Ezekiel Ross
Green Lantern
The construct shuddered.
It wasn’t physical, the barrier wasn’t shaking, it was fine, doing exactly what I had built it to do.
The shuddering was happening somewhere behind my eyes, in the part of me the ring was drawing on, in the place where the fuel lived.
Every impact from the other side traveled through the construct and into my skull like a thought I hadn’t chosen to have, like somebody had wrapped my brain in barbed wire and was slowly twisting it tighter.
Another leviathan hit the barrier, the vault door bowed inward and again something in my head tore, blood ran warm from my nose again, the second time in ten minutes, my vision blurred at the edges.
The ring flared green.
[Power reserve: 21%.]
I grit my teeth and shoved back.
The construct lurched forward, gaining maybe three feet, before the next wave hit from the other side.
Hundreds of skiffs and multiple leviathans working in tandem against the same stress point.
Thousands of tons of alien flesh, metal and momentum pressing against a wall I was holding together with four percent and a decision.
The barrier stopped moving forward, then, slowly, it began to slide back toward me.
“No…..”
I poured everything I had into it; every memory, every angry punch I’d ever taken, every thankful face I’d pulled off those streets.
Yusuf.
Danny.
Paulie.
Alvarez.
Firestar, the civilians huddled beneath my construct.
The wall held…for one more second.
Then another crack raced across its surface, longer this time, deeper, and the ring healed it but it came back and the ring healed it again and it came back wider, the gaps between the cracks showing and healing getting longer.
[Power reserve: 20%.]
I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.
My breathing had gone shallow, every inhale tasting like copper and concrete dust , the construct wasn’t running out of power.
I was.
Willpower.
That was the fuel, the ring had told me that in the rubble of the parking structure like it was simple, like it was obvious, like will was a resource with a clearly marked gauge a warning light and a gas station somewhere nearby.
Turns out will wasn’t infinite.
The things you learned.
Another impact, the barrier folded inward and a leviathan’s skull began forcing through the surface of the vault door, the hard green light parting around it like something being pressed through fabric, and its roar hit me so hard it shook my back teeth.
“Not—” I pushed.
“Yet.”
Nothing, the barrier barely moved, my entire body was trembling in a way I had stopped being able to control, green sparks bleeding from the ring into the air around my fingers and dissolving before they reached anything.
The leviathan pushed further through.
[Power reserve: 19%.]
Somewhere below me Manhattan was still burning.
I couldn’t see it anymore, the construct filled my vision, there was only green and pressure.
I buckled in midair.
The ring compensated automatically, keeping me suspended, and caught the construct again on sheer instinct.
Just one more minute…
just one more.
“…Come on…” I didn’t even know who I was talking to anymore.
Myself.
The ring.
God.
Didn’t matter, the barrier slipped another foot the leviathan pushed farther through, it’s maw inching ever closer, then another one appeared beside it, then another.
The armada had realized what I was flagging, every skiff, every leviathan, every Chitauri on the other side, all of them converged on one point.
Me.
“I’m fucked,” I said it came out half hysterical and half something else.
I had bought them time.
Thor.
Ironman.
Hawkeye.
Black Widow.
Captain America.
Maybe enough.
Maybe not.
Either way, this was it.
I thought I’d be scared, instead…
I was just tired in a way that went deeper than muscles or the blood drying on my upper lip, I was just tired.
Really…
really tired.
The barrier lurched.
It slid backward and my vision narrowed and the black crept in from the edges the way it always did when the body was making decisions the brain hadn’t authorized yet.
The ring flashed a dull green.
[Warning.]
[Willpower reserves critically depleted.]
[Construct integrity failing.]
[Primary bearer approaching neural collapse.]
“Yeah,” I said softly.
“I noticed…”
The construct cracked from top to bottom.
A spiderweb of fractures raced across the entire face of the vault door simultaneously, the green going white at every stress point, and through the gaps the Chitauri surged, thousands of them pressing against the thin remaining integrity of a wall about to break.
I could feel them, a collective weight, directed, total and utterly without doubt.
Like a tidal wave that had been given an address.
“Sorry,” I said.
Whether I meant the city or the people below or myself, I couldn’t have said.
The wall shuddered, then somebody behind me snorted.
“Lousy.”
The voice was deep enough to rattle my ribs from six feet away.
“What?”
A sound that was almost a laugh, the kind that came from someone who found the situation genuinely amusing and wasn’t bothering to hide it.
“Six hundred seconds.” A tongue click.
“Took you less than ten minutes before you started feelin’ sorry for yourself. Six hundred seconds of real trouble and you’re already writin’ your goodbyes.”
I turned.
He was standing in the air beside me, seven feet of something that shouldn’t have been possible to look at directly without recalibrating your understanding of scale, built like someone had carved a gorilla out of a tank and had given it a uniform and an expression of profound, almost theatrical disappointment.
Thick skinned.
Tusked.
The Green Lantern symbol stretched across a chest broad enough to blot out a meaningful portion of the portal behind him.
His edges shimmered…
he wasn’t solid his body was made entirely of emerald light, just like my constructs, the giant folded his arms and looked me up and down and then exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Is this really who you chose?” he said, to no one in particular, “they’re lettin’ anybody wear the ring nowadays.”
“You’re…real?” I asked.
He barked out a laugh that hit me like a shockwave.
“No, Poozer.” He jabbed a thumb into his own chest.
“Wrong universe, I’m an echo, an avatar.” He pointed at the ring on my finger, the band still glowing its dim and critical red.
“Every Lantern leaves something behind when they’re gone; lessons, experience, instinct. The ring holds onto it.” His tusks showed in something that wasn’t quite a smile.
“Lucky for you.”
Another leviathan slammed into the barrier.
The construct bent, the entire vault door bowing inward so far I saw space through the gaps between the panels, the pain that rolled through my skull from it almost pulled me away from the fact that I was face to face with an impossibility.
Kilowog didn’t glance at it, he looked at me.
“Is that all you got?” His voice was almost gentle.
Then another impact, and the barrier cracked, and gentle evaporated.
“I said is that IT?”
“I’m trying!” I said pushing back.
“No.” He stepped toward me, the emerald light that made up his body shifting with the movement, and his voice dropped to something that somehow carried more weight at low volume than it had at high.
“You ain’t trying.” His voice exploded across the construct.
“YOU’RE BUCKLIN’! Your rings doing most of the work and you’re still failing!”
“Fuck you! I said I’m trying!”
“No!” He pointed at the wall.
“You’re survivin’! You’ve already decided this is where you lose! I can see it. The ring can see it, you’ve been writing the ending for the last ninety seconds and you haven’t even noticed.”
“I haven’t—”
“Really.” He looked pointedly at the blood drying on my upper lip, at the dull green of my ring, at my shaking hands.
“You look real convinced.”
I clenched my jaw hard enough to ache.
“You got any better ideas!?”
“You bet your scrawny simian ass I do!”
He leaned in until the construct light of his face was close enough that I could see the details of it, the specific texture of something that had been a real being once and still carried the shape of having been real, and his voice came out low and direct and without any of the theater he’d been using up until now.
“You think this ring picked you because you punch good? Think it picked you because you’re the strongest thing on this planet? Because you don’t get scared?”
A beat.
“Why me then? Why not anyone else?”
His grin disappeared at the doubt in my voice.
“It picked you because you keep moving after fear tells you to stop.” He jabbed a finger into my chest, solid enough that I felt it through the suit.
“But right now? You stopped, first time all day and you picked the worst possible moment to do it.”
I looked past him at the barrier.
“I stopped an invasion!” I said, as though to defend myself.
“You stopped one wave.” His voice didn’t rise that somehow made it worse than shouting.
“You know what’s happening underneath your feet right now?”
I didn’t answer. This story is hosted at g.com.
“People are dying.” Another jab.
“People who trusted you.” Another.
“And you’re up here watching it happen.”
“I’m holdin’ the damn portal shut!”
“Barely!”
“I CAN’T be in two places at once! I’m holding the portal shut, if I let go—”
“Is that what you told the girl in the alley?” he said.
…
“Is that what you told the nineteen people you carried out of that rubble? ‘I’m doing the best I can, which isn’t good enough, so good luck?'” He folded his enormous arms.
“Because I seem to remember you told ’em something different. I seem to remember you told ’em what was going to happen, and you made it happen.”
I had nothing for that.
“I can’t—”
“That’s not a word a Green Lantern uses.” He laughed, a genuinely amused one that was somehow more insulting than contempt would have been.
“Your problem is you’re still thinking like Ezekiel Ross, like you’re still one guy.”
“I am one guy.”
“No.” He pointed at the ring.
“You’re a Green fucking Lantern.
He pointed his finger toward the sky above the portal.
“Do you know why there’s only one Lantern assigned to an entire sector? Why one lantern protects billions of people, entire civilizations, across thousands of worlds, across more star systems than you have numbers for?”
I said nothing.
“Because your bosses are cheap?” I offered.
Killowog barked another laugh at that.
“Closest thing to a right answer you’ve said all day,” he said.
“But the real one is this.” He tapped my forehead once.
“We aren’t one pair of fists, we’re will manifest and will doesn’t have the same limits fists do.”
He opened his hand and it became a hammer, then the hammer became a wall, and the wall split into a dozen smaller constructs radiating outward from his palm like spokes from a wheel.
“When your fist gets tired, you make a hammer, if the hammer breaks, you make a shield, if the shield isn’t enough, you extend. You reach. You build something that lets you be everywhere your will can carry you to at once.” He closed his hand and all of it dissolved back into the ambient light around him.
“One Lantern protects an entire sector because one Lantern’s will, when it’s fully understood, doesn’t end at their skin.”
I looked at him.
He pointed down toward Manhattan.
“What did you do before the ring found you?”
“I—” I stopped, thought about it properly.
“I got people organized.”
“How?”
“I just—” Danny.
Alvarez.
The EMT.
The Washington Heights crew.
Firestar looking away when I told her she’d done good.
“I gave them something to believe in, I gave them a direction when they didn’t have one.”
“And what happened when they believed it, believed you?”
I looked down at the burning city below me.
“They did the rest themselves,” I said slowly.
“There it is.” Kilowog smiled.
“You’ve been using your will all damn day. You’ve been using it on people. You just thought it stopped at the edge of your constructs.” He shook his enormous head.
“It doesn’t stop anywhere, that’s the whole point.”
The barrier cracked again, I looked at it, then I looked back down at Manhattan.
The words hit me like lightning, the constructs, the wall, the mech, the shields.
None of them had ever been the point.
The point…
…was reaching people.
“Congratulations.” He nodded toward the ring.
“Now you’re finally thinkin’ like a Lantern.”
The barrier cracked again, this time, I didn’t panic instead…
I looked down, through the clouds, toward Manhattan, toward everyone still fighting below.
Everyone who had refused to quit.
“….How,” I asked him, “How do I help all of them from here?”
Kilowog’s body had already begun to dissolve at the edges, the emerald light pulling back toward the ring the way light pulled back at sunset.
“What do you mean how.” His grin was the last thing that stayed solid.
“You already know.” The grin widened.
“Quit overthinking it, Poozer.”
His voice was almost gone.
“Say the words.” Then he was gone.