Finally posting the Dinah/Ollie(/Hal) fic that lured me back into active fic posting after a hiatus of more than a decade:
Summary: Unfortunately for Hal, it turns out that most of being a gladiator is sitting around in your prison cell with your two stupidly-in-love best friends and nothing to do but all the personal introspection you’ve been avoiding for most of your life.
I absolutely LOVE the fact that Bruce and Ollie HATE their best friends spouses. Oliver cannot stand Barry while Bruce Bat-Glares at Hal whenever they're in the same room. Leading up to the wedding, Ollie and Bruce who are both their buddies respective best man, are trying to convince their friend to leave.
Ollie throws Hal a bachelor party with exclusively blonde entertainment. Male and female. The bartenders are all blondes. He's hoping that Hal will find literally ANY other blonde to shack up with, as long as he doesnt have to deal with BARRY FUCKING ALLEN.
Bruce tries a different, slightly classier, slightly less legal means if breaking them up. Bribery. He approaches Hal after a League meeting and pulls him aside.
Bruce: fifty thousand right now, in your pocket, if you break up with Barry.
Hal, dumb as fuck bless his soul: Why would I break up with Barry for fifty thousand dollars?
Clark and Dinah are both annoyed at their partners for being so immature. Bruce is ready to break his no kill rule just to get Hal away from his mystery movie marathon buddy and Clark intercepts all of his plans.
Bruce: People die of food poisoning all the time, nobody would think twice.
Clark: If you kill Barry's soulmate with bad chicken, I will sic the entire Daily Planet investigative journalist team on you. No secret Bruce Wayne has ever had will be safe.
Bruce:😠
Ollie tries getting Hal to leave Barry.
Ollie: Are you sure you want to Marry BARRY of all people? He's bossy, he's a shut in, he's-
Dinah, fed the fuck up: He's smart, he's got a good career, he understands that being green lantern takes up a lot of your time, he's cute.
Hal: I know, he's so amazing 😍
Ollie, trying not to barf: 🤢
The day of the wedding they both dial it up to eleven. Bruce is in Barry's space helping him get ready but the whole time he's very supportive of the idea of leaving.
Bruce: I'm just saying, there is NOTHING wrong with not being sure, if you need more time to think, we can leave right now. I'll have Alfred drive us to the airport right now and we'll go eat our way through Europe, no questions asked.
Alfred, who is very much looking forward to this wedding: No I will not.
Jay, about to walk Barry down the aisle:😡
After they get through the wedding and have been together for a while, Bruce still kinda pushes for a break up.
Clark: Barry's birthday is coming up, what are you getting him?
Bruce, not looking up from his newspaper: a divorce attorney.
Alfred, reaching over and smacking him.
Bruce, after a long suffering sigh: and a new microscope for his lab. He's been wanting one.
Then Wally comes along and all attempts stop because Bruce and Ollie are not going to be the ones to break up a family.
Sometimes I get to thinking, how must Ollie feel knowing that his best friend, with whom he has had incredible adventures and whom he loves like a brother; is in love with the guy he can't even stand?
Imagine.
You're Ollie and one day out of nowhere your best friend starts making a bunch of comments about how cute Barry is and how much he wants to hug and spend time with him. At first you ignore him and think he's just obsessed with another blond, until you start to realize how really pushy Hal is on the subject without him even realizing it. Ollie realizes what's going on, but denies it.
He can accept anything but that.
So he talks to Dinah about it, trying to calm her paranoia.
He wants his wife to tell him that she hasn't noticed anything unusual, but his wife was quite calm on the subject and even proposes to help them be together. Of course Oliver refuses at first, not planning to accept Barry as his other brother; but after realizing how fucking in love they were and how obvious it is, he ends up disgusted and desperate to see how neither of them do anything and finally along with Dinah end up getting them to be together. Still Ollie wasn't thrilled and perhaps on more than one occasion tried to find him a date with any blonde, blue-eyed guy who was more fun than Barry, hoping his best friend would reconsider his crush.
Evidently it didn't work out.
So he ends up accepting his brother's relationship against his will.
(Deep down he's happy to see Hal so excited and knows Barry is a good choice, but Ollie is proud enough to never accept that he does like Barry a little. But only a little.)
Another day, another fic on Tumblr that uses Roy Harper's addiction to demonize Ollie in order to pair him up with Jason Todd and erases Dinah Lance and Hal Jordan from Roy's life yet again.
I’m crying 😭 cause what do you mean your best friend is missing and his girl is falling off a roof and instead of being normal you create a GIANT form of him to catch her this is so wholesome
Summary: Hal should be able to crack open these doors like snapping peanuts, go straight to the heart of this rotten world and find the political apparatuses that make it possible. It stinks of corruption. It should be impossible for it to have gone unnoticed.
When the people with the power make the laws, rings Ollie’s voice in his ears, and Hal shouts, “Shut up, this is not the law,” to the empty cell. Outside, the crowd screams again.
Hal is going to get his ring back. He’s going to figure this out, he’s going to get Ollie and Dinah away, and then he’s going to find the heart of the corruption and burn this whole fucking thing down. He swears it.
(Or, it turns out that most of being a gladiator is sitting around in your prison cell with your two stupidly-in-love best friends and nothing to do but all the personal introspection you’ve been avoiding for most of your life.)
Just Dinah/Ollie/Hal dragging me out of my decade-long fannish hibernation. I was feeling self-indulgent and decided to splash in the waters of a new fandom with a little good old fashioned forced-to-fight-as-gladiators h/c, for my own personal enjoyment, never to leave my hard drive. Then Ollie and Dinah ate me alive and Hal had all the feelings and this somehow turned into 25k (+? still working on the ending) words while still managing to be mostly just the three of them sitting around in their cell talking. I’m not sure how this happened either.
Meltzer retcon people are so weird like…… how it is a gotcha that Ollie, fresh from the island and deeply traumatized after his only friend tried to MURDER HIM, is like “yeah I can’t be a dad right now- I’m gonna offer Moonday literally anything she needs to make sure Connor is provided for and I care about him and love him so I want to hold him and carry his picture with me, but I can’t be the father he deserves.”
Like why do you WANT baby Connor to have a dad that hasn’t processed any of that trauma? Why do you WANT baby Connor to be in a position where his dad is unwell and not in a place to be a present father? Why do you WANT that?