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Published:
2025-08-11
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1/1
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green lantern: rising

Summary:

Gotham can try to eat her alive, she’s not rolling over for it—not tonight, not ever. Steph’s already clawed her way out of one basement; she can make it another few blocks.

Notes:

happy birthday to my goat steph brown!! will probably make this a series bc i want her interacting with the other lanterns

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“Yield.”

Steph coughed, trying to twist her hips and buck Cass off. “Not—” She gritted her teeth as the motion sent pain lancing through her shoulder. “—a chance.”

“Yield,” Cass repeated, tilting her head. Steph’s chest was heaving, sweat dripping into her eyes, but she knew right then that she'd rather get knocked out cold than give in. She could feel Cass’s silent assessment, the way she was weighing the line between pushing her and hurting her.

“Yield,” Cass said, one last time.

Even as her vision edged white, Steph bared her teeth in a grin, straining against Cass’ hold.

“Make me.”

 

-

 

It’s kind of pathetic that the first thing Steph thinks when she gets out of that basement goes something like: Tim wouldn't have been caught in the first place.

That’s the shape of the thought, anyway, once you filter out all the white-hot pain that’s short-circuiting her system. Her broken ankle drags behind her, a sick little jut in the wrong direction that sends bile crawling up her throat every time she has to stop for breath and her eyes traitorously flick down to it. It’s weird, though; you’d think the real problem would be the hole in her shoulder, the hot wet slick of her own blood leaking through her fingers, or the horrifying, alien sensation of her guts trying to slip through them, too. Objectively the worst of it. That’s what should be making Steph nauseous, not the mundanity of a broken bone. A bad prop from a school play, except it’s hers, and it’s real, and every step makes her vision spark with white.

And, okay, it is pretty badly broken.

When she gets out onto the street, it's the smell that hits her first. Acrid smoke and rotting garbage and the coppery tang of her own blood in her nose.

Every fucking step is a negotiation. Her ankle barely takes her weight before it folds, and then she’s lurching forward, catching herself on a dented dumpster that rocks under her grip. The metal is sticky, warm with something she is not thinking about. Stephanie’s head swims, the edges of the world blurring. Tim didn't like showing her his bad photos, but Steph always thought there was something beautiful about the haziness of an unfocused shot. Almost like a memory, maybe, or something poetic like that.

Down the street, two guys in matching leather jackets with Penguin’s umbrella stitched onto the shoulders are kicking someone curled up on the pavement. Steph’s blink lags a beat too long, and when her eyes open, they’re both staring at her instead. Fear rockets down her spine—but they recoil, taking a step back as if she’s the threat, which is about when Steph remembers that she's soaked head-to-toe in blood and hobbling around like Baba Yaga. Steph backs up until she's fully obscured in the shadows of the alley, breaths stuttering out of her rattling chest. Her shoulder throbs in time with her pulse, each beat pushing her closer to the edge of unconsciousness.

To be frank, Steph doesn't know how she's still upright.

That's why I win, even though you beat me, Mask had said. The only thing that counts is whether you have the will to do what needs to be done.

And that's—it's not wrong. Stephanie fucked up bad, and the worst part is that she couldn't even finish things. She escaped, sure, but Mask is still out and about and if anyone dies tonight it will be on her. It will be because she didn't have the will to stop him.

Stephanie shudders, pressing her lips together until they stop wobbling. She doesn't have time to—to cry about it like some fucking amateur. I'll give you something to cry about, her dad's voice snarls in her head. Steph grinds her shot shoulder into the brick she's leaning against until the pain overpowers his nasally tone. A car's headlights sweep across the mouth of the alley, sending Steph careening into the wall with the force of her stagger, agony exploding behind her eyes.

Concussion, she thinks weakly. Jesus fuck. Every nerve in her body is alight with pain, and now she's hyperaware of the jagged hole that power drill tore into her gut and the bullet still lodged in her shoulder and the blood trickling down from her hairline. “Fuck,” Steph keens, her breaths shallow.

Leslie's. She just has to get to Leslie's.

Steph is halfway across a splintered stretch of sidewalk when her boot catches on something. There’s a sick, jolting tug, and then fire explodes up her leg as her already-broken ankle wedges between two jagged edges of concrete jutting from the ground like teeth.

The shock nearly drops her. She gasps, grabbing at a rusted lamppost for balance, but her grip slips on the dried blood coating her fingers, forcing a choked cry from her throat as she tries to twist free. For a heartbeat she’s stuck there, breathing raggedly, the world swaying around her.

Go home, Batman tells her. Demands of her.

She had been—it was on patrol. The details are blurring together, the agony from back then superimposed over the agony from now. The guy had stuck her with a shiv, wasn't it? It wasn't even that big, which was doubly embarrassing because of how much it fucking hurt to have it lodged between her ribs. And she had wanted to keep going, wanted to wrap herself up and insist that she could keep moving, but then Batman's lips had pursed in that way they always did when he looked at her and she had—

Her throat had locked up. Steph had dropped her gaze, swallowing past the sting in her eyes, and let herself be sent home like a fucking child who had stayed out past curfew.

He'd made the decision to send her home and Steph had let him.

Fuck that. Fuck Black Mask and fuck Batman, too, for giving up on her. Steph's got willpower in spades. She's here, isn't she? She's still fucking standing and she is going to make it to Leslie's—because she wants to, and because if she can't do this one thing then maybe they were all right about her.

Steph plants her palms against the rough, cold pavement that bites into her torn skin. It scrapes across her calf as she drags herself out inch by inch, nails splitting against the grit, her breaths coming in short, broken gasps. She can taste copper on her tongue. Her whole body’s trembling, sweat chilling her skin.

With a wrenching twist that sends agony tearing through her ankle, she’s free, collapsing back against the sidewalk with a cry. It's gravel against her cheek, against the bloody mess of her foot, but she's fucking free. Above her, beyond the haze of smoke and light pollution, Steph can just barely make out the stars.

Gotham can try to eat her alive, she’s not rolling over for it—not tonight, not ever. Steph’s already clawed her way out of one basement; she can make it another few blocks.

If her legs give out, they can do it on Leslie’s doorstep. That’s the only compromise she’s willing to make.

Steph forces herself into a rhythm; counting steps in her head, syncing them to her breathing so she doesn’t think about the rest, and on every third block, she ducks into a doorway or behind a burned-out car to tie off her shirt around her waist, cinching the makeshift tourniquet across her stomach a little tighter. It's hardly functional.

(Batman would say something like ‘you need more field training’ to which Steph would reply ‘oh sure let me get tortured by a lunatic a couple more times to practice’ and he'd go ‘hrn’ and drop it.)

When the bullet wound starts throbbing hard enough to blur her vision, she tears off the hem of her undershirt with her teeth, threads it under her tattered suit, and knots it across her chest to keep the arm from swinging. For her ankle, she raids a toppled mailbox, using one of the thin metal strips inside as a crude brace, wrapping it tight with the rest of her shirt until the joint is trapped stiff.

‘One foot in front of the other, sweetheart,’ her mom used to say, on the rare occasion the two of them got out of the city to hike Mount Tammamy. Steph doesn't think she really had this in mind, but the mantra repeats over and over and over in her head. Her whole world narrows to the cracked pavement in front of her boots and the dull glow of a streetlight marking the next stretch.

Leslie's clinic is two streets down from Steph's favorite bodega. The place has been picked clean already, but she spots someone staggering down the street with their head wrapped in bandages, and the last bit of anxiety stiffening her muscles ebbs away. They usually leave Leslie's alone, but tonight—Steph had been worried. Things were going so monumentally terrible that she was sort of expecting this also to fall apart.

Voices carry down the road as she inches closer and closer. The last block feels fucking endless, but once the etched letters of Leslie Thompkin's Clinic finally come into sight, Steph could cry with relief. She might've, if she had the strength for it.

The doors are propped open, a steady stream of people weaving in and out of the side entrance. Batman isn't here and neither is Tim, which Steph takes to mean they're okay. She drags herself up the steps, blood slicking her palm where it smears across the doorframe. The ground lurches under her feet, her body getting heavier with every second she's upright, and suddenly Steph knows, intrinsically, that she isn't making it.

She promised herself she would get herself here and she did. That's what matters, isn't it? She didn't give up. She didn't let him—let him end her. Not on his terms.

“Oh, shit,” someone says. Their voice is muddled in her ear. “Holy fuck. Leslie! One of your—Spoiler is here, you have to help her! She's gonna—”

Hands are on her before she can process it, trying to steady her, guide her into sitting down, but Steph shakes her head weakly. “No,” she rasps, throat raw. I sound like mom, Steph thinks hysterically. “Don’t—don’t waste your time.”

“You’re bleeding out,” the voice insists, urgent now.

“It’s fine,” Steph says, though nothing about it is fine. She blinks slowly, each shutter of her eyes taking longer to lift. “There’s—people out there—people who still have a chance. You should… focus on them. I'm already—”

She cuts herself off with a violent shiver that wracks her whole body. Bloodloss. Probably three pints.

It occurs to her, bizarrely detached from the here-and-now, that this might be it. And weirdly, she’s—well, she's okay with that. She doesn’t care how the others measured her time out there. The mistakes they tallied, the way they looked at her like she was an idiot for showing up every night. Steph doesn't really give a fuck about any of that anymore. She knows the good she did, the people she pulled out of alleys, the nights she made it just a little harder for the bad guys to breathe.

God knows it was thankless fucking work, but Steph's always had a thick skull, and right now the scoreboard in her head isn't reading wins and losses. It reads ‘did I make it better?’ And the answer, more often than not, is yes. 

Steph is—she's satisfied with that. More than satisfied. If this was the last night she put the mask on, she can go out knowing she didn’t waste her shot.

There’s movement around her, frantic footsteps and shouts. Leslie’s voice cuts through it, brisk and commanding, but Steph can’t hold onto the words. They slide off her, her focus collapsing inward. She’s so tired. She just wants to close her eyes.

And then—

A bright, searing flash of green floods her vision, cutting through the fog in her head. It’s so sudden she flinches, the light painting the inside of her eyelids even when she squeezes them shut. The voices around her falter, replaced by a low, resonant hum that seems to vibrate in her bones.

The words are spoken directly into her mind.

Stephanie Brown of Earth.

Her eyelids twitch, then lift, her gaze locking onto the green ring hovering inches away. It's—it's beautiful, inhumanely so. Her spine straightens, shoulders squaring despite the blood loss and the constant thrum of pain, her body making some instinctive, clumsy attempt to bask in the ring’s presence. It’s sheer fucking power and it’s looking at her.

You have the ability to overcome great fear.

“My God,” Leslie murmurs. The hum in Steph’s skull swells until it’s all she can hear.

Welcome to the Green Lantern Corps.

Notes:

twitter mutuals drew incredible art for this au!! here and here!!