...Okay, I have to ask: How do you think an interaction between Aya and Parallax!Hal would go? (Probably very sad.)
OP i love you
To live again, Aya mused through the faint buzz of her body twitching its way back to life, was like the first time. A great rush and a gentle voice, familiar and warm and male. English--North American subcontinent. She remembered that much from her first introduction, even if the database she pulled it from was lost to her now.
Her vision did not blink as much as it fizzed and popped its way back. Pockmarks of starlight, bright bursts with nowhere to go while the universe came back to shape. Aya did not cough or sigh or breathe. She could do nothing of the sort. Her limbs, lanky, pale things did not respond immediately to her command.
But...
It had been a long time since she had lain her eyes on the stars.
Aya did not recognise these ones. The sputters of her mind, still rebooting, fixated on three stars in a line and only bleated out the word Orion, a faraway word, an unfamiliar one. Not one from the database, she thought quietly. A word gifted to her alone.
"Aya? Aya, look at me. Aya, please," said a voice, a very persistent voice.
"Just a moment," she whispered. With an otherworldly creak only she suffered to hear, Aya turned her neck to look at the shadow beside her, the owner of that voice dressed in imperial green.
He looked... Aya knew human hair lost its pigmentation once at a certain age. Still, the white hair was jarring, as were the rings of weariness, the guarded way he sat with his cape balled in one fist. Strange. Hal had never worn a cape.
He had never looked more mortal to her.
"Aya," he breathed again. It took a moment for her to realise that the expression on his face was that of naked fear. She had never seen him this afraid either. Something about it unsettled her. "Can you--"
"Where am I?" Her eyes turned to the stars and then a little further. A marble sat in the distance. Beyond that, light. "I don't understand, Hal. Where am I? What happened?"
His expression crumpled. "You-you don't remember?"
How could she forget? Was that not Aya's curse? To remember all, to keep it all within herself and hope not to burst. Isn't that what she did? One finger traced a mindless pattern in the soft dust she lay in while her mouth waited for a coherent response. "I am dead," she said simply. The rot gone. The cancer trimmed neatly away.
"No." The way Hal said it was vehement enough to be desperate. Aya's head tilted. "No. You-you're back. You're okay."
Was she? Odd thing to say when she'd been scattered for so long. "I see. Where...where am I?"
To this, Hal's eyes glazed over and he stared at a point over Aya's head. "Home," he murmured, though it was no home Aya had ever known. "It's safe here."
Could that be true for her? She wasn't sure. Achingly, carefully, she sat up. His hand braced against her back to help her, warm and wide, tentative like he was still afraid. Of what? Her?
"Hal," she said quietly, her gaze affixed again to the white hair streaking away from his eyes, "how long has it been?"
He faltered then and the smile he forced looked painful to her. "Don't worry. Don't-it's okay. It's okay, kid." At her silence, he hurried on. "You have to have a lot of questions, don't you?"
"Plenty." They were alone on this rock and it was so quiet. A quiet that screamed. "Is Razer safe?"
There, his expression froze over again in that fear. "I'm not sure. I haven't...he's been away a lot time."
"I had hoped he would be safe," she said forlornly. "You did not look for him?"
"I--"
Aya didn't wait for an answer. There was another absence she felt sorely, an ache deep in her chest. "Where is Kilowog?"
Hal reared back as if she'd struck him. She hadn't, of course she hadn't but his mouth turned downwards in horror, eyes blown wide and bright. Brown, not warm but murky with terror. "Aya," he gasped, like he was choking on something.
She understood then, though it struck her hard and fast and left her dazed. Accidents happened. The Corps was not a kind profession. But she had hoped...
"Would you please tell me how it happened?" she asked quietly.
But Hal could not even give her that, staring like he wanted to run away and hide. Her unease grew at the widening cracks guilt left upon his face. His mouth was set firm, his hands shaking and oh--
The rings.
Aya could not fear Hal Jordan. She ought, perhaps, but she still reached out with a stead hand and uncooperative fingers to brush against two of the many rings she wore. Neither were his own. Aya would know.
"Aya," he rasped, her name acting as his apology.
She heard herself ask, "What did you do?" She received no answer. Hal buried his head in those scarred, trembling hands and fell silent completely.
as a soralande shipper, i actually do love sorakyle as a juxtaposition and a precursor to soralande because from the start, sorakyle was built off of a lie (kyle telling soranik that he saw her in the star sapphire's crystal as his true love) and was also ended with a lie (a lie of ommission, wherein kyle did not tell soranik that sarko was their son from the future because he feared that she wouldn't want to be with him anymore if she knew). meanwhile, the soralande dynamic has always been defined by their mutual trust and respect in so many small yet significant moments. when stentar and myrrt are killed, iolande and soranik confide in one another, despite that basically being their first real interaction. when iolande is upset at soranik, she doesn't hold back from telling her (when soranik couldn't save iolande's father from dying), and vice versa (when iolande condescends to soranik about her own planet). iolande is the first person soranik tells that sinestro is her biological father, and iolande lies to keep her secret. when soranik shows up in front of the glc wearing a yellow lantern uniform (the enemy uniform), iolande does not hesitate to cheerfully sweep her into a hug and tell her she missed her. when soranik deflects once and for all to the sinestro corps in that infamous issue of hal and pals, kyle tries to wheadle her to come back, but iolande stops him and lets soranik go.
soranik by her own admission is someone who has trouble opening up: she tells kyle that she holds everyone at arm's length to "play it safe." and then she did open up, she did let someone in, and that person betrayed her (or at the very least, did something to her that she perceived as betrayal). wherever soranik is right now, i don't think she’ll be ready for another relationship for a while, but if/when she does, i think it'd be very fitting for her to fall in love with someone who already has a track record of being trustworthy, dependable, and candid with her.
Okay YAY it seems like ygs r interested. Here u go!
Note: I personally like to headcanon Coast City as being somewhere in between San Francisco and Sacramento, even though I know it’s supposed to be near Edwards Air Force Base, which is down in the desert in SoCal (Southern California). Hal just reads to me like a Bay Area bitch, and I think SoCal gets too much hype anyway <3
Now onto my Californian Hal Jordan headcanons:
As a kid, he used to go up to Lake Tahoe in the winter with Carol and her family so he could ski
I like to think that he also traveled to SoCal a lot during the summers, too. Maybe to visit family or with Carol’s family again
he’s extremely desensitized to seeing the ocean. Big whoop. Who gives a shit. (Still thinks it’s beautiful at sunrise and sunset, though)
Also extremely desensitized to earthquakes
Always bemoaning gas prices
Loves to surf (canon)
Can NOT handle cold weather at all. Any time it drops below 50 degrees F, he’s sniffling and whining and bundled up (so mecore)
Randomly met Anh Phuong once (she’s a car accident lawyer who is famous for having a ton of billboards around the Sacramento area) as, like, Carol’s plus-one at a party. His ass did NOT recognize her from the billboards, and he thought she was just an everyday regular woman who was really nice and kinda hot. But after he met her, he couldn’t stop noticing all the billboards with her on them, and he thought he was going crazy
Assumed that everywhere was more or less as racially diverse as Coast City, so it was a real culture shock when he went to the Air Force Academy in Colorado. His ass was like, “Where are all the Asians????”
On that note, I think he loves seeing the Chinese New Years parades and festivities (there’s a Chinatown in the canon map of Coast City iirc)
His brother Jack went to UC Berkeley for either undergrad or law school (UCB has a reputation for being the most competitive and prestigious University of California)
Jim feels like a Sac State kid Idk
Thank god he grew up in a West Coast metropolitan area because if his ass grew up in, like, a rural traditional conservative area, his internalized toxic masculinity would be even WORSE
Has in the past occasionally dropped into a pseudo-valley girl accent when being extremely casual because he hung around a lot of girls who had the accent while surfing, before his aforementioned toxic masculinity kicked in and he trained himself out of it (being in the USAF definitely would’ve gotten him out of the habit, I think). Still can come out when he lets down his guard, but it takes a LOT for this to happen
I also think Carol used to have this kinda accent when she was young, too (although I want to make it a side note that this accent is NOT at all as prevalent as the media might have you believe), but then when she got into business, she forced herself to stop doing uptalk as a way to sound more serious and be taken more seriously, like how Hillary Clinton has over time sounded more “masculine” linguistically-speaking
Hal says “hella” and “like” all the time
Is totally willing to ham up the “surfer bro” accent for laughs, but it’s affected
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