Wrath of the Red Lanterns

#5

Veon struggled against his bindings endlessly, spluttering plasma and snarling, his single massive eye bulging and bloodshot with rage. He never calmed down. He couldn't calm down. He was incapable, physically, of feeling anything less than the most intense frenzy – there was no hope of him simmering down or acting rationally, no hope of reasoning with him. He couldn't be told that everything was okay because nothing would ever be okay again, not for him. Not for the purple, frothing alien that Ratchet now carried behind him in a hardlight straightjacket, within a hardlight cage, at the end of a hardlight chain. Not for Veon. Never for Veon.

His cage landed on the lumpy, dust-carpeted surface of Ysmault with a clunk, and Veon spluttered, letting out a crazed scream and slamming his head against the cage. Hard, herbivorous teeth locked and crunched around the bars, trying to rip them away. His body squirmed against the jacket, little rips appearing in it as he tried to burst it with the strength of his body alone.

As Bleez, Guy Garder, Arisia, and Tomar-Re landed lightly on the surface, the colored trails behind them already fading, Ratchet tended to the slobbering alien, placed under his charge by Atrocitus. He had been tasked with curing Veon, making him better. He'd kept him in this cage for so long now, tried sedating him. Tried... tried everything. And....

“I have done you a disservice, my ring-brother,” Ratchet whispered, turning his tiny eyes to the other three lanterns before acting. He waited for them to move into the citadel at the helm of the Blood Ocean, waited until he was out of their sight. “I have done you an injustice – and it is one I shall now remedy, no matter the cost to myself.”

Now, Veon was responsible for himself. For his vengeance and his survival. No longer bound by the Corps. If he could regain his freedom and his mind in enough time to recharge his ring, then Ratchet would have saved his soul. If not....Ratchet exhaled, and adjusted the crimson construct containing the frenzied alien. The back wall of the cage opened, the construct extending into a long, wide chute that led away from Ysmault, led back into space. With a solemn wave of one tentacle, he dissolved Veon's straightjacket, and the creature shot out of the cage like a bullet, following his predetermined pathway along the chute. Within a second he had broken out of the atmosphere and was back in the cold harshness of space, where he belonged. “Be free."

Ratchet didn't like to think about that.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

“You don't belong here, Gardner. You never did,” Bleez growled as she led the ragtag team of green lanterns towards the Citadel of Ysmault. Ratchet seemed to have wandered off with Veon, which was for the best. It wasn't like Bleez was particularly afraid of these three, she'd fought most of them before.

“Ya certainly got better at the whole “talking” thing, huh redwing?” Guy snarked, looking around around him as he walked on behind with his distinctive swagger. “You guys sure fixed the place up, too. I dig the palace.”

“I was a different person when you knew me. I hadn't been blessed by the Blood Ocean, then. I was mindless, crazed. Probably why I let you live for as long as I did.” The havanian woman folded her wings against her back as she walked into the citadel – a dismal place running with rivers of blood, built around the Red Power Battery – her eye out for Atrocitus.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Guy snorted. “And whaddya mean I never belonged here? I was a Red just like the rest of you goons.”

Bleez paused, then turned, a thin brow arched. She took a step back towards the human man, her full height easily equaling his. “It is only Atros's fascination with your... kind... that allowed you to attract a ring. I have tasted your pain and rage, and it never matched the True Rage that should be experienced by a Red Lantern. You never experienced complete loss. Pain that destroys your very being, so intense that it devours the person you ever allowed yourself to be. You're pathetic, a pretender. You always were."