar pollen only really works as a cure-all medicine for species indigenous to the planet. For almost every foreign species, including humans, the pollen’s primary use is as the most powerful aphrodisiac in twenty-three solar systems.
That was years ago, but Hal feels the memory of it rushing back to him; this is the only time he’s felt even half so turned on as he was then. His ring is sparking, his glow casting shadows across half the room. His blood pounds in his head, between his legs. His hips move of their own accord, jerking up roughly again and again, mindlessly searching for friction. His skin is so hot it hurts, beads of sweat trickling down out of his hair and behind his ears, the only relief to be found in the touch of Jordan’s cold hands through the fabric of his gloves.
“Yeah,” gasps Jordan, like he can tell, and is just delighted to be here. He aligns with Hal expertly, timing their movements to meet, and Hal thinks, of course, he knows my body like his own—it is his own—
The thought is horribly arousing. Hal nearly bites through his own lip in the effort not to come.
Jordan gets the same crease between his brows that Hal does when he’s teetering on the edge. Says something that he’s had sex in front of enough mirrors to know that, but whatever. Jordan’s tongue slicks over his teeth as he pants and writhes and tilts his head from side to side on his skinny shoulders, showing off the bruises that Hal’s sucked into the exposed slice of his pale throat.
A frisson of sparking power jumps from the triangular gem of Jordan’s ring, snaking up his arm and across his chest like a centipede, making him jerk like he’s being shocked. Hal twitches sympathetically.
“Hal,” Jordan exhales, breath hitching, skinny thighs trembling on either side of Hal’s hips, “oh, Hal—“
Hal has had sex in front of mirrors, but he’s never actually seen his own O-face before—he usually has his eyes shut. It’s… not overly attractive. Jordan’s mouth drops open and his eyes roll back, lashes fluttering down as they close, and he gives this huge cracking gasp that Hal’s almost surprised he doesn’t choke on, letting the breath out in a long, wailing moan as he grinds himself down against Hal harder, so hard it nearly hurts, so hard it makes Hal grit his teeth and mutter “Oh, fuck, oh my God,” as electric pleasure overtakes him too and the hot, wet warmth spreads between them, soaking into two layers of fabric.
Jordan collapses onto Hal almost immediately, a habit Hal reluctantly concedes he shares. It knocks Hal’s breath out, and he punches Jordan’s kidney desultorily.
“Ouch,” says Jordan, not moving.
“Bastard,” says Hal.
They shudder through the last of the aftershocks together, and Jordan rubs his face into Hal’s shoulder like a cat, a panther contented after a kill. His sleek hair is coming loose of whatever product he’s used to slick it back and fine brown strands of it tickle the side of Hal’s jaw.
Hal wonders, again, what the rest of his team is doing. What the rest of Jordan’s little group is doing. What his team and Jordan’s are doing, together. He kind of hopes they’ve been doing something like this, because it’s better than the alternative, but at the same time his mind sort of instinctively squirms away from the idea, despite the hypocritical evidence gluing his uniform to his dick as it dries.
“You should come home with me,” says Jordan.
It’s such a non-sequitur that it makes Hal blink into the silence for a long moment, battling through his confusion. “So the bunch of you plan to leave, then. No evil clone takeover.”
Jordan doesn’t seem to react to being called an evil clone, which just proves that he is one. He licks Hal’s ear thoughtfully. Hal doesn’t bother trying to squirm away, just tries to tune out the wet feeling.
“Well, we were always going to leave,” Jordan replies. “We just came to see you. Have a little fun. Our place is better than yours. No offense.”
“None taken,” says Hal, mildly. Whatever this guy’s idea of “better” is, Hal is positive he doesn’t share it.
“And your place just isn’t very good for business. Too many heroes.”
“We do have a lot of those.”
Jordan’s hand clumsily comes up to hold Hal’s face, the flat bit where his jaw meets his neck. Hal lets him. It might be Hal’s imagination, but he seems a little warmer underneath his gloves.
“I like you,” he says, half-muffled into Hal’s shoulder. "You should be part of the Syndicate."
“Narcissist,” Hal says back.
“Yeah,” Jordan admits readily. He doesn’t sound all that put-out over Hal’s lack of reciprocation, which is a good sign, since Hal has no plans to go with him anywhere.
Jordan’s breath is slowing, evening out into sleep. Hal would mock him for letting his guard down so easily if he didn’t usually pass out after an orgasm himself—the only reason he hasn’t fallen asleep yet is because he’s thinking too hard. And he has a plan.
He waits until he’s sure Jordan has fallen asleep, allowing himself a last few slow swipes of his hand up the bony ridge of his other self’s spine. His hand creeps up their bodies to the crook of his neck, where Jordan’s left hand has come to rest. Listening for any hitch in his quiet breath, Hal takes Jordan’s hand in his own, and begins to slowly, slowly twist the ring off of his middle finger.
The ring is probably half a size too small, catching on the knuckle, but Jordan doesn’t wake. Heavy sleeper—never joined the military, maybe. Hal palms the ring, feeling the sharp edges of the triangular gem bite into his skin even through his gloves, trying not to shudder at the way the thing pulses with an unpleasant throbbing warmth, like a tiny heartbeat. Not like the gentle wishing light of a Lantern ring at all.
Hal powers up a simple construct, closing Jordan into a bubble of green light and carefully lifting him off. He grimaces slightly at the stickiness between his legs, but Lantern uniforms don’t ever really stain, so. Small mercies.
Jordan wakes up halfway back to the Hall of Justice. Hal has a vague idea to call for the rest of the League, if they’re not there already—Jordan’s hardly a threat now that Hal’s disarmed and restrained him, he can afford to wait. As he flies over the city, Jordan startles awake, disoriented.
“What the—“ he mutters, looking around vaguely at the construct he’s suspended in, before his gaze snaps to his left hand—his bare left hand—and he screeches like a furious bird. “No!”
“You didn’t think I’d let you get off in every way, did you,” Hal asks conversationally, raising his voice a bit over the wind. He’s replaced his mask, so he knows it probably isn’t visible, but he raises his eyebrows anyway, just for him. “You’re not that stupid. I’m not that stupid.”
Jordan scrambles to right himself from the half-upturned position he’d been asleep in, flattening his palms against the side of the construct to glare at Hal. He’s powerless to escape it without his ring, but his poisonous scowl gets through the wall of green just fine.
“Where is it,” he demands. “What did you do with it?”
Hal lifts his unoccupied hand, where he holds the power ring between his thumb and forefinger. He rolls it a little, enjoying the way Jordan’s pale face blanches even whiter at the way it’d be so easy to drop. If he did, it’d fall right into the Metropolis River.
Hal smiles, guileless and charming. Jordan mirrors it with an ugly snarl.
They drop down in front of the Hall of Justice, and Hal’s bolstered by the sight of most of his team there waiting for him.
Diana’s got her seething doppelgänger bound tight with her golden lariat, and Hal elects not to comment on the way the intricate web of knots appears artfully arranged to conspicuously frame Superwoman’s chest.
Johnny Quick appears unconscious, his helmet visor askew and his left ankle twisted on a harrowing angle, and Barry is holding him in an awkward bridal carry; he grimaces embarrassedly when Hal catches his eye, but shifts his burden at the shoulders to better support him anyway.
Bruce has his double restrained, but it appears Owlman had come something close to willingly—he doesn’t share the bruising and disheveled clothes that the rest of them do, though his cowl’s been pulled down, and he seems sufficiently held by a single set of handcuffs. His face is painted with a bored expression.
All that seem to be missing are—
“Whoa!” Hal jumps half a foot in the air as a huge thwunk sounds from behind him, a sound of heavy fast impact, followed by an incoherent snarl of rage.
“Nice of them to join us,” drawls Owlman.
Bruce shakes him by the shoulder and growls, “Be quiet.”
The impact was, in fact, Clark and his own evil clone, who’d fallen out of the sky like meteors to impact the ground in front of the Hall. Clark has Ultraman in a full nelson, leaning his entire weight between the other man’s shoulder blades to keep him down. Ultraman growls and scrabbles like a trapped animal, but he’s at the disadvantage with his face pressed against the concrete, and Clark’s grip is like iron.
“Sorry I’m late,” Clark pants. “Got a little held up.”
Yeah, I’ll just bet you did, Hal thinks, staring at the bruises blooming against Ultraman’s collarbones, where the wide neckline of his costume covers nothing.
“Alright,” says Diana, crisply authoritative. She leans down to address Superwoman. “Time for you all to go home, I think. How did you open the bridge between our worlds?”
Superwoman clenches her teeth, her face going red with the effort of keeping her mouth shut, but Diana lashes the Lasso of Truth a little tighter and she explodes like a long-held breath.
“The ring! Volthoom’s ring!”
“This ring?” Hal asks, holding it out. Superwoman nods miserably.
“None of us can use it,” she grits out, flexing ineffectually against the golden rope. “Only its—nnh—its chosen bearer.”
Well, Hal’s not an idiot, he knows what that means. He locks eyes with Diana, then with Bruce, confirming it, and when they both give him the smallest of nods, he says, “Alright, alright. Stand back, everybody.”
Hal manipulates the construct Jordan is suspended in, stretching it into an oblong shape, before cracking it in half like an egg. Jordan falls out of it stupidly, landing on the concrete in a heap of skinny limbs.
“I’d say it was nice to meet you guys, but it wasn’t,” Hal continues as Jordan stands up, injecting into his voice the type of flippant grandiosity that always used to irritate Carol.
“Hey, no hard feelings,” Jordan says, brushing imaginary dirt off his shoulders and swiping at the remains of the flaking crust of blood under his nose. Almost mocking, but not quite. Damn, Hal should have known it wouldn’t land on himself. “We had fun together, didn’t we?”
Before Hal can respond with something nice and heroically scathing, Jordan slithers close, holding out his left hand.
“If you don’t mind.”
And it’s something about his mean little smile, maybe. Something about the fog of lust that still hasn’t quite cleared from Hal’s head. Something about the way that everyone is watching.
Instead of dropping the ring into Jordan’s outstretched hand, Hal takes him by the wrist and slides the ring onto his middle finger.
Jordan’s mask shimmers back on the moment the ring is seated on his hand, so Hal only gets to see a half-second’s worth of the way his pupils dilate. But it’s a half-second enough.
“Thanks,” Jordan mutters, sounding like it’s being pulled out of him, and turns away.
To his credit, he knows when he’s beat, and doesn’t try to pull any fast ones under Clark and Diana’s watch. Reaching out and muttering a few words under his breath, he swivels his ring hand around at the wrist, scoring a circle of poisonous green light into the air a yard or so in front of him.
“Come on,” he says.
Clark pulls a sullen Ultraman to his feet, herding him toward the open portal and pushing him through. Diana unties Superwoman and moves to do the same, but the other woman shoulders past her to stop in front of Barry, holding out her hands, wordless and impatient.
Barry deposits Johnny Quick into her arms with no complaint. She holds him as though he weighs nothing, even when he shifts restlessly and groans out a mumbled, “Lois?”
She pats the side of his face indecorously as she walks away, not caring about knocking his helmet even further askew.
As they disappear through the portal, Bruce reaches down to unlock Owlman, only to be presented with the pair of cuffs dangling from a slender index finger.
Owlman rubs his reddened wrists with a louche smirk and raise of his brow. “Wouldn’t be opposed to doing that again sometime.”
Bruce doesn’t rise to the bait—just narrows his eyes and tightens the corners of his mouth ever so slightly. Owlman shrugs, as if to say, What can you do?
“Pleasure meeting you all,” he directs to the rest of them, fixing his rumpled cuff as he strides briskly through the portal, navy blue cape snapping around his ankles. Hal can hear the creaking of Bruce’s leather glove as his fist tightens on the picked handcuffs.
The last to leave, of course, is Jordan, who does nothing but give Hal one last look and call out, “Volthoom!” as he steps out of the universe, zipping up the green wormhole behind him as he goes.
No one says anything for a very long moment.
“Suppose we should start on clean-up duty,” says Barry, finally, directing it to Clark. “Saw you and, um, the other you went through a couple buildings in the city.”
“I will claim responsibility for the collapsed overpass on 30th Street,” Diana adds, pinching the bridge of her nose as if to stave off a headache.
Well, all Hal’d done was smash through an abandoned warehouse, and that was almost out of city limits anyway, so he thinks he can get away with leaving—at least for now, until Clark notices and drags him back to clean up. In the interest of elongating the time between now and that inevitable future moment, Hal lifts himself into the air, hovering a few feet off the ground as he says, “I should report this to the Guardians.”
He does want to get out of clean-up, but he isn’t lying about that, either. Oa likes to have records of anomalous incidents, especially ones occurring on inhabited planets that are directly under a Green Lantern’s care, and doppelgängers from the mirror dimension definitely fall under that umbrella.
Clark gives him an exhausted go-ahead, and Hal wastes no time rocketing up into low orbit to mentally compose his report before the trip. He thinks he’ll leave out the part where all of them might have fucked their evil clones.
Plus, you know. It’s almost a half a day’s flight to Oa from Earth. If he sorts all the official business out before he leaves, it’ll just leave him that much more time to turn over the memory of cold hands, sharp hips, and the fascinating sight of his own face twisted up in rapture.