“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall never surrender.” – Winston Churchill
Ezekial Bastian Ross Green Lantern
New York City, New York, U.S.A
Thor shot off into the air at those words, his hammer dragging him off alongside a trail of lightning, already on his way to keep his promise to me, and after a quick look around, getting resolute nods from Captain Rogers and Black Widow beside him, I also shot off towards the tear in the sky above us, green light exploded beneath my feet, hurling me skyward hard enough to crack the pavement where I’d been standing, to keep mine.
The city fell away beneath me, the tall Skyscrapers became blocks, those blocks became streets and with the increasing distance, the sounds of people fighting also fell away into one continued roar of noise blanketed by the wind.
I might have glossed over it earlier given everything that was happening since I got this ring, but the higher I shot up, the wind brushing against my face, my right hand outstretched in front of me like a battering ram, the more I realized I was enjoying this, I was hundreds of feet in the air flying, FLYING, towards an alien army and the reason my heart was beating a hundred miles a minute wasn’t out of fear or worry, it was excitement.
Today had been actively one of the worst days of my life, I’d watched friends, old and new die, watched my city burn around me, led good people into a fight they had no business being involved in, and got half of them killed for it.
But the fucked up thing is I haven’t been this happy since I punched my dads teeth in all those years ago, despite all the death and regrets of today, it would be a lie if I said I didn’t like the way my chest felt lighter with every person I pulled off the street, every barricade I’d set up, every terrified stranger I’d convinced to stand back up.
Looking back at it now, knowing that there were people that got another tomorrow because I was there…made me feel, for the first time in a long time…
I felt useful.
I’m pulled out of my thoughts, by movement in front of me I snap my eyes upward just as a new wave of invaders came out of the portal, dozens, with hundreds more behind them, they spotted me instantly, and in unison they all fired at me.
Energy bolts filled the sky, the blue white bolts crossing the distance between us in seconds, I didn’t even flinch as they struck the emerald aura around my body and burst apart into showers of harmless light.
[Incoming hostile formation.]
[Projected civilian casualties if unimpeded: 18,432.]
Those words stilled something in my gut, I planted my self in the air, “Yeah…” I aimed my fist towards them and concentrated.
“Not on my watch.” Green light exploded from my body.
I wasn’t really a creative person, mostly due to having spent my childhood trying to find ways to stay as far away from home as possible, I realized the ring had been doing most of the heavy lifting when it came to my constructs, even in this moment there was only one thing I could think of to push these fuckers back.
A giant wall spread out across my vision, it was so wide across it bathed m entire field of vision emerald green, an enormous green bulwark that I pushed towards the portal, and the army coming out of it.
The first wave crashed into it in a fiery explosion, then the second wave and the leviathans behind them, all of them stopped in their tracks and were actively being pushed back as I flew closer and closer to the portal, until eventually I pushed all of them back through it and used my construct to seal the portal.
For one impossible second…I could see the other side, it was mostly darkness and stars but in the distance behind the army coming my way I saw the ship, well not a just a ship it looked more like a mobile city pretending to be one.
It stretched across space farther than I could comfortably comprehend, its surface alive with docking bays, factories, launch apertures and impossible machinery.
Thousands…no, tens of thousands of Chitauri skiffs poured from its interior, leviathans circled it like sharks around a whale carcass.
And all of it…all of it…was pointed at Earth.
The ring spoke before I found my voice.
[Unknown capital-class vessel detected.]
[Strategic command nexus identified.]
[Passive sensor sweep initiated.]
[Acquiring navigational databases…]
[Acquiring linguistic archives…]
[Acquiring command encryption signatures…]
[Acquiring cultural and historical records…]
[Download in progress…]
For one brief moment I stared back into another galaxy and another galaxy stared back.
They did not like what they saw.
At the sight of their invasion point being blocked off the Chitauri threw themselves against the barrier like a tide that had forgotten how to stop, skiffs ramming the construct face first at full speed, ground troops clinging to leviathans that battered their bulk against the hard light in a rhythm that had no patience in it shooting at it all the while.
I was confident that I could hold, then the motherships cannon fired.
I felt it rather then heard it, a deep subsonic pulse that crashed against my construct and sent spikes of pain lancing through my brain.
The barrier curved at this shot, a slow terrible inward curve that spread from the point of impact outward across the construct’s face, hairline fractures racing across the surface in every direction before the ring poured charge into them and sealed them closed, the green light flaring white at the stress points before stabilizing.
A pained sound came out of me that I wasn’t fully in control of.
Another cannon shot, then another.
The mothership wasn’t waiting for its own forces to clear the line of fire and the forces weren’t moving, the result was a barrage that made no distinction between the Chitauri still pressing against my side of the barrier and the barrier itself.
It felt like trying to hold up a mountain with my thoughts.
Each impact arrived as a physical weight behind my eyes, a pressure that built and built without releasing, and I could feel the ring compensating, drawing harder on the charge with every hit, the percentage in the back of my awareness dropping in increments that were starting to feel
The fractures healed as fast as they formed.
But they were forming faster.
I looked at the construct, at the weight pressing against it from the other side, my hand extended toward it, green light pouring from the ring in a steady output that was becoming less steady with every hit.
And something shifted in how I was thinking about it.
I had been holding it like a shield, arm extended, pushing outward, trying to meet the force coming at me with an equal force going the other way.
That was the wrong approach, I knew it the same way I knew the wrong way to absorb a hit in the ring, not from thinking about it but from the sensation of it not working.
You didn’t hold a weight by pushing against it.
You got under it.
I flew closer to the barrier’s face, close enough that the displaced energy of the impacts rolled across the suit in waves, close enough that I could feel each hit through the construct the way you felt pavement through your knees.
Blood had started from my nose at some point, warm against my upper lip, and everything behind my eyes was pulsing in a slow hard rhythm that matched the cannon fire.
I reached up. This story is hosted at g.com.
Both hands, pressing against the underside of the construct the way hands pressed against a bar, finding the weight of it and letting it settle across the span of my shoulders and the back of my neck, and I felt it, the imaginary impossible weight of a barrier between two galaxies with an entire army pushing against the other side, settling into my body like something that had always been there.
The ring blazed, brighter than it had burned all day, brighter than when it had first ignited in the rubble, a deep sustained green that pushed back the smoke and the portal light in a color that had no business being that vivid.
[Willpower output increasing.]
My teeth clenched, my jaw ached with it.
“Come…” The word came out through locked teeth, barely a word at all, more a sound my body made while the rest of me did something else entirely.
The wall held.
For a moment I thought that was it.
That the familiar weight had settled and I had it, that getting under it had been the answer and the rest was just endurance, then the mothership fired again.
Whatever they had decided to point at my barrier, they pointed all of it at once, and the impact that rolled through the construct; through the ring and through the back of my skull was not comparable to anything that had come before it.
The barrier bowed inward so far I could see the shape of the forces pressing through it on the other side, the construct face going translucent at the deepest point of the curve, the fractures not healing fast enough this time, the green going thin and pale at the stress points in a way that meant something structural was about to give.
Every instinct I had screamed let go.
I have heard that voice my whole life.
Every time I got back up off the canvas.
Every time I stood up in a room where the smart thing was to stay down, every time someone said enough and I pushed through anyway, that voice was there, tempting and reasonable; completely correct about the odds, and I had never once listened to it.
“ON!” The roar came from somewhere below language, the place where the ring and the will from the years of getting back up pooled together into something that did not have a better name than that, and the construct answered it.
The bowing stopped, then reversed as I flew back up.
The fractures sealed, pale stress points flooded back to deep solid green.
The thin translucent face of the barrier thickened and darkened, layer upon layer of hard light pressing outward against the force coming through, and as it pushed back the construct changed, the flat barrier becoming something with depth and mass.
A vault door, reinforced at every edge bolted at every point, it was the kind of thing that communicated through its existence alone that whatever was on the other side of it was going to stay on the other side of it.
The locks turned, massive hard light tumblers rotating in sequence across the construct’s face, each one settling into place with a concussive green pulse that I felt in my chest, each one adding to the weight of the thing pressing back against the mothership’s cannon.
The cannon fired again, but this time the vault door did not move.
Blood ran freely from my nose, everything behind my eyes was white with the sustained effort of holding this door shut, my entire awareness narrowed to the ring and the construct.
I held it.
[Willpower output: critical threshold. Charge: 34%.]
[Bearer. Current output unsustainable.]
“I know,” I said, and my voice came out wrecked and quiet but completely certain.
“I just have to hold on.”
Below me Manhattan burned, but above me the vault door held.