Chapter Text
Hal knew the war hadn’t been going well for any of the involved parties. The USA’s leadership might not have seen it, and the common populace were too taken by propaganda and fervor, but Hal had been alive for a hundred and forty years and was as impartial an observer as you could get in 2034’s political climate.
Both the USA and China were driving themselves into the ground in the frantic scramble for resources and military victories, and probably wouldn’t last more than a few decades before one imploded. The only question was which one did so first.
The Justice League had largely pulled out of patrols and now only involved themselves in supervillain attacks, to minimize the opportunities for patriotic citizens to berate or attack them for not fighting in the war.
Bruce may have slightly rigged the draft so that none of their civilian identities would ever be picked, but most of them kept their heads down and tried to stay out of everything. Hal had instead taken longer and longer missions off-planet, not wanting to deal with Earth politics even slightly, but still being drawn back to Coast City and his family.
That was probably what saved his life when the war went nuclear. The first warning he got was an alert on his ring telling him that Earth had been officially reclassified as a Class-Three Tomb World. (Which was a month after the actual nuclear exchange thanks to bureaucracy.)
Hal was in a policy briefing when he saw the alert.
“Where are you going, 2814.1?” the Guardian overseeing the briefing asks.
“Presumably you are aware of my homeworld imploding into nuclear war, yes?” Hal rolls his eyes, and yanks on the door(to no avail) while the other Lanterns gape.
“The briefing is not over.”
“Come on, my entire species is probably dead, can’t I catch a break?” Hal studiously avoids thinking about the fact that that includes his family too.
The Guardian stared at him. Hal stared back unblinkingly. Eventually the door clicked open and Hal rocketed out of the room.
Hal managed to keep it together until he reached Earth. Once he saw the planet itself, he was overwhelmed by everything at once.
The planet was entirely gray, black and brown, swirling fallout rendering the entire atmosphere opaque. A quick scan with his ring revealed that the atmosphere was unbreathably polluted and radiation levels would be fatal in minutes.
Hal’s ring would protect him from the radiation and generate a clean atmosphere, but anyone on the surface was definitely dead.
Which meant his entire family was dead. There had been no fail safes for a nuclear war outside of a few private bunkers for the American government, and absolutely nothing protecting common citizens.
Hal was halfway to a breakdown when he remembered that anyone on the Watchtower or able to zeta there could have survived.
And Barry was definitely fast enough to make it to a zeta tube in time.
The Watchtower was eerily silent when Hal entered. The lights had been manually placed on emergency power and the distress beacon had been activated, so at least one person had made it up.
Hal searched the station- the blankets had been taken from the beds in Oliver and Barry’s rooms, the kitchen had been ransacked, and the power had been shut down in the training rooms. Calling up the Watchtower’s self-diagnostics revealed that the water recycling system had failed eighteen days ago thanks to a micrometeorite puncture made worse by an unskilled attempt to repair it.
Hal’s heart sank, but he went to search the monitor room anyway.
Someone was bundled in blankets and strapped into the main chair, but they didn’t respond to him entering the room.
Scan for life signs, Hal instructed his ring.
No life signs detected, the ring declared.
Who’s in the chair?
One Human corpse detected. Biometrics match signature stored as Green Arrow/Oliver Queen. Time of death: approximately 13 Earth days ago. Cause of death: dehydration.
Hal was angry to say the least. This entire thing was preventable if humanity hadn’t been so petty and short-sighted, and Oliver surviving nuclear war only to die from dehydration of all things just stung.
He quickly shoved the anger down. Getting angry over things he couldn’t control or change wouldn’t do anything, and right now he had to find his family, or at least their corpses.
Hal took Oliver with him and buried him in his estate’s garden.
Wayne Manor was entirely collapsed. A scan of the ruins revealed that the Batcave had been breached by the collapse of the Manor, and everyone inside had died from a mixture of radiation poisoning, suffocation and being crushed by rock. Hal spends four hours digging graves and carving tombstones for the Bats and Catwoman, though he couldn’t find Jason. Hopefully that meant he had met Final Death instead of just getting trapped.
Kyle had quietly suffocated in his apartment, a half-finished painting on the easel in front of him. Red paint had splattered onto the floor, easel and Kyle’s clothes from when he’d dropped the bottle. Hal cleans off the paint as best as he can and buries him in a graveyard that probably had only about five actual corpses in it despite having hundreds of supernaturals' old human identities allegedly buried there. (Now it has seven.)
Wally took a little bit of searching to find since Central City had taken a direct hit and he wasn’t at home, but he eventually found his corpse impaled on the wreckage of the restaurant he’d been in. Hal carries his body back to Coast City and buries him next to Kyle.
Joan had suffocated on her front porch, but Jay was still in torpor in the cavern underneath their house in rural Kansas. Hal buried Joan in her garden, and left a note for Jay telling him what had happened and how to contact him- careful not to wake the ancient dragon by going downstairs.
Iris had been killed when her office building had collapsed on top of her, and Hal spends the evening sifting through the wreckage so he can bury her next to her parents. He turns up and burns the bodies of several of her coworkers that are too damaged and decayed to identify. (His ring is of no help, seeing as how it can only identify people whose biometrics are stored in its database.)
Finally, Hal makes his way to Barry's house, heart heavy.
The house had mostly collapsed, though some of the first floor was still intact. Hal scans the ruins, expecting only corpses.
1 life sign detected nearby. Signature reads as an adult dragon in torpor, his ring announces instead.
Barry’s alive. Hal freezes when he realizes that Barry’s only alive because he’s in torpor and his metabolism is frozen. The basement is magically sealed for as long as the door stays closed, but that also means Hal can’t open the door. I can’t wake him up, or he’ll die.
Hal is alone, and the only other living dragons are only alive because they’re in torpor. His homeworld is destroyed, and half his hoard is inaccessible. He has nothing left to fight for.
But, he isn’t alone, is he? He has the Green Lantern Corps. Kilowog knows what he’s going through- he’s also lost his homeworld. He doesn’t really know the other Lanterns that well, but they’re friendly enough and he can certainly try to make friends- it’s not like he’s made any enemies.
Hal flies back to Oa, throwing himself into mission after mission. He shifts into hybrid form and never turns fully human again, though he does shift into dragon form whenever he has enough space and free time- but most often on missions where brute force wins the day.
Every year, on Barry’s birthday, Hal flies back to Earth and places a handful of trinkets inside a weatherproofing ward he erected in the ruins of their house. When Barry wakes up, he’ll find the giant pile waiting for him.
Gradually, the Lanterns he originally served with die or retire. Kilowog makes it to forty-five years of service but is eventually killed in action. Most of the other Lanterns die earlier- after only about one or two years of service. A few retire, most thanks to crippling injuries.
Hal checks his service time on a stakeout and boggles when he realizes he’s been the longest-serving active member of the Corps for four hundred and seventy-five years. He’s been serving for five hundred and forty-six.
Hal gets to know each and every recruit he inducts- all three thousand, eight hundred and fifty-nine of them. He guides them through the early days of struggling, comforts them on bad missions, learns their likes, dislikes and life stories, and sees them off personally when they die or retire.
And since dragons are one of only a handful of functionally unaging species, even the ones that retire inevitably die of old age. Hal watches over their descendants from afar, but they’ll never truly replace his family.
Hal never bothers to check the radiation levels of Central City. If he did, he’d realize that they became largely harmless a long time ago.