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There are other memories, but this one will always be the clearest.
On some unspecified summer day, Hal Jordan stands ageless before a chain-linked fence. Puppy fat is still tough on his cheeks and he’s wearing a pair of scratched-up trainers, his eyes drawn haplessly towards the empty runway. There, the sun hits the metal side of a plane so as to make it gleam and glare like an ant beneath a microscope.
His father sits behind the cockpit and waves a hand in his direction, his face obscured by a bulky helmet. Hal can tell that he’s smiling. The blue of the sky has long since chased away the last drooping sweeps of dawn from the horizon, and the day is as cloudless and as perfect of a day for flying as a day can possibly be; brilliant from the aftermath of rain and thunder.
Hal’s baseball cap is too tight around his head. He will remember this detail later, when it is blown away from him in the shock of the crash and he sees the red marks it left on his forehead in the bathroom mirror. He will lock the door and stare, and stare, and stare at the remnant; unseeing, denying, his hands clenched into fists, until at last there is a knock on the door and he is ushered away.
Until then, his mother has a hand on his shoulder as Hal angles himself closer and closer towards the fence. He wants to be closer still. The space around him is flat and free and Hal wants to fill it. It clogs his throat and there is a jitter in his legs, a glitter in his eyes. That awed tension scatters onto his palms as he watches his father’s plane start to move and, with a splitting boom that has him scrambling to cover his ears, lift off.
Less than thirty minutes later, the plane goes belting down into the desert. It splinters like a white-hot branch of lightning, and the heat scalds the hair of his arms and wrings his tongue dry, the sky breaking into burning red behind his clenched eyes. He looks out and sees rubble. His mother’s hand slips off his shoulder.
It blinds him.
Learning to fly is an act of will. For longer than he cares to admit, Hal keeps his feet planted firmly on the ground—on distant, dazzling Oa—and thinks over and over and over again of science that no longer applies. Of physics and gravity and aerodynamics: universal laws that he now struggles to understand the lack of.
These are the first things he thinks of whenever there is an engine rumbling in his ears, blinking lights dissolving below him, a heady weightlessness mooring in his gut. On days when the plane’s windows are so clear that they may as well be invisible, he thinks of air currents and Rayleigh scattering and the conservation of momentum, and has to stop himself from falling ever so closer into that breathless, whistling blue. To stop himself from shooting down into the bloody desert only to pull up at the very last second, his heart rattling alongside the stutter of his man-made wings.
Flying with a ring is different. It demands everything from him, more so than just his eyes on the horizon or his hands on the control rig. It’s power given form. To fly, Hal sucks on the weak bones of his spine and forces his splinters into blinding lights; a great big flare unto the stretching universe that lingers and lingers and lingers, until at last, it no longer can.
He shreds the red skin of his legs whenever he falls. He finds a new intoxication to the ache of his arms. He is a child again and restless with want and it burns as if he had swallowed a star.
But mostly, Hal remembers the wrench of his fear and the glaring crest of his father against the sun. He remembers the dead heat of his inciting tragedy. Now, his lungs heave and bruises kiss up and down his back, but even so, his will blazes above an alien metropolis and he feels if not settled, then accomplished.
By the end of his training, his biggest learning curve had not been in getting off of the ground, but in getting down from the sky. That makes him laugh.
Space is not lonely, but it is vast. There are times when Hal is sequestered away to systems devoid of any and all mass and he is the only sentience for galaxies upon galaxies, for eons upon eons. Constant is the light of a million distant stars around him–glittering like the dark wings of a beetle underneath the sun; watching, always watching him–alongside great sweeps of yet-unmapped constellations. It is cold in the way that all big and endless things are.
Then and there, will he feel small. He will miss Earth with a sudden ferocity; miss the place where he is at once a giant and the world a shoebox, where a part of him is cobbled into the sights, into the smells, into the slow shift of an ever-moving city. There is something both drawn and dreamy to the grit of his planet’s air and space is sterile with the lack of it.
Or maybe Hal has just never adjusted to being insignificant.
Here in the lonesome, all there is the sound of his own breathing. Atop of abandoned moons and ashen comet tails, he dreams of eyes on him like a scar; hands soft on the bridge of his nose and hands that beat him down into the dirt. He dreams of noise, and battle, and warmth of all kinds. Illusion, after illusion, after illusion.
He goes to sleep. One day, he wakes up and his city is gone. The crater is flat and foul and free: like every dead thing that he has ever seen fly underneath the sun’s glare. Like every wick fear his fabled willpower could never rid himself of. Like–
He builds a new city. He builds it in the ruins and pumps it full of noise and people and light. His father is glowing green and sitting on the opposite end of the table from him, and the very first man that he has ever seen die fades from view before he could tell Hal that he was proud of him. Hal begs on his knees and screams for help and when someone finally answers him, they tell him no.
So he takes it instead.
Space is vast and lonely and cold. Hal haunts on its outermost edges, stares and stares and stares, an old want in his chest that plagues him ever farther and farther away. There in the distance is the mangled yawn of a nebula, its edges clustered alongside the proud curve of wailing meteors. Beyond that are the red-hot coals of distant suns and the lazy hound of misshapen, rootless moons.
He lingers there in the lonesome and finds a new brand of comfort in this space that he did not before. This power he has stolen is enough to pinion a star and the force of it snarls in his grip; a wild, trashing thing over which he must grit his teeth over. With its burn crushed into his chest, it feels at once too much and too little: punishment and righteousness in equal measure.
He takes, and he takes, and he takes. Later, he will regret the taking, but he does not regret enough to repent for it. He is doing this for a reason, he justifies. And so each time, he guts his mouth and clenches his fingers so tight that his rings press against his palms. Each time, he is absolved of sin with the lax comfort that later–still later, with the horizon point quickly rushing up to meet him–it will no longer matter what he does or why he did it.
He will be powerful enough to prevent it from ever happening in the first place.
…
…
…
Hal misses Earth. And so it comes to be that one day, Kyle Rayner tracks him down at the very end of the universe and begs him to reignite the sun. One day, Hal recalls a plane below a golden light and the exhilarated weightlessness of flying that he has long since forgotten the feeling of, and looks at the young face of his legacy. He has gray in his hair.
Hal says yes and dies by immolation.