Hal sits in his room, legs drawn up against his chest, eyes blank and staring as tremors run through his limbs. The lights are off and the floor is hard but the wall gives him some kind of support and everything is spinning. So.
"What happened? You're going to tell me what happened right now you two-faced pompous narcissist!"
Hal's ring glares a bright and violently angry green, flaring out to seize his dark cloaked and cowled counterpart in a vice-like death grip. "What happened to Barry?!"
Hal shakes and his gaze falls down to his hands and the ring that sits dull on his finger. He touches it once, not really feeling its smooth texture under his finger. His eyes sting, but nothing more happens. It doesn't feel like he's really here. It doesn't feel like this is really happening.
Hal stands in an exercise gym in front of a closet door, fist white-knuckled around his ring.
The vigilante had been wrong. He might be a good detective, but he didn't have the most powerful weapon in the world. He didn't have the ring.
And he didn't know Barry like Hal did. Didn't know how good the man was at last-minute escapes and tricks.
Hal would find Barry where everyone else had given him up for dead.
Hal slides the ring off his finger in jerking motions, staring at the green metal as though he might wake up any moment. A single silent tear escapes him, but he doesn't know why he's crying when he can't feel anything. Something is crushing his chest. He can't breathe.
The ruins are terrible; twisted smoldering metal everywhere. There are no bodies, for which Hal is grateful, but he's looking for something. Someone.
They had the uniform, and the ring, but Barry himself must be here somewhere.
Hal ordered the ring to search for incorporeal beings.
Perhaps Barry had vibrated to escape the explosion, and had been stuck in intangibility ever since.
Hal ordered the ring to search for intelligent energy signatures.
Perhaps Barry had run so fast that he had transmuted into sentient energy, and was simply waiting to be reformed.
Hal ordered the ring to search for evidence of time or dimensional travel.
Perhaps Barry had finally been able to vibrate through time or dimensions; something he had been theorizing about eventually doing.
Hal finally entered the room; stared at the demolished contents, scoured with antimatter burns and fiery death.
The smell of burning flesh still hung in the air.
The smell wouldn't go away. It hung in the air, around everything Hal touched. It strangled him, wrapping intangible fingers around his throat, like Barry's final condemnation of Hal in his failure.
Hal's fingers fumble over his ring for relief, but it does no good: the battery dead and empty.
Wally had signaled for Hal to meet him, and Hal used his ring to hone in on the tracker. Wally had never called Hal like this before, but the signal was high priority, so Hal did his best to make good time.
To make matters worse, once Hal had managed to pull himself out of deep space he realized that he had missed a previous signal from Flash himself, asking Green Lantern to return to Earth. He'd been too far away to receive the message before, but as he neared the planet, like Wally's message, it came in loud and clear.
Worry nagged at him slightly, but he doubted it was anything too serious. Probably there was some big bad Flash and Kid Flash needed help fighting, and they just needed some backup. Probably Barry was letting Wally call to make the kid feel special - he loved the 'super-spy' crime fighting gadgets.
A smile peeled over Hal's face. He did too.
He did an unconscious barrel roll as he approached Earth, ecstatic to finally be coming home. Being a space cop was awesome, but it just wouldn't feel the same without being able to regale his friends with the (slightly edited) stories of his adventures.
Iris's mild concern, Barry's amused laughter and the stars in Wally's eyes kept him coming home at top speed, no matter how tired he was after a mission.
Hal could see it now, the excitement lining Wally's body as he waited for Hal to come back, to kick off their next big adventure. Abra Kadabra? Captain Cold? Rainbow Raider? The possibilities were endless, each more exciting than the last.
Breaking into Earth's atmosphere, he zeroed in to Central City, frowning as he realized the signal was coming from outside in the pouring rain. From the top of a building, no less.
As he got closer, he could see that Wally was sitting alone on top of a building in his civvies, turning over a small glinting object in his hands.
Concern twinged at Hal as he moved to touch down next to Wally's hunched form, forming an umbrella above the kid's head. He kept a reassuring smile on his face. Everything would be okay. It always was.
He wondered what had happened to Barry, in the end. He couldn't stop replaying it in his head, and somehow the visions seemed more real than anything else in his life.
Had Barry gone so fast that he had burned to death, flames consuming layer after layer of skin until there was nothing left but ashes scattered by the force of the explosion?
His friction aura would have taken some of the brunt, though.
Perhaps the force of the wind had simply grown to be too much, stripping layers of flesh away and pulverizing the remains.
Perhaps it had been his own metabolism that had finally did him in. Perhaps he had run so fast that it had accelerated beyond all control, his body consuming itself from the inside out as he literally ran himself to death.
Hal's fingers closed around the useless hunk of green metal in his fingers before he hurled it out the window. The sound of breaking glass was dull in his ears, and he choked, breathing accelerating and shortening as he panicked, the stink of Barry's death choking the air out of his lungs.