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"John — I met him the other day! I like him," Hal chuckles, and pretends he isn't watching the way his older self's already grim expression tightens. "Where is he?"
"In the car," Hal, the real, true, up to date version of himself says shortly.
"Shouldn't he be helping us?" he asks, because he might not have a real clear picture of exactly what the hell is going on here, but he's pretty damn sure they're in Rushville, and from the look on his own face there's a storm going on if he's ever seen one. Doesn't hardly seem to be the time to be sidelining the newbie, unless —
The other him's expression contorts in anger. "Just forget about John!" he snarls, shoving the drawing at him. "Just find this and we're golden."
Hal listens, because he's only half as stupid as he is stubborn.
The thing is, though, that ten years is a pretty long time.
Now, Hal doesn't like to think of himself as one for paranoia. But he doesn't really know the man on that water tower giving him his orders. The future him doesn't want him to know, or he wouldn't have left him out of date for the whole damn decade.
And some people have described Hal as nosy.
He doesn't neglect the task he's been given —he looks for the alien from the drawing, scanning the roads beneath him as he flies.
He just also checks the cars.
It's as he's circling above the general store parking lot that he sees the smoke.
His first assumption when he sees the burning wreck of what used to be a car is that someone was trying to get out of town. Then he sees the tire tracks.
His next realization is that there's someone still alive in there.
Hal feels like Hal, in thought and memory. But the reality is that he's not much more than a whole lot of light that can think.
"Ah, shit," he says helplessly, the flames licking through his hand as he puts it up against the bottom of the shattered passenger side window. "Shit. I'm so sorry."
The dying man inside — because he is going to die, Hal has no doubts about it, Jesus he's barely got a face left — tries to scream. It comes out a guttural sound, like the groaning of burning wood, or a house on the verge of collapse. The overheated air has probably cooked his lungs and vocal chords by now.
Flame licks at his arms as he tries to shove at the dashboard pinning him in place, then claws mindlessly at the shattered window frame. Blood splashes down the scraped paint job as his burnt skin splits. It sizzles.
"Fuck!" Hal slams his hand down on the roof of the wrecked car. It passes through unsatisfyingly.
The burning man lets out an awful wheezing sound. He leans his head as far out the window as he can get it, straining for cooler air. His hair is gone, his eyebrows, eyelashes — corneas might be burnt away by now, with the way his eyes are almost swollen shut, though Hal has no doubt that he knows Hal is there.
"I'm sorry," he rasps again. "I can't help you."
He turns away, swiping a hand across his face. It's a chicken shit move, but fuck it — he ain't doing either of them any favors watching him die like this.
His eyes flick here and there around the empty road. There's no sign of the driver anywhere.
There's a car coming down the road.
"Hal."
For a second, Hal thinks he's imagined it, making sense of the nonsense gasps coming out of the suffering man. But he turns to look.
The eyes he'd thought might have been burnt shut are cracked open, slivers of familiar, piercing green locked onto him. "Hal," he wheezes again, and reaches out for him with a trembling arm.
If Hal had a real stomach, he might have thrown it up then and there.
"John?"
The dark van pulls up right next to the burning car. He barely even glances at it, right up until a bullet whizzes through his head.
The woman from the drawing — John's drawing, Jesus Christ — steps out of the van, gun still held calmly at her heart. She puts another bullet through Hal's head, then another through his chest for good measure. "You're Jordan's backup," she surmises. "You're out of date."
Her gaze drops to John, weakly writhing against the dashboard. Her face shows a flash of… something. Pity. Maybe even grief.
Not a bit of the horror or shock at the sight that Hal would expect to see from anyone with a fucking soul.
"Whatever the fuck he did to you, he didn't deserve this," Hal snarls at her.
She tilts her head at him. "I don't disagree," she says simply. "Wish it mattered."
At a gesture, two men get out of the back of the van, both glaring at Hal suspiciously from under the brims of their cowboy hats. One of them wrenches the dented car door open with the aid of a crowbar, letting out a fresh rush of boiling air that billows the woman's hair back.
Still, she doesn't so much as flinch as she grabs John by the back of his collar, the flames eating through the fabric just inches from her fingers as she and the other man wrench his body out of the car.
Something in one of his trapped legs gives way — Hal can hear the sickening snap of bone even before John arches in their hold with a gurgling sound of pure, inhuman agony.
Hal curses lowly to himself, phantom sickness pushing at the back of his throat again as he watches them dump John on the ground.
What he should do is take off right now and return to the other version of himself, the one who can actually do jackshit to save their apprentice.
He also knows his future self can't do a hell of a lot to save the kid at this point anyway.
How the fuck did they manage to screw up this bad?
The woman — looks like a woman, anyway, though Hal knows she could be just about anything — kneels down next to John. She doesn't say anything, just rests a hand briefly on his raw chest as if in reassurance. John lets out a whimper — a noise horribly incongruous with the stoic man that Hal met on the road what might as well have been that very morning, from his point of view.
The woman rises back to her feet. Her dark eyes fix on Hal.
She points the gun at John's head without looking at him.
Hal puts his hands up warily. "You just said you didn't think he deserved this," he says. "So that makes me think that you're not the one who did this to him. Now I'm lacking some context to the nuances of y'all's relationship, but here I'm thinking you don't really seem like you want him dead."
He's already dead, the pragmatic part of Hal whispers, thinking about the fates of men who survived long enough to be pulled out of their cockpits with injuries like this. A bullet in the brain might be the kindest thing anyone could do for him at this point, even if it means dying there on the side of a Nebraska highway like fucking roadkill.
But, God damn him, Hal still can't bring himself not to try.
"I'd rather he weren't," she says. "But it seems like you've done ninety percent of the job without me."
Hal goes very still.
He takes in the car, the skid marks leading up to it. The driver didn't even try to stop before they wrecked. The front of the car is just as crumpled in in the driver's seat as the passenger's — the driver should have been pinned under the steering column just like John was.
Unless they jumped out early, somehow uninjured even at the speed the car must have been traveling, and left their passenger to burn.
"I did this to you?" he asks hoarsely, looking down at John.
"Fuck you," John sputters out, blood flecking his teeth as his swollen lips crack. His chest heaves jaggedly up and down. "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck —"
"Nice to know you had a conscience at some point," the woman says. "Doesn't do him a lotta good, but still. Nice."
Hal stares at her. His raised hands have curled into fists so tight they'd ache, if he had any nerves to feel it. "Pretty fucking bold, coming from someone with their finger on the trigger," he says, feeling something like hatred curling up through his chest like smoke.
She gives it a tiny, unperturbed flick. "I won't die for him," she says, and it sounds almost mournful. "Here's what's going to happen, Jordan — can I call you that? I'm going to take John here with me, and I'm going to fix what you've done. And you are going to stay right here with my friends for the next ten minutes, and then you're going to go right back to that ring you came out of." She taps the trigger again. "You do anything other than exactly what I just said, and I put a bullet in his head. And you and the man holding the other end of your leash are just going to have to live with your choices."
If he were the real him, maybe he'd have another option. Or maybe that version wouldn't care — maybe he'd shoot him himself.
Hal would be less disgusted by that than what he's actually done.
"Go on, then," he says roughly. "He doesn't exactly have time for you to make me pinky promise."
She huffs softly. Lowers the gun.
John tries again to scream when she and one of her men pick him up, her at the legs, him under John's shoulders. He almost drops him lifting him into the back of the van as the skin on John's arms sloughs off under his palms.
Hal wishes more than anything for the kid to just lose consciousness.
But the accusing green of his watering gaze fixes on Hal through the agony, right up until he's out of sight.
"For what it's worth, I'm sorry," the woman calls to him from the driver's seat. She has to raise her voice to be heard over the roar of the flames, the car now completely consumed.
"For what exactly?" he shouts back.
The heat rising off the car in between them distorts her face like a mirage. "That you made the same choice I would have."
He watches her tail lights fade away along the dusty highway until the only sound left is the crackling of the flames.
Even without a body, he still feels cold.