#but best believe he's the one who walks her home after Iolande texts him to come check on his partner

[haveyouthoughtaboutcomicstoday]

Sometimes grief hits the hardest when things are going well.

Arisia pauses mid sentence while playfully arguing with Iolande about which of them was at fault for messing up their last mission—causing it to extend an extra 4 days and making them miss John’s birthday party.

The other lantern lays a gentle hand on her wrist when the silence extends too long, head tilted to the side in concern, “is something wrong?”

Arisia blinks awkwardly at her. It’s hard to explain why her chest has gone tight and her eyes feel hot. Why she’s suddenly forgotten how to measure her breaths. She forces a smile but knows based off Iolande’s expression that it doesn’t come across as comforting as she had hoped.

Pulling her hand away, she makes an excuse of needing a refill, lifting her mostly empty glass from the table as evidence. Nearly running directly into another lantern who was sitting nearby, she cringed uncomfortably before making her way through the thrum of people populating Warriors. It’s the dinner rush and, as is always the case when everyone isn’t busy being stretched across the galaxy, it’s a packed house.

The heat of tightly pressed bodies, the overwhelming sound of dozens of larger-than-life personalities holding court over a relatively small space, a poker game in the corner that erupts into a wall of sound every once in a while. It was too much.

She feels her skin prickle as Vath’s arm brushes hers while walking in the opposite direction on his way back to Isamot. He might have stopped to say something but all she can hear is her blood rushing in her ears, the erratic thump of her heart trapped in the too small space of her chest. Finally making it to the bar, she follows it, ducking and diving around chairs and bodies until she makes it to the door leading out back. Throwing it open, she takes a deep breath of the slightly cool air of Oa that greets her. She steps through and lets the door fall close with a heavy thud.

She waits a beat in the new found silence before crumpling where she stands on the small steps. Her forehead presses to the knobby bones of her knees, shoulders hunched forward to enclose herself against the world. Arms wrap tightly around her legs.

Everyone was alive.

A single door stands between her and their laughter.

It’s been years since she’d gotten her ring back, since she was given a chance to hug Kilowog again, and Salaak fell back into bossing everyone around in the neurotic, overbearing, mothering way of his. It wasn’t even the anniversary of anything, so why did she feel a yawning pit open itself inside of her? She hates how helpless and small she feels in that moment. Especially over something so insignificant in the grand scheme of it all.

There was nothing left to grieve. Breathe. Get up. Go back inside. She knows she needs to apologize to Iolande and Soranik (who’d also been sitting at the table with them, now that Arisia was thinking about it), and enjoy the time off like a normal, well adjusted adult. She counts down from three to help spur herself into action, yet finds herself immobilized.

Her eyes drift to the soft green hum of her ring and there is a flash of anger, hot and vitriolic before it dissipates just as quickly, leaving her feeling exhausted. What use is willpower if you can’t force your brain and body to cooperate with you?

The door opens behind her. There is a yell about beer, a crash of laughter. She thinks she might be able to pick out Kyle’s voice. His meeting with the guardians ended on time for once then. That’s good.

The door shuts.

“Hey, Kid.”

Her eyes squeeze shut to force tears away. “I just need a minute, Guy. Did you need anything?” Her voice sounds mostly steady, she thinks. She might pass as stable so long as he doesn’t look at her face, which was surely blotchy and flushed, or her hands, which were trembling. She imagines, briefly, forming a large, green sign overhead announcing “nothing to see here.” Will that get him to go back inside? Will anything? Did she want him to?

“Nope,” Guy said as he lumbered forward. She can hear his left knee creak and pop as he settles himself down next to her. Normally she’d take the time to bully him for getting so old. She lets the silence sit instead.

There were a few inches between them, which Arisia knew he did consciously because Guy did not have much of an understanding of personal space otherwise. Even still, she could feel the heat radiating off of his body, but it didn’t prickle at her overstimulated senses the way everyone else’s did just a few minutes before.

Slowly, she unfurls herself, allows her elbows to rest on her knees, lifts her head to settle her chin more comfortably on one hand. She brings her gaze to the left where Guy has situated himself, and finds him already looking back at her. His eyes are soft and sad, his mouth turned ever so slightly downward.

She knows that he is the only person capable of understanding exactly how she feels in this moment. He had held Kilowog’s skull in his hands, had built a shrine to everyone in a different Warriors bar once upon a time. She wonders, suddenly, if it’s ever the image of her body, ensconced in a casket, that haunts him. She hasn’t been dead in actuality but he didn’t know that at the time.

She knows about her funeral. Had gotten filled in by Zinda when she finally brought herself back to Earth for a visit. Had seen a picture of the sign, written in Guy’s blocky writing, “Closed Due to Death in Family.”

She typically tries not to think about it at all. The feeling of large hands around her throat. The panic. How she insitinctively reached out for a ring that was not there. Struggling against the hands of a man who didn’t even know who she was, on a planet she wasn’t even from. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong life.

“I’m sorry,” she finally says.

“Me too.”

Arisia remembers a different night, in a different bar. Everyone else had gone to bed and Guy was ceremoniously presenting her a single chocolate cupcake with a candle shoved into the top. He was trying to make a joke of it, the way he does when he feels emotional and unsure of himself.

He was fighting with an uncooperative lighter. The flame flicking in and out of existence faster than he could get it to the wick. It had taken both of them, laughing and clumsy, to get the candle to light at all. The flame itself was so small and pitiful she had to blow it out quickly for fear it would extinguish itself first.

She remembers in that moment thinking of her friends and her home and the freedom of not being tied to one place like she had been for long at that point. Aching tremendously from the loss of it all. They both pretended she didn’t cry into the cupcake while eating it in little pieces. Her rolling stomach wouldn’t allow for more than that even if the cupcake had been good. Guy was a decent baker when he bothered to be.

In the now, she closes the space between them. Draws Guy into a hug and feels him return it instantly. She thinks she ought to thank him for taking her in the way he did, or for being here with her now.

She knows she doesn’t have to.

She allows herself the moment to grieve the things she’d lost, even if they had been found again.

“Hey do you remember that time you were turned into a girl?”

“Oh shut the fuck up.”