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"Well? What are you waiting for, Jordan? Off with it."
Hal felt his stomach churn, and the circle of eyes and teeth just at the edge of his perception wavered in excited glee. Hundreds of Crawlers, shiny yellow uniforms wrapped around nightmares, waited for his next move.
"Jordan" Thaal's familiar tone of warning made his face twitch, and he hated how responsive he still was to it, how after so many years his Ring didn't even have to tell him that the other was running out of patience.
His fingers tightened around his Ring. Right. Off with it. He had surrendered, that was the deal, that was what it had taken to just...just make Thaal stop.
The ships were ready at last, engines thrumming in the distance, a sound low enough to be little more than pressure against his ears. Hal looked up for a moment, at the intricate bellies of these behemoths, vessels so large they stretched to touch the horizon, squashing the clouds and choking the sky below them.
They looked invincible, and he knew better, but still his heart couldn’t help a traitorous flick of defiance, a spark of way-too-late hope.
Maybe John had been right, maybe together, maybe with enough power they could have pulled them through. His Ring gleamed in response, ready to fight, charged with possibilities, but he stilled himself: there was a reason he hadn't believed there was another way, hadn't listened to Stewart, hadn't taken that chance.
And the reason was just, Sinestro was here. Sinestro was here, and he knew what Sinestro really wanted, and what they were willing to do to get it.
"They'll be safe to leave, Jordan. I will keep my word, as long as you keep yours, naturally."
The smallest mercies still surprised him, sometimes.
Every single creature around him, every last one of them, knew exactly how scared he was right now. But Thaal still allowed him this small dignity, to pretend it was doubt or mistrust to make him hesitate.
Not that it made anything easier.
One Green Lantern. One Ring. At more than 40% of charge they were still a formidable weapon. They could tear through armies.
But if he did, the ships above him and all the people in them would never be free. Sinestro would get their teeth into them, and they would never be the same.
He knew something about that, after all.
One moment he was safe, wrapped in power. The next, his hand was bare, his chest couldn't expand and his Ring floated in front of him like through a glass.
"Now, now, was that so hard?"
His ears were ringing. He was barely aware of the horizon tilting, of the awful gravity of the planet dragging him down, bending his knees, wrapping around his body and squeezing.
Still, the only scream was in his mind. And it wasn’t his.
Go.
Thaal approached, golden tendrils holding him up, reaching for…
GO, DAMN IT, GO!
The Ring pulsed and shot up, too fast to catch. The tendrils reached out, chased it, but it twisted and flew faster and higher than they could follow. Hal saw its light blink a last time, then his eyes filled with tears, his body aching for a breath that his lungs just weren't strong enough to take.
Thaal didn't pay him any mind, frowning at the half of this Green Lantern who had still managed to escape.
The Crawlers waved again, nearly unable to contain themselves as he kept choking to death at their Master's feet. As his sight kept turning darker he thought he saw hands, with their long, too long fingers and bared bone and mouths and eyes in all the wrong numbers and all the wrong places.
It was impossible to tell what was real and what was illusion, planted paranoia, not with his mind unprotected from the yellow light.
It didn't particularly matter, anyway. Not if he just died first.
But of course that wasn't what Thaal wanted.
There was a cool, soft feeling of hands on his face, and finally he stopped being crushed under his own weight, stopped swimming in pain and dark, bathed in gold light and held gently, too gently for anything to make sense anymore. Maybe this too was some trick of the energy seeping through his brain, sinking through only to pull up ugly things, like a needle plucking a snail out from its shell.
"Well done, my dear boy"
Hal could just wheeze and twitch, and not, unfortunately, scream.
The hand caressed him gently, wiping a tear away.
"Always so brave. Always so selfless...except when it came to selling me off to the Guardians, I suppose."
The praise turned to mockery, but the hands kept running gently in his hair.
"Thaal, please."
Of all the things that could have come out of his mouth, God. They hadn't even started, and he was already begging. Thaal didn't even smirk at it.
"No matter, Earthboy. You've made your choice and now, I am afraid, it is the time for you to regret it"
They moved, but he was actually the one floating up, held in a weightless bubble, gripped in yellow constructs.
"Thaal"
Hal could have blamed the way his voice broke to the damage the gravity had done to his throat. But Thaal knew better. Their too black eyes, too black now, turned back on him, something blank and guarded in their face.
"I do. I do, Thaal."
They had known before that he was scared. They knew now that he wasn't. They knew it wasn't fear for all those teeth ready to tear him apart to make him say that, to make his voice crack like he was already being eaten alive.
They stared in silence as their golden tendrils waved gently, holding him just above the closing circle of shadows, just above the horrors to come. Hal could have struggled, if his bones hadn't felt like powder. If that empty face hadn't promised certain suffering.
"Not yet, you don’t."
The grip of the construct faltered as they started dissolving.
"Not yet."
Hundreds of Yellow Rings fed on and amplified his terror as he felt himself fall.