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“Are you sure you’re good with this, man?” Simon asks. For about the fifth time in the twenty minutes, Simon knows, but he can’t help himself. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s properly interacted with the famous Torchbearer, former White Lantern, and full-time Corps legend Kyle Rayner—who is now completely covered in sidewalk chalk, dusted in his hair and smeared across his cheeks and coating his white T-shirt.
Lucky that Kyle is taking all this in stride, as if he’s been dealing with excitable ten-year-olds all his life. “Yeah, totally! I like hanging out with kids—especially a fellow artist, right, Farid?” He grins and holds out his fist for Simon’s nephew to bump. Farid meets it with a huge grin, a plume of white chalk floating into the air where their knuckles smack together.
Simon huffs, amused, as Farid returns his attention to the chalk collage they’ve created on his sister Sira’s driveway. Kyle has somehow made a masterpiece with only the primary colors in the chalk bucket: a bright red sea serpent, erupting from a swirling blue ocean, with yellow pirate ships weaving between the waves. Once Kyle started drawing, Simon had just settled cross-legged on the lawn to watch him with fluttering awe. He was struck with sudden understanding of how Kyle seemed to breathe life into his constructs with ease, rather than just build and shape them like most other Lanterns.
What’s more, Kyle easily worked around his kid nephew’s wild scribbles, encouraging Farid to add underwater creatures to the chalk ocean and stick figure captains to each pirate ship.
“You would make a good art teacher,” Simon had remarked at one point.
Kyle had grinned at him over his shoulder: “Funny, Guy tells me the same thing. But art teacher is probably the only profession that pays worse than being a regular artist.”
“Besides being a superhero, you mean?”
“... Touché.”
The thought doesn’t leave Simon alone, though. Kyle was a good teacher, which is why Simon had been so keen to spar with him again after their last ‘training day.’ And here Kyle is, having flown over from Oa just because Simon asked. After an emergency call from Sira and Nazir had cut their meeting short and grounded Simon with babysitting duty, Kyle could have just as easily taken off to anywhere else in the universe. But he had stayed instead, enduring the sticky dregs of Michigan summer just to help Simon wrangle his sister’s excitable kid.
Even if he does still think of Kyle as 'Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky,' Simon’s not used to that easy selflessness from anyone besides his family and Jessica. He’s not sure how to sit with it, shifting again on the grass and opening his mouth for the sixth time to say: “Seriously, you don’t have to waste your time if—”
“Baz, chill! ” Kyle laughs and flops backward onto the lawn. He tilts his head so that he can meet Simon's eyes, chalky curls falling onto the grass. “If you’re cool, I’m cool. And Farid is cooler than us both. And hey, don’t think of it as time wasted! We’re supposed to be training, so let’s train.”
Simon raises his eyebrows. “Here? I think my sister’s neighbors are going to freak out if we start summoning giant green pies in her front yard–” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Farid’s head perk up with interest and makes a mental note to entertain the kid with a fake food fight when they’re safely indoors.
“No, no,” Kyle pats the driveway next to him, prompting Simon to sit. “Remember what I said about using your imagination? C’mon, picture the scene.” He draws a floating red stick figure in the air and writes beneath it with enthusiasm: GREEN LANTERN!! “You’re out on the waves, fighting pirates...”
“Seems like that’s outside our nonexistent paygrade,” Simon says drily.
“Says the guy who’s literally time travelled, jeez. Okay, we’re fighting space pirates! And what kind of construct are you making to get them to stop firing their alien cannonballs at you?” Kyle punctuates his question by scribbling a cannon on one of the ships.
“Okay,” Simon picks up a stray shard of red chalk. He starts making a small grid next to his doodle self. “I guess I’d make a giant net to catch them...”
Kyle fixes him with a Come on, you can do better than that kind of Look, grinding his chalk to make the cannonballs bigger and more menacing.
“...no, a giant tennis racket,” Simon amends. He circles his chalk around the grid and adds a handle. “So I can deflect them back towards the ship, which will take care of the cannons for me.”
This time the look that Kyle gives him is beaming, and Simon feels that flutter of awe again, stronger and warmer than before.
“I want to help!” Farid exclaims, running over to add his own floating stick figure next to Simon’s.
“Yeah? What kind of ring do you have, bud?” Simon asks.
“Periwinkle!” Farid says.
“Oh no! The sea serpent is attacking!” Kyle booms, as if voicing over a movie trailer. The yellow and red chalk in his hands begin spinning bright flames from the serpent’s fanged maw. “What will the Periwinkle Lantern—and his sidekick, Green Lantern—do now?”
“Sidekick?” Simon says, affronted, but he can’t fight his smile when Farid laughs with delight.
They spend the rest of the day there, sprawled out on the driveway through the August afternoon. Kyle teaches Farid how to mix chalks with water to make a periwinkle paste and coaches Simon through at least fifty different ways to fight (space) pirates, each more ridiculous than the last. He lets Simon clumsily teach him how to make a simple version of chicken kabsa in Sira’s instant pot.
After Farid has been safely tucked into bed and Kyle finally steps back out onto the chalk-collage driveway to make his flight home, Simon stops him before he can lift off the ground.
“Hey, Rayner, I just wanted to say–”
“You better not be about to apologize, because I was gonna thank you,” Kyle cuts him off. “I had fun! The Guardians don't really take my vacation time seriously, you know.”
Simon rolls his eyes. “It was hardly a vacation. You were helping me out, instead of... I don't know, regulating the emotional spectrum? Or whatever it is ‘the Torchbearer’ does these days.”
“What are heroes for?” Kyle ribs. “Really, Baz, it wasn’t a chore. You're, like, the future of the Corps—you and Jess, you're bearing all the torches now. My job is just admiring the light show.”
Patently untrue, Simon wants to say. But a few weeks ago he might have taken it as a dismissal, proof that other heroes like Kyle still saw him as a fake in a costume to be patted on the head, rather than the real deal. Now, Simon can hear the undercurrent of emotion in Kyle’s voice. The genuine, bright pride.
Before Simon figures out how to respond, Kyle takes off, pausing midair to call back: “You better keep brainstorming, my friend, because next time I’m making you fight an actual sea monster, and it’s going to be a lot meaner than that little scribble!”
Next time, as if he wants to see Simon again soon. As if he’s looking forward to it.
It’s only when Kyle’s completely out of sight that Simon realizes that strange warmth in his stomach has only grown stronger. “Until next time,” he says to the open sky.