The world was concrete and dust.
I did a fast internal inventory the way I’d been taught to do after any impact that took you off your feet.
Fingers.
Toes.
Everything responded, which was the first piece of good news I’d had in the last however long it had been since the leviathan decided our parking structure was in its way.
My left leg was pinned under something heavy but the pain was pressure rather than the deeper, structural kind that meant something had given way.
My right arm was free.
My chest was moving, which meant my ribs were intact enough to function, which was more than I’d expected.
My head was a couple feet from a slab of collapsed ceiling that weighed, at a conservative estimate, somewhere in the neighborhood of everything.
It wasn’t on my head because Paulie was holding it up.
Paulie Provezano, had followed us unto the lot from where we met up in the streets, he an American-Italian recently discharged from the Marines, and more importantly he was a Mutant.
He was currently on his hands and knees between me and the slab, both arms braced against its underside, his face going red from the strain.
His power was invulnerability.
Had been since he was fourteen, he’d mentioned it once between shots at the skiffs.
The invulnerability was comprehensive and reliable and had saved his life more times than he’d bothered counting in the military, that was until he jumped onto a grenade for a squadmate, and was dishonorably discharged when he didn’t get blown to chunks.
The superstrength that came with his invulnerability topped out around a ton.
The slab above us weighed more than that.
Considerably more.
I could see it in the way his arms were shaking, in the way the concrete beneath his hands was cracking from the downward pressure his body was transmitting into it, in the way the slab had already descended another two inches since I’d regained consciousness and was continuing its slow, patient, inevitable journey toward the floor.
Toward my head.
Paulie looked at me.
His jaw was tight.
His eyes were asking a question he didn’t have the breath to say out loud.
His breathing had gone ragged ten seconds ago.
Arms vibrating hard enough to blur.
The slab kept inching lower anyway, slow and patient and inevitable.
Physics always got the last word eventually.
Paulie’s eyes met mine through the dust.
There was a question there.
‘You got a plan?’
I stared back at him for a second.
Then I shook my head once, a small thing that sent pain shooting down my side.
‘Don’t.
Don’t kill yourself trying to buy me another minute.’
I could see him process it.
Jaw tightening.
Eyes narrowing like he was considering telling me to go fuck myself on principle alone.
Then something in the darkness between us changed.
A light.
Not the dusty grey filtering through the rubble from somewhere above.
Not the blue-white pulse of alien weaponry or the orange flicker of something burning in what used to be the floors above us.
Something else entirely.
Green.
Vivid and deep in a way that light in this context had no right to be, moving through the gap between broken slabs with a patient, directed certainty.
It was small.
A ring, and I recognized it.
I recognized it from the dreams, the ones that had started when I was seven and had never fully stopped, the ones that felt sharp and consistent and real in the way that regular dreams didn’t.
I had seen those light in those dreams, from a cartoon about superheroes, and from comic books, the other guy used to read.
Impossibly, I knew what this was.
The ring came to a stop in front of my face, hovering at eye level, rotating slowly in the dust-thick air in front of my face.
The voice, when it came, was not a sound exactly.
It was more precise than sound, more immediate, bypassing the ears and arriving directly in the part of the brain where language lived.
“Ezekiel Ross of Earth.” A pause, or what felt like a pause.
“You have the ability to overcome great fear.” Another pause.
“Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps.”
I stared at it.
Above me the slab shifted.
Paulie made a sound through his teeth that was not a word.
I thought about the dreams.
About the seven year old version of me waking up with his heart hammering from something he couldn’t explain.
About the diagnosis.
Delusional Misidentification Syndrome.
Maybe this was that.
Maybe this was the delusions doing what delusions did, producing comfort in the form of familiar imagery at the exact moment the brain needed something to hold onto.
Maybe the Delusional Misidentification Syndrome had picked this moment, pinned under a collapsed building.
Maybe.
I looked at Paulie.
The slab had come down another inch.
His arms were vibrating with the effort of holding it.
His eyes met mine and said everything that the weight pressing down on both of us wouldn’t let him say out loud.
But none of those explanations changed the fact that Paulie was dying in front of me trying to hold a building off my skull.
None of them changed the weight crushing my leg.
None of them changed the smell of dust and blood and pulverized concrete filling my lungs.
And none of them changed the look in Paulie’s eyes.
The guy was scared.
Not for himself.
For me.
That landed harder than it should’ve.
This man barely knew me.
Thirty minutes ago we were strangers on opposite sides of Midtown.
Now he was spending the last strength in his body trying to keep me alive because somewhere along the line he’d decided I mattered.
Not just me either.
All morning people had been following me.
Danny.
Alvarez.
The bodega guy with the baseball bat.
The EMT on the roof.
The Washington Heights crew.
Every terrified person who looked at me waiting for somebody to tell them what came next.
I felt all of them at once suddenly.
Every scared face.
Every shaking hand still holding a weapon.
Every person refusing to run because somebody else needed them not to.
Willpower.
That was the word that surfaced in my head.
Not courage.
Courage was temporary.
The false bravado that came from a lack of fear.
Will was different.
It was getting up anyway.
It was staying when your instincts screamed run.
If hope is what you fought for when you had nothing left, then will is what you fought with.
Paulie’s arms buckled another inch.
The slab came lower.
Decision made.
I reached out my hand.
The ring crossed the distance between us in a fraction of a second and settled onto my middle finger with the specific, final quality of something finding the place it had always been supposed to be, and for one fraction of a second I felt everything, the weight of the slab and the dust in my lungs and the concrete on my leg and the ringing in my ears and the grief I’d been holding at arm’s length since I’d looked back at where Yusuf’s cart used to be, all of it at once, every sensation arriving simultaneously like a door opening onto a room that had been sealed.
The weight above me.
The rubble pinning my leg.
The ache in my ribs.
The blood drying on my skin.
Yusuf’s empty food cart.
The people screaming in the streets outside.
The perforated, smoking corpses we had passed by on the street
The thirty people on a rooftop fighting because somewhere along the line they believed they could, because of me, and now they might be dead because of me, because I wanted to play hero.
All of it hit me at once.
Too much.
Way too much.
Then the ring ignited.
And everything exploded into green.
Authors Note: That’s it for Part 2!
Hope you all enjoyed it.
And before anybody jumps down my throat, yes, I know the Battle of New York only lasted around twenty minutes in canon, and that Tony was the first Avenger on the ground immediately.
But I wanted to do a grittier, semi-realistic take on what an actual alien invasion in a more comic book-centric Marvel version of New York would feel like from street level.
The goal was to make the city itself feel alive.
Not just the Avengers fighting in the background, but ordinary people, cops, gang members, mutants, EMTs, and random civilians all reacting to the end of the world in real time.
As for the mutants featured in this chapter, none of them are OCs.
The “Jean Grey knockoff” is Firestar (Angelica Jones), a young mutant living in New York who can manipulate microwave radiation to fly and generate intense thermal blasts.
The Italian version of Brit is Omerta (Paulie Provenzano), a discharged Marine and former mob associate who was outed as a mutant.
His mutation grants him extreme invulnerability and enhanced strength, though he can still be poisoned or suffocated.