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Guy Gardner had three datavaults.
This was not unusual for a Green Lantern. The ring could generate constructs, but constructs required will and attention and they dissolved when you stopped concentrating. Datavaults were persistent storage. You loaded them into the ring's architecture the way you'd load files onto a drive, and they stayed there, accessible, taking up a percentage of the ring's total capacity that Guy had calculated precisely because Guy calculated everything about the ring precisely because the ring was the only thing in his life that worked exactly the way it was supposed to.
Vault One was tactical. Combat recordings, threat assessments, planetary surveys, the operational data of a man who'd been doing this job for long enough that his institutional memory was worth more than most Corps databases. Vault One was professional. Vault One was what the Guardians would see if they audited his ring (which they had, twice, and found nothing objectionable, because Guy was not an idiot).
Vault Two was personal. Music. Photos from the old neighborhood. His father's voice, recorded off an answering machine message in 1994 and transferred through four ring upgrades because the answering machine was in a landfill somewhere and the message was the only recording of Roland Gardner saying "I'm proud of you" that existed, and Roland had been drunk when he said it, and it was the only time he'd said it, and Guy kept it in a datavault rated for surviving stellar events because some things you didn't lose twice.
Vault Three.
Vault Three was curated.
Guy had been alive for forty-six years and a Green Lantern for nineteen of them. In that time he'd traveled to approximately six hundred inhabited worlds and encountered over four thousand sentient species. He was, by any objective measure, one of the most cosmopolitan humans alive. He'd seen things. He'd done things. He'd had experiences that would require explanatory footnotes in multiple xenobiology textbooks.
Vault Three was the record. Not a diary. Not a memoir. A collection. Organized by species, cross-referenced by aesthetic category, tagged with metadata that Guy maintained with a precision he applied to nothing else in his life, including personal hygiene and tax filings.
It was, if he was being honest with himself (and Guy was always honest with himself; he was only dishonest with other people, and only when the dishonesty served a tactical purpose), the single most comprehensive archive of interspecies erotica maintained by any human being in history. Three datavaults. Six hundred worlds. Four thousand species.
He was not ashamed of this. Shame was for people who thought desire was a character flaw. Guy thought desire was a dataset. You collected it. You organized it. You learned from it. The fact that his particular dataset was stored in a weapon of cosmic power that drew its energy from the emotional spectrum was a coincidence of his employment situation, not a moral failing.
The Guardians would not see Vault Three. Guy had encrypted it with a protocol he'd reverse-engineered from a Maltusian cipher system during a particularly boring diplomatic assignment. The Guardians could theoretically crack it. They never would, because cracking it would require acknowledging that they were curious about a human's porn collection, and the Guardians would rather let Oa fall into the sun than admit curiosity about anything below the cosmic scale.
This was all preamble.
The point was: Guy Gardner had, by volume and variety and sheer breadth of comparative experience, the most educated eye for physical beauty of any human male who had ever lived. He had seen Tamaranean courtesans (they were everything the reputation suggested and about forty percent more). He had seen Zamaron queens (weaponized beauty; he respected the engineering but it left him cold because you could feel the intent and intent killed it for him). He had seen things on Odym that he couldn't describe in English because English didn't have words for what light-based organisms did with their bodies when they were happy.
He had seen a lot.
And then Kara Zor-El walked into the Watchtower commissary on a Tuesday in March wearing jeans and a t-shirt and his brain produced a sound like a hard drive failing.
He didn't show it. People thought Guy Gardner had no filter. People were wrong. Guy Gardner had an excellent filter. What he didn't have was a social incentive to use it in most situations, because being loud and crass and saying the thing everyone was thinking was a tool, a role, a position he occupied within the League's social architecture that served specific functions (tension release, deflection, the guy who says the uncomfortable thing so nobody else has to). The performance of having no filter was itself the filter.
Right now the filter was working overtime.
Because here was the thing about Kara Zor-El that three datavaults and six hundred worlds had qualified him to assess with what he was confident was genuine expertise:
She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Not the most beautiful human. Not the most beautiful humanoid. Not the most beautiful thing in her general phenotype category. The most beautiful woman, full stop, across all species he had personally encountered, including several that had literally evolved beauty as a primary survival mechanism.
And she was in jeans. And a t-shirt. And the t-shirt said "Metropolis University" and it was slightly too big and she'd pushed the sleeves up to her elbows and she was eating a sandwich.
This was the part that broke his brain. He'd seen beautiful women try. He'd seen them in gowns and armor and nothing at all. He'd seen beauty deployed, wielded, performed. Beauty in evening wear was a statement. Beauty in combat gear was a threat. Beauty naked was an offer.
Beauty eating a sandwich in a college t-shirt that was slightly too big was just a fact. Undeployed. Sitting there like gravity. Not doing anything. Just being the fundamental condition of the environment.
He sat down across from her with his coffee and his own sandwich (turkey, mustard, the same sandwich he'd been eating in this commissary for six years because Guy had found the platonic ideal of sandwich in year one and he was not a man who fixed things that weren't broken).
"Hey, Blondie."
"Hey, Guy."
Normal. Casual. Two colleagues eating lunch. He bit his sandwich. She bit hers. The commissary hummed with the low-grade noise of a space station running at operational capacity.
He did not look at her.
He looked at her.
He looked at her the way he looked at everything, which was quickly, completely, and with the total-field situational awareness that Kilowog had beaten into him during training (literally beaten, because Kilowog's pedagogical philosophy was "you learn to see everything when not-seeing-everything gets you hit, poozer"). One sweep. One second. Everything registered, processed, filed.
The face. The face was the problem. The face was always the problem. He'd been in rooms with her a hundred times and the face got him every time because it was doing the thing that no amount of comparative data could prepare him for, which was: being exactly what it was, without effort, without maintenance, without any of the thousand small adjustments that every other beautiful person he'd ever known made to optimize their presentation.
She wasn't optimizing. She was eating a sandwich. Her hair was in a ponytail that she'd clearly done in about four seconds. She wasn't wearing makeup (she never wore makeup; he'd noticed this years ago and filed it and never mentioned it because mentioning it would require explaining that he'd noticed and explaining that he'd noticed would require a conversation he was never going to have). Her skin was doing the thing it always did under the Watchtower's artificial light, which was to look like it was generating its own light source from somewhere underneath, a low-grade luminosity that wasn't quite visible but was present in the way that a star's gravity is present even when you can't see the star.
The arms. The pushed-up sleeves revealed forearms that he was not going to think about. He was going to think about his sandwich. His sandwich was turkey. His sandwich was good. His sandwich did not have forearms.
(Three datavaults. Six hundred worlds. He had encountered species where the forearm was a primary erogenous zone, species where the forearm was a display structure, species where the forearm didn't exist because the species had evolved past bilateral symmetry. He had a comprehensive framework for evaluating forearms. Kara's forearms broke the framework. They were just arms. They were just arms that happened to be capable of bending steel and they looked like they couldn't and the gap between the appearance and the reality was—)
He bit his sandwich.
"You're quiet today," she said.
"Tired. Long patrol."
"Vega?"
"Vega. Three systems. Spiders." He made a face that was genuine (he did hate the spider species in Vega, they were rude and their webs were a pain to get out of the ring's emitter array) and also tactical (making a face gave his own face something to do other than the thing it wanted to do, which was look at her, which he was not going to do, which he was doing anyway in his peripheral vision because Kilowog had trained him to see everything and the training did not come with an off switch).
"I hate the spiders," she said.
"Everyone hates the spiders. The spiders hate the spiders."
She laughed. The laugh. Jesus Christ, the laugh. It was unguarded in a way that her face usually wasn't, a half-second where the Supergirl layer dissolved and what was underneath was just a woman in her twenties who thought a joke about spiders was funny, and the half-second was enough to make his chest do something he was going to ignore completely.
Here is what Guy Gardner knew and would never say:
He knew she was hiding. He'd known for years. He'd known since the first time he'd seen her in the suit and his brain (which was, beneath the performance, a pattern-recognition engine that Kilowog had called "the best raw tactical mind I've trained in forty years," a compliment Guy had never repeated because repeating it would undermine the idiot persona and the idiot persona was load-bearing) had flagged the silhouette as wrong.
Not wrong-ugly. Wrong-strategic. The suit didn't fit. Not in the sense that it was the wrong size. In the sense that it was deliberately miscalibrated. The lines were off. The proportions were adjusted. The cape did something with the visual weight distribution that pulled attention to the crest and away from everything else. It was a magic trick. A misdirection. Look at the symbol, not the woman.
He'd figured out why within about a week. He'd been crass, not blind.
She dressed down because if she dressed accurately, nobody would function. Every press conference would be a hostage situation. Every League briefing would lose forty IQ points aggregate the moment she walked in. She'd figured this out (probably within her first year on Earth, because she was smart, scary smart, Kryptonian smart, the kind of smart where she was running calculations in her head that he needed the ring for) and she'd made a decision that was, if Guy was being honest, one of the most strategically sophisticated things he'd ever seen anyone do: she'd deliberately made herself less so that she could be taken seriously.
He respected the hell out of it.
He would never tell her.
He would never tell her because telling her would require admitting what he saw, and admitting what he saw would change everything, and everything was a thing that did not need changing. She was a colleague. She was Clark's cousin. She was, on the short list of people Guy Gardner actually respected (a short list; he could count it on one hand and have fingers left), near the top. He was not going to jeopardize that.
And here was the other thing, the thing underneath the thing, the part that lived in the same operational security vault as his father's voice:
He knew what it was like to be underestimated.
He knew what it was like to walk into a room and have everyone see the surface (loud, crass, the joke Lantern, the one who wasn't Hal) and not see the architecture underneath. He knew what it was like to maintain a performance so consistently that the performance became the accepted reality and the real thing disappeared behind it and you let it disappear because the disappearing was, in its own way, a form of control.
Kara's performance was different from his. Hers was "approachable, safe, the girl version." His was "loud, dumb, the asshole version." But the mechanism was the same: present a simplified surface so that the complex thing underneath can operate without interference.
He saw her.
He was never going to tell her he saw her.
Not because he was afraid (Guy Gardner was not afraid of much, and the things he was afraid of were all cosmic-scale threats that warranted fear, not conversations with colleagues). Because telling her would be a violation. She'd built her cover deliberately. She maintained it with intelligence and discipline. Walking up to her and saying "I know what you're doing and I know what's underneath" would be the equivalent of stripping away someone's armor uninvited, and Guy had been stripped of his armor (the ring, twice, once by the Guardians and once by Parallax, and both times the naked vulnerability of being Just Guy without the construct that made him bearable had been the worst experience of his life).
You didn't do that to someone.
Not even to tell them you thought they were beautiful. Especially not to tell them you thought they were beautiful. Because "you're beautiful" in this context would really mean "I've seen through your disguise" and seeing through someone's disguise without their consent was not a compliment. It was an intrusion.
So.
Operational security.
He ate his sandwich. She ate hers. They talked about Vega, about the spiders, about the new recruits who couldn't hold a construct under fire (a perennial complaint that he and Kara both enjoyed because complaining about the younger generation was one of the few recreational activities they had in common). He made her laugh twice more. Each time the Supergirl layer dissolved for a half-second and each time he saw what was underneath and each time he filed it in the place that was not Vault Three.
It was not Vault Three. That was important. She was not in the collection. She was not data. She was not a file to be organized and tagged and cross-referenced. She was a colleague and a person he respected and the fact that she was also, by his comprehensive and expert assessment, the most physically extraordinary thing he had encountered in nineteen years of literally flying through the universe, was a fact that lived in operational security and stayed there.
Vault Four. The one that didn't exist. The one that wasn't a vault because a vault implied storage and storage implied retrieval and retrieval implied use and he was never going to use this. It was just going to sit there, in the part of his mind that had no ring access, no encryption, no protocol. Just Guy. Knowing a thing. Carrying it. Not putting it down because putting it down would require telling someone and telling someone was not an option.
(Kilowog would laugh. Kilowog would laugh so hard his tusks would shake. Kilowog would say: "The poozer finally found something he can't hit, and it broke him." And Kilowog would be wrong, because Guy was not broken. Guy was functioning perfectly. Guy was maintaining operational security on a piece of intelligence that had no tactical value and no actionable implications and was therefore, by any rational assessment, not worth the storage space it occupied in his head.)
(It occupied a lot of storage space.)
(It occupied more storage space than Vault Three.)
(He was not going to think about what that meant.)
She finished her sandwich. She stood. She said, "See you Thursday, Guy." She walked out.
He watched her go. The jeans. The t-shirt. The ponytail. The walk, which was (and he was going to note this and then stop noting things because this was becoming a problem) the walk of someone who was aware of every body in the room and was calibrating her movement to be unremarkable, to take up the normal amount of space, to move at the normal speed, to be the normal version of a woman walking through a commissary, and the calibration was so good that nobody noticed it and he noticed it because he noticed everything and he couldn't stop noticing everything because Kilowog had trained him to see and the training didn't come with an off switch.
She rounded the corner. Gone.
Guy sat with his coffee.
He thought about Vault Three. Six hundred worlds. Four thousand species. The most comprehensive archive of interspecies erotica maintained by any human being in history.
It was all ranked. He'd ranked it. Because Guy Gardner ranked everything, fought everything, competed with everything, needed to know where everything stood in the hierarchy because hierarchy was the only structure that made sense to a man who'd grown up in a house where you were either on top or you were getting hit.
She'd be number one. If he ranked her (he wasn't going to rank her, ranking her would make it a thing, making it a thing would jeopardize the operational security, the operational security was the priority), she wouldn't just be number one. She'd be number one by a margin that would make the rest of the list look like a statistical error.
He was not going to rank her.
He drank his coffee.
Thursday. Same commissary. Same sandwich. Same jeans, different t-shirt (this one said "National City" and was also slightly too big and he was beginning to think the slightly-too-big thing was part of the strategy, which, if it was, was genius, because slightly-too-big said "I'm not trying" and "I'm not trying" was the most effective camouflage in the known universe because it redirected the entire assessment from "look at her" to "she's just a person").
"Hey, Blondie."
"Hey, Guy."
Operational security.
He ate his sandwich. He made her laugh. He did not look at her forearms.
(He looked at her forearms.)
(He ate his sandwich faster.)
The walk home. The ring hummed. Vault One, two, three, all secure. Vault Four, which didn't exist, also secure, in the way that a thing that doesn't exist is always secure, because you can't breach a vault that isn't there.
He thought about what Kilowog would say. He thought about what Hal would say (Hal would say something smooth and wrong and then act on it and then it would blow up because Hal always acted on things and things always blew up). He thought about what John would say (John would say nothing because John understood operational security better than anyone in the Corps and John would look at Guy and nod once and the nod would mean "yeah, I see it too, and I'm not going to do anything about it either, because some things you just carry").
John's nod. That was the right frame. You carry it. You don't put it down. You don't deploy it. You don't let it affect operations. You just add it to the weight and you keep flying because the ring doesn't care what you're carrying as long as your will holds, and Guy Gardner's will held. That was the one thing about himself he'd never questioned. Everything else was negotiable. The will was not.
He'd carry this.
It was light. (It was not light.) It was nothing. (It was not nothing.) It was a fact about a colleague that had no operational relevance and would never be acted upon and therefore did not need to be addressed.
Tuesday. Thursday. Tuesday. Thursday.
Same commissary. Same sandwich. Same Guy.
The ring held.
Operational security.