A/N: On the "Ask the Squishykins" tumblr, Twinings recently offered ourselves up for a few weeks of filling fic prompts for our readers, varying in length from a hundred to sixteen thousand plus words. The project has been dubbed the Free For All Fic For All—or FFAFFA for short. This is one of those stories—and this is the boilerplate author's note you'll see on all of 'em.
Prompt: Roxy Rocket tries to join the JLA
Warnings: Sexual harassment
Notes: This got a very quick rewrite after it was originally posted because I wasn't satisfied with GL's dialogue. I feel much, much better about it now. If you've already read it on tumblr, be aware that some things have changed. :)
Tires squeal on blacktop. A cackle flutters on the wind. Soot and ash catch in her hair. The wind is hot.
She smells like smoke. Thick, black smoke. The smell of a factory on fire.
She smells like destruction.
Leather steering wheel burning under her fingertips, pulse thumping so hard she can feel it behind her left eye, blood pools at the corner of her mouth, the same color as her lipstick.
Roxy Rocket screeches out of Coast City the way she screeched out of Gotham, Metropolis and Gateway: with her foot on the gas and a hero on her heels. The speedometer creeps up past seventy, then eighty, and Roxy can't stop laughing at the green glow in her rear view mirror.
"You're gonna have to do better than that if you want to catch me, handsome," she burbles at the mirror image of Green Lantern, who's gaining fast. The speedometer hits one hundred as she zips past the city limits sign and onto the highway that leads into the desert. One ten, one twenty, and still he's gaining. Miles of empty desert fly past her windows as she weaves from lane to lane, avoiding station wagons and semi-trucks with such ease that she might as well be driving a carnival bumper car instead of four thousand speeding pounds of good old Detroit steel. In and out and in and out of the rapidly thinning traffic, she pushes the car to a speed that makes the doors rattle.
Green Lantern is closer than ever, she notes with a glance at her side mirror and a giggle. He's still trying to figure out how to stop her without the momentum killing her, if the adorable twitchy scowly thing he's doing with his face is any indication.
The blur of a mile marker catches her eye and she leans forward, gripping the wheel tighter. It's almost time.
The road in front of her is empty—she's either far ahead or far behind everyone else on the road this afternoon—so she jerks the wheel to one side, spinning the car right off the highway. It smashes through a barbed wire fence, leaving scratches and dings all over the hood, but it barely even slows her down. Sand kicks up behind her as she punches the pedal down into the floorboard. The engine roars in response—"Oh, yeah!"—and she's off like a shot.
A mile into the desert, she sees it—the thing she's been waiting to spot: "WARNING! CANYON AHEAD!"
Finally, he's close enough to use his ring, just in time to see her convertible go flying over the edge of a cliff. In the milliseconds after it goes into free fall, Roxy unbuckles her seat belt and leaps from the car, shouting as she falls towards the earth, "Think fast, stud!"
She sees him overhead as she plummets downwards, the hand that holds his ring a tightly clenched fist in front of his body as he flies toward her, and she lets out a scream of adrenaline fueled delight. Green energy blinds her for a moment, shoots past her at the speed of light and forms a net below her, with just enough give to keep her from breaking any bones.
Roxy hits the net, slowing her down just enough to keep her from hitting the ground, but she bounces a dozen times before Green Lantern plucks her out of the air by the collar of her jacket.
"What took you so long?" she asks conversationally, throwing herself at him and wrapping her limbs around him in a fair imitation of a python.
He narrows his eyes at her behind his mask.
She just grins at him. "Told you I'm fearless. So, whaddya say, stud?"
"You could have killed someone," he says sternly, threatening with a pair of green construct handcuffs.
"Could have," she says with another maddening grin, "Didn't."
"You could have killed yourself."
"Also could have, also didn't."
"I caught you." The handcuffs close around one of her wrists.
"'Cause I let you. And I still gave you a run for your money." With her free hand, Roxy walks her fingers up Green Lantern's chest. "So…?"
"You are absolutely not JLA material." The handcuffs capture her other wrist and Green Lantern wills several bands of energy into existence to pry her legs off him. "Stealing a car and breaking every traffic law known to man is not the way to prove yourself during the application process."
"But it was fun, wasn't it, baby?" Roxy quirks an eyebrow behind her goggles. "Got your blood pumping, didn't it?"
He scowls at her, clearly not amused.
"Oh, so it was fun but you don't want to admit it." She leans in as close as the constricting energy will allow and whispers huskily, "Don't worry, it'll be our little secret."
"I'm taking you to jail."
"Eh, if you live that long," she says, diving in for a smooch. She hooks her arms around his neck, even though her wrists are bound, and kisses the hero in ways he hasn't been kissed in awhile. If he's ever been kissed this way...
"Mmph!" Caught off guard, Green Lantern's concentration breaks. It's all he can do to remain airborne. It's all he can do not to kiss her back.
Roxy's fingers tangle in his hair and she kisses him harder until the coils of energy around her body snap and shatter. She smiles against his mouth when her wrists are free.
After a minute, Roxy pulls back and looks him in the eye, grinning from ear to ear. She twists her hand in his and bites her lip in a most enticing fashion. "You sure you're going to take me to jail?"
She watches his Adam's apple bob as he swallows harshly. He was not expecting this. "Yes."
"Really?" Roxy looks at him from beneath lowered lids and draws his finger up to her mouth, tracing the outline of her lips and leaving lipstick on his pristine white glove.
She sees him swallow again. The perfectly buttoned up do-gooder starts coming undone as she sucks on one of his fingers.
"I said, I'm—" His voice doesn't crack when her lips meet his knuckles, but it threatens to. "—taking you to jail."
With a shrug of her shoulders, she draws back.
He seems relieved, but that relief quickly turns to something else.
Roxy gives him a wink and a winning grin, flashing him a view of his power ring between her teeth.
"Son of a—!"
And then they're falling, heading straight for the canyon floor.
Roxy stuffs the Green Lantern ring down her shirt where it nestles in her cleavage and throws her arms out, putting just enough distance between her and the hero to make things difficult. "You want it? You're gonna have to get to second base to get it!"
He makes a grab for her, just missing the edge of her collar with his grasping fingers.
"Too slow, G-man!" Roxy laughs, spinning in the wind.
He reaches for her again, this time hooking her around the waist. He pulls her close and tears her jacket open, feeling her up as he tries to find the ring.
"Fresh!" She pinches him, making his eyes go wide, but he doesn't have time to spurn her advances.
The ground is dangerously close when his fingers finally close around the power ring. There's just barely enough time to compensate for the rate of their fall.
Roxy screams—"God, YES!"—as they come within a foot of the ground and swoop upward in an arc large enough to keep their necks from breaking.
"You're a menace!" Green Lantern shouts at her over the wind.
"Liar!" She shouts back. "You think I'm fun!"
"I think you're crazy!" Roxy assumes that their speed is going to level off once it's safe to do so, but Green Lantern surprises her. "I'm going to teach you a lesson if it kills you!"
"Oh yeah?!" They go even faster, flying higher and higher and higher. She clutches his shoulders and screams with ecstasy when he goes into a human barrel roll. "Oooh, YEAH!"
Without warning, Roxy finds herself being flung through the air, arms and legs scrambling to find purchase on surfaces that don't exist.
She falls forty feet before he swoops under her to catch her in his arms.
Before she has the chance to get a good grip on him, he drops her again.
She falls another hundred feet this time before he catches her.
Over and over again he catches and drops her in varying increments. Each drop is only long enough for her to feel the beginning tingles of adrenaline. She gets almost close enough to a thrill, but time and again he yanks it away from her.
Eight feet from the ground, he snatches her out of the air for the last time. Roxy's knees feel wobbly from the workout her adrenal gland has been getting and the hair that's not covered by her aviator helmet sticks up in about thirty different directions. He holds her in his arms, bridal style, and she lets out a whoosh of breath. "Oooh, you tease."
Green Lantern drops her again.
This time he doesn't bother to catch her.
Without time to prepare, Roxy doesn't get to use all her stunt-woman know-how to save her from the full impact. With a squeak, she lands in the dust. She manages to roll over onto her back, spitting sand.
Roxy lies there for a minute, staring up at him. None of her bones are broken, from what she can tell, but everything hurts.
"Unngh."
Hovering over her with his arms folded over his chest, Green Lantern says, "I'm taking you to jail."
"I'll get out," she answers from her place on the ground, a wry smirk crossing her face. "And in the meantime…conjugal visits?"