Chapter Text
It’s a bright and early summer morning, with nothing but clear blue skies as far as the eye can see. All in all, it’s the perfect weather for flying. Naturally, Hal Jordan can’t have been at work for more than a couple minutes—barely long enough to shoot the shit with Tom over a cup of coffee—before he’s summoned to the boss’s office. Wondering what he’s done this time, Hal casts one longing stare up at the endless blue before entering the air-base’s office complex and making his way to Carol’s door.
He steps into the office to find Carol laughing with some pretty brunette Hal doesn’t recognize. She’s young but professional-looking, the kind of career-oriented gal that he can see Carol being friends with. She seems to have put Carol in a good mood at least, so Hal lets himself relax. Whatever he’s been summoned for, at least he doesn’t seem to be in trouble.
Sitting next to the pretty brunette is a skinny boy with bright ginger hair. Hal would guess that he’s about nine or ten years old. The boy is slumped in his chair with a bored expression on his freckled face. He glances briefly at Hal when he enters the room, but soon resumes looking out the window at the same blue sky Hal was admiring just a moment ago.
“Hal, there you are,” Carol says, drawing back his attention. “You’re good with kids, right?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I’m great with kids,” Hal tells her. “I’ve got three nephews and—”
“Mm-hmm,” Carol hums. “This is Iris West. She’s a reporter from Central City.”
“Nice to meet you, Miss,” Hal says, shaking the young lady’s hand. “I’m Hal Jordan, the best test pilot at Ferris Air.”
The boy looks up at Hal with far greater interest this time.
Iris chuckles. “You’re certainly confident, Mr. Jordan.”
“Some might say over-confident,” Hal says, shooting Carol a wink. She just sighs and shakes her head with fond exasperation. “But when you’ve got thousands of dollars of top-of-the-line military hardware screaming through the sky at super-sonic speeds, you don’t want anybody timid in the pilot’s seat, you know what I mean?”
That definitely gets the little redhead’s attention. “You fly planes?”
“Not just any planes,” Hal tells him. “The fastest planes humans know how to make.”
The boy grins. “Cool!”
“So, what brings you two halfway across the country?” Hal asks. “I’m guessing you’re not just here for the California sunshine.”
“Iris is here to interview me for Picture News,” Carol says. “I told her you’d give her nephew, Wally, a tour of base so he doesn’t have to wait here the whole time.”
“You don’t have to if it’s too much trouble,” Iris quickly interjects.
“But I wanna see the planes,” Wally tells his aunt in a quiet voice.
“I don’t mind,” Hal says.
“Great! And then we’ll go for lunch after the interview, all four of us,” Carol offers. “My treat, Iris, I insist.”
“I’m not one to turn down a free meal,” Hal says with a cheeky grin. “Until then, us guys can check out the planes while you ladies conduct your business. Right, Wally?”
He holds out his fist to Wally, who grins and bumps their knuckles together. “Yeah!”
“Okay,” Iris says hesitantly. “Just be careful, alright?”
“Yes, Aunt Iris.”
“I’ll get him back to you in one piece,” Hal promises, giving Iris a salute.
“Stay with Mr. Jordan,” Iris says. “Don’t wander off.”
“Yes, Aunt Iris.”
“And pay attention to what you’re doing, okay Wally? No getting distracted.”
“O-kay, Aunt Iris!”
“Okay,” Iris relents with a fond smile. She kisses her nephew’s forehead. “Be good.”
“I will,” Wally answers cheerfully.
“If you take pictures,” Iris suggests, “I’ll see if I can get one of them in the article.”
“Cool!”
Hal leads Wally out of Carol’s office as the ladies resume the interview. He’s never really given a tour before, but Wally is an eager and appreciative audience and asks plenty of questions that let Hal show off his aviation knowledge. There are some things Hal can’t show him, of course—Ferris Air has a number of ongoing military contracts that require absolute confidentiality—but even the less experimental, publicly-known aircraft are plenty impressive. Wally’s eyes widen in amazement when Hal tells him that their fastest jet has a top speed of over twenty-five thousand miles per hour.
“And here’s the best mechanic in the business, Tom Kalmaku,” Hal announces when they enter one of the hangars and happen to find the man himself repairing an engine. “Without him, we’d never be able to get off the ground.”
“And that’s Hal Jordan, the most destructive pilot in the business. If it wasn’t for him, my job would be a lot easier,” Tom retorts with a wry smile as he climbs down from his stepladder. To Hal, he asks, “Who’s the kid?”
“Hi,” Wally says with a wave. “My name’s Wally West.”
“There’s a reporter here to interview Carol,” Hal explains, “and Wally here’s the photographer.”
One of Tom’s brows arch as he wipes the grease from his hands with a rag. “Huh. You seem young to be a photographer, but I guess people say the same about me being a mechanic. Nice to meet you, Wally.”
“Nice to meet you, sir,” Wally replies, shaking Tom’s offered hand. “My aunt asked me to take a picture for her article about Miss Ferris. Do you want to be in it?”
Tom looks surprised but pleased. “Sure.”
“Can you be in the picture, too, Mister Jordan?”
“I told you, call me Hal. And who am I to deny the people of Central City this gorgeous face?”
Tom snorts loudly.
“How about in front of the jet, Wally?” Hal suggests.
“Yeah!” Wally says excitedly. “It’d be nice if we could see more of the base in the picture, though.”
“What do you say, Tom? Is this baby mobile, yet?” Hal asks, reaching up to rap his knuckles against the jet’s fuselage.
“I wouldn’t trust it in the air, but it should survive a trip outside,” Tom says. “Although, with your track-record…”
“Funny guy,” Hal remarks before climbing up the side of the jet and into the cockpit.
After obtaining ear-protection for all three of them, Tom guides Wally to a safe place to stand while Hal starts the engine. Even with the protective earmuffs, Wally jumps at the thunderous sound, but there’s a huge grin on his freckled face that Hal can’t help but return from his place in the pilot’s seat.
Hal wonders if this is how his father felt, the first time he showed off one of his planes to Hal and his brothers.
Fighting off the wave of bittersweet nostalgia brought on by that thought, Hal taxies the jet through the hangar doors and out onto the tarmac while Wally and Tom follow at a safe distance. After one last rev, Hal shuts off the engine and climbs out.
“Well, what do you think, Wally?” he asks when the boy comes running up. “Is this a good place for your picture?”
“THAT WAS SO LOUD,” Wally shouts.
Hal plucks the earmuffs from Wally’s head. “Pretty cool, huh?
“Awesome!” Wally agrees, quieter but no less enthusiastic.
After walking around the jet a few times in search of the best angle, Wally pulls a digital camera out of his pocket and tells them to pose in front of the plane.
“Alright, awesome, just stand still and—wait, Mister Kalmaku, you’ve got some grease right—” Wally points between his own brows.
“Good looking out, Hal,” Tom mutters as he scrubs his forehead with the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “You couldn’t have mentioned I had a grease unibrow when I was about to have my picture taken for a newspaper?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice,” Hal says, utterly unrepentant. He runs his hands through his hair a few times to make sure it looks attractively windblown and not like he just got into a fight with a leaf-blower.
“Ready? Say cheese!” Wally snaps the picture and looks down at the camera’s tiny screen with a critical eye.
“Do you need to get another one?” Hal asks.
Wally hurries up to them and hands Hal the camera. “I don’t know. I think it looks okay.”
“Just okay? I think it looks great,” Hal says with a grin. Neither of the subjects was caught mid-blink, so that’s already better than anything Hal could manage at least. In the picture, Tom is standing proudly in front of the jet with his arms crossed, while Hal looks roguishly handsome (if he doesn’t say so himself) perched on the wing. “Seriously, this is professional quality.”
“Really?” Wally asks, astonished and bouncing on his heels in excitement.
“Yeah,” Hal says, handing the camera to Tom so he can see the picture, too.“I think your aunt’s going to be really happy with it.”
“Not bad,” Tom agrees with a nod. “Can I have a copy?”
They give Wally their e-mail addresses, then Hal drives the jet back into the hangar for further repairs. As soon as Hal shuts off the jet’s engine, Wally runs up with a cheeky grin on his freckled face. “Can you teach me how to fly a jet?”
“Sure,” Hal says as he climbs out of the cockpit.
Judging from his expression, Wally clearly wasn’t expecting Hal to actually say yes. “Really?” he squawks with as much dismay as excitement.
“Uh,” Tom says in a drawn-out, warning tone.
“Yep. But we’ll use something else, so we aren’t in Tom’s way,” Hal says, leading the astonished youngster away. “See you later, man.”
Tom calms down once he realizes what Hal has planned. “See you. Bye, Wally.”
“Bye, Mr. Kalmaku. It was nice meeting you,” Wally calls back. He trots alongside Hal, matching each long stride with two of his own. “Are you really gonna teach me how to fly a jet?”
“Why not?” Hal replies.
“Because Aunt Iris is gonna murder us, that’s why not,” Wally says, but he’s still grinning from ear-to-ear.
“Don’t worry about her,” Hal insists. “I’ve got it all under control.”
“Okay…” Wally replies doubtfully. He looks out across the tarmac at the parked jets. “So which one are we gonna…?”
“None of those,” Hal tells him. “The one you’re going to cut your teeth on is a unique prototype—a real one-of-a-kind.”
Wally frowns in confusion but follows Hal without complaint into a nearby warehouse. Hal leads him to a large object hidden underneath a blue tarp, surrounded by several unplugged flat-screen TVs and computer towers on rolling carts. Despite the object’s size, it’s clearly not big enough to be a fighter jet.
Hal pulls on the corner of the tarp, revealing what looks like a jet’s cockpit mounted on a mechanical base with powerful hydraulic cylinders.
“Woah,” Wally says. “What is that?”
“It’s a flight-simulator,” Hal explains. “I made it to train new pilots.”
“You built this?”
“Yeah, with some help from Tom. It was kind of a side-project. It’ll never be used by the Air Force—they’ve got the world’s most bloated military budget to work with, they’re not gonna want some DIY flight-sim we built in a garage—but for Ferris’s in-house training, it gets the job done.” Hal crouches slightly next to the simulator and laces his fingers together into a makeshift foothold. “Here, I’ll give you a boost up.”
He lifts Wally up high enough that the boy can clamber the rest of the way into the cockpit on his own. “Woah, that’s a lot of knobs and dials,” Wally exclaims as he sits down in the pilot’s seat. “How do you remember what they all do?”
“A lot of practice, that’s how. You train long enough and it eventually becomes second-nature,” Hal answers. He helps Wally buckle and tighten the seat’s harness. Once Wally is strapped in, Hal searches a nearby shelf and finds the spare helmet he’s looking for in a large cardboard box. “Here. Can’t be a pilot without one of these.”
“Cool,” Wally says with a grin. The helmet is too big, drooping over his eyes even with the visor retracted.
“Now,” Hal says, gesturing at the array of switches and buttons lining the cockpit, “can you tell just by looking what any of these are?”
Wally frowns thoughtfully at the controls. After a moment, he wraps his hand around the stick. “This is how you steer. Side to side turns the plane left or right, pulling it back makes you go up, and pushing it forward makes the plane dive.”
“That’s right. Anything else?”
“Um… that’s the speedometer,” Wally says, pointing at one of the dials. “Right?”
“Right, just like in a car. Except a jet can go a lot faster than a car, so that’s why the numbers are so much higher,” Hal says. “Speaking of higher, this here is the altimeter. It keeps track of your altitude—how far up you are in the air.
“How high can a jet fly?”
“It depends on the type of jet,” Hal says. He raps his knuckle on the outer shell of the flight-simulator. “This was built mostly out of a scrapped F-16, and their upper limit is a little over eighteen thousand miles.”
“Holy cow!”
Hal laughs. “Yeah, that’s pretty far up there, huh? But there are plenty of jets that can go even higher. Especially stealth jets. They’re designed to fly as high as possible so they’re harder to detect from the ground. They also tend to be the fastest, since you need to be quick enough to get in and get out before you’re noticed. With fighter jets, agility is generally more important so you can outmaneuver other fighters.”
“Have you ever been in a dogfight?”
“Yeah,” Hal sighs. “I have.”
“Did you shoot down the bad guys?” Wally asks excitedly.
“No, I shot down other pilots,” Hal corrects him. “You don’t get to shoot bad guys in a war. You just shoot a bunch of kids unlucky enough to born in the same country as the bad guys.”
At such an unexpectedly somber answer, Wally’s smile falls into a troubled frown.
“So if you do decide to become a pilot when you grow up, stick to the private sector,” Hal advises, trying to break the sudden tension. “The pay’s better, anyway.”
“You really think I could be a pilot?” Wally asks.
“Why not? You seem like a smart kid.”
Wally scoffs with uncharacteristic bitterness. “My dad says I’d be lucky to even get a job at the plant where he works.”
“Your dad’s kind of tough on you, huh?” Hal guesses. He knows how that is.
“Yeah,” Wally sighs. “He says I’ll never amount to anything until I get my head out of the clouds and start living in the real world.”
Wow. Hal knows exactly how that is. “Sounds like me when I was your age.”
“Really?” Wally asks. “But you’re a pilot!”
Hal chuckles. “My mom—charitably—called it an active imagination. Dad called me a space-case.”
“Hey, my dad calls me that, too!”
“And look at me now. I turned out alright, don’t you think?” Hal asks. “So don’t worry about what your dad says. If you could be anything in the world when you grow up—anything at all, dream as big as you want—what would it be?”
Wally doesn’t answer at first, thinking intensely with his brow furrowed and his lower lip between his teeth. “Don’t be mad.”
“Why would I be mad?”
“Dad beat the tar outta me when I told him,” Wally says.
That’s more than a little concerning. Hal hopes Wally’s just exaggerating, in the way some kids do without realizing the implications of what they’re saying, but makes a mental note to ask the boy’s aunt about it later. In the meantime, he promises, “I’m not going to be mad.”
“And you won’t laugh?”
“I won’t.”
Wally fiddles with the flight-simulator’s controls for a moment before warily admitting, “I wanna be Green Lantern.”
“Green Lantern?” Hal can’t help an astonished and delighted grin. He’s relatively new compared to most superheroes out there, and most of his adventures happen in space where no one on Earth can see. Coming across a fan in his everyday life is still an exciting novelty.
Wally cringes in embarrassment. “I know that’s stupid, ‘cause it’s never gonna happen—”
“No, it’s not stupid,” Hal assures him. “It’s just, I’d have figured you for a Flash fan, being from Central City and all.”
“I’m not from Central City. I’m just visiting Aunt Iris for the summer,” Wally corrects. “I used to be a big fan of the Flash, though. And I still like him, it’s just…”
“Just what?”
“I dunno. He’s just not as cool, since he got that sidekick,” Wally pouts. He crosses his arms over his chest and mutters, “What kind of a name is Speedy, anyway?”
“You don’t like sidekicks?”
“They’re fine, I guess. I like Green Arrow’s sidekick, Robin. And Batgirl and Supergirl are alright. But everyone thinks Speedy’s so cool, and he’s not. He sucks,” Wally says grouchily. “I bet the Flash only picked him because he’s fast, too.”
“Well, yeah,” Hal says. “The Flash would need a partner who can keep up with him, right?”
“Whatever. Green Lantern’s way cooler than the Flash, anyway,” Wally continues. His mood quickly bounces back to his usual cheerful enthusiasm. “He can fly, he fights alien monsters, and his ring can create anything he can imagine!”
“That is pretty cool,” Hal agrees, feeling his ego swell to dangerous levels. “You know, I’m a bit of a Green Lantern fan myself.”
Wally gasps. “Green Lantern’s gonna be at the Coast City parade this Sunday! You should go with Aunt Iris and me!”
“Er—sorry, kid, I can’t. There’s somewhere I’ve got to be,” Hal replies. Of course, that ‘somewhere’ is flying above the crowd in his Green Lantern uniform, but Wally can’t know that.
“Oh.” Wally slumps slightly in the pilot’s chair. “Well… I’ll take lots of pictures, okay? And I’ll try to get Green Lantern’s autograph for you.”
“Thanks Wally,” Hal says with a smile, genuinely touched by the offer. “So, you really want to be a Green Lantern someday?”
“Sure, but I’m just some nobody from nowhere. How would I ever become a Green Lantern? When I said that—it’s just a fantasy. Kid’s stuff. I know it’s never really going to happen.”
“Do you know how Green Lantern got his ring?”
Wally frowns a little, puzzled at the seemingly abrupt shift in conversation. “Didn’t he get it from the old Green Lantern? The one who was in the JSA?”
“Good guess, but no,” Hal says. “Living in Coast City, I guess we hear more about Green Lantern than you do out in the Midwest.”
“Tell me!” Wally eagerly demands.
“First of all, there are lots and lots of Green Lanterns. The whole universe is split into hundreds of thousands of space-sectors, and each sector has at least one Green Lantern sworn to protect all of the people living there,” Hal says. “The Green Lantern Corps was founded by an ancient race of aliens called the Guardians of the Universe, and they programmed the rings to search all of space for those worthy to wield them.”
“How do they know if someone’s worthy?”
“The rings can sense it. They look for people who are imaginative and strong-willed, who are completely fearless, and who’d gladly dedicate their lives to fighting the forces of evil and helping those in need.”
Wally’s blue-green eyes are big and earnest under the rim of the oversized flight-helmet—and unbeknownst to him, he is sitting exactly where Hal was on that fateful day only a few months ago when a mysterious green aura scooped him up, flight-trainer and all, and flew him across the desert to crashed spaceship of Abin Sur.
“Before he got the ring, Green Lantern was a ‘nobody from nowhere,’ too,” Hal says. “But if you’ve got what it takes, a ring will find you. No matter who you are, no matter where you are.”