Star Sapphire

Back on Earth, before the ring and Oa and the Guardians and the whole remarkable sweep of what his life had become, Hal Jordan had a friend named Carol Ferris.

She ran Ferris Aircraft — the whole company, the runways, the hangars, the fleet of experimental jets that Hal tested every week. She was brilliant and organized and slightly terrifying in a boardroom, and she had known Hal long enough to see through every bit of bravado he put on for other people.

They were, in the way of people who have been friends a long time, completely honest with each other.

Which made things complicated when the violet gemstone showed up.

The Star Sapphires were not new. Their power was older than most things Hal had encountered — the violet light of love, wielded by a group of warriors who carried their emotion like a weapon, channeled through gemstones that burned with a purple-pink luminescence that was, Hal had to admit, genuinely beautiful.

But the gemstone had a way of getting ahead of its wearer.

The violet light of love is powerful — one of the strongest forces in the universe, the kind of thing that builds civilizations and crosses impossible distances. But it is not always gentle. When it got hold of Carol Ferris, it became something fierce and protective and occasionally focused in directions that were not entirely reasonable.

The first time Hal encountered Carol wearing the Star Sapphire suit — deep violet, gleaming with crystalline light, her constructs arcing through the Coast City sky in shades of purple and rose — he was genuinely caught off guard.

"Carol—"

A bridge of violet energy appeared between two buildings. Carol walked across it with the ease of someone who had always been entirely comfortable at great heights, which, Hal reflected, she had. Running an aircraft company gave you a certain nonchalance about altitude.

"The gemstone," she said, and her voice was Carol's voice but layered with something more resonant, "has identified a threat to what it values. I'm protecting it."

"What's the threat?" Hal asked, hovering at a cautious distance.

Carol held out the gemstone, and in its facets, Hal could see what it had decided was a threat: everything uncertain. Everything that might, possibly, in some indirect way, cause harm to the things Carol cared about. The gemstone was running a prevention operation on a very wide definition of danger.

"Ah," said Hal. "Yeah. That's a problem."

The thing about violet constructs was that they were genuinely formidable. A Star Sapphire's shield was not something you battered down — it was reinforced by genuine feeling, and genuine feeling does not simply stop because you hit it hard enough. Hal's green construct pressed against a violet barrier, and the barrier held, warm and immovable, like trying to argue someone out of loving something.

So he didn't fight it. He joined it.

He built, alongside Carol's violet bridge, a green platform — not to challenge her structure but to extend it, to give it somewhere to go. He built a path that led away from the closed loop the gemstone was drawing and out toward something open. He poured his willpower into a shape that said: here is a way through.

The violet light flickered. The gemstone's grip on Carol loosened, just fractionally, just enough.

Carol blinked.

"The gemstone's been running the show again," she said.

"Little bit," Hal confirmed.

She looked down at the Star Sapphire gem in her palm, violet and pulsing. "It's not malicious. It just... cares very aggressively."

"I know." He paused. "It's not wrong about what it values. It just needs help with the proportionality."

That was the thing about working with Carol: everything in the end came down to balance. Her instincts were good. The gemstone's power was real and formidable. The problem was scale — the difference between caring for something and wrapping it so tightly it couldn't breathe.

Together — green and violet, willpower and love, constructs layering over each other in the afternoon light above Coast City — they rebuilt the buildings the gemstone's enthusiastic protection had slightly re-arranged.

Carol looked across at Hal as they hovered side by side, the last violet bridge dissolving gracefully. "You know, if we just worked together from the start every time—"

"Then it would be boring," Hal said, grinning.

She gave him a look that had absolutely no patience in it.

He laughed. The green ring blazed. The violet gemstone pulsed once, quietly, and then rested.

And over Coast City, the evening light painted the sky in shades of gold and purple, and two old friends flew home.