Greg Vs Raid 9-5

Tension finally, finally, melted to nothing like ice on Lung’s asscrack, the whole room exhaling slowly in ways that probably weren’t visible but definitely felt real. 

For fifteen solid minutes, conversation splintered all over the over-sized living room into manageable fragments instead of the full-spotlight treatment he’d been getting since walking through the door.

Least I can breathe. Sure, he liked attention, but on his terms.

Thankfully, he wasn’t the main exhibit anymore; just a kid at a dinner party. Weird dinner party packed with at least two people who could benchpress a city bus, but still.

Wild how normal that felt now.

Daughter and Papa Pelham were deep in some debate about the ongoing villain truce, a truce that Greg was glad for because he honestly needed some time off after Leviathan. “It was just… deeply weird,” she said, small smile playing across her features. “But also… kinda sweet? In a post-apocalyptic, ‘the Nazis are helping with urban renewal’ kind of way.”

“They’re still Nazis, honey.” Mark’s voice drifted from the armchair, easy-going but firm in that dad way that meant the lesson was important. “Don’t mistake a ceasefire for a personality transplant. Second the city’s close to normal, they’ll be right back to their old jackbooted selves.”

“Let them.” Carol’s voice cut through the chatter, the over-stern woman yet to take a seat the entire time since Greg had been here. Just perched up by the fireplace like some kind of legal eagle. “The manpower’s useful. When that stops, we’ll deal with them..”

Man, she’s inteeeeense. He clicked his tongue, taking a slow sip of soda as he glanced over at her husband picking at a charcuterie board, suddenly sure who wore the pants in the Dallon household. You poor, poor man.

Even Amy, who’d been operating in full ninja stealth mode all evening, murmured something about hospitals being overwhelmed when his mom tried to make some polite convo. Sure, it was only a single sentence, but it was still more words than she’d managed in the last hour combined.

Meanwhile, he and Eric had fallen into easy back-and-forth about one of the hero MMOs that they played, conversation feeling blessedly normal for the first time all night. Just two nerds arguing about class builds and drop rates, no secret identities or world-ending disasters required.

“Dude, for sure, honestly, I got a lot of ideas on how to use my shields from the Sentinel Class,” Eric’s voice buzzed with that new confidence that was still weird to hear from him. “It’s just like so much better than a flat field, even a regular curved field ain’t close. Hell, I can even keep a shield on me all the time without thinking about it that could tank as much as my old ones.”

Blue translucence flared barely half an inch over Eric’s skin, subtle enough that anyone not paying attention would miss it completely. But Greg caught it, especially as Eric turned his head from side to side to show it off.

Sick.

“Think you could tank a high-power sniper to the face?” The words slipped out before conscious thought could slam the brakes on them, and immediately his brain started getting a comprehensive beating for being a complete moron. The fuck are you doing, man?

He didn’t even know why he’d said that. Maybe I’m not over getting my brain blasted out of my skull. Big maybe, but who knows how psychology worked. Ehhhh… I’m probably fine.

“Oh yeaaahhh,” Eric didn’t seem to notice Greg was giving his mental voice a nuclear-grade swirlie, way too caught up in the technical aspects to register social awkwardness. “I could’ve done that before even. It’s not about stopping the force, it’s more about redirecting it across the entire surface area.”

Kinda want to test that was his immediate, unspoken thought, carefully locked down behind a neutral expression before he could say anything else. Then again, maybe lay off the whole ‘getting shot at by snipers’ thing for a while. Mom’s already looking at me funny.

Hell, that wasn’t even a joke. Danger Sense or no, he could almost feel her gaze tracking him from across the room, low-level maternal radar probably monitoring his vital signs and checking for signs of additional psychological damage.

Speaking of moms and psych damage, he’d told his mom not to worry about tonight, but he hadn’t expected… how regular this would be. 

A room full of superheroes and their families just talking about patrols and video games and the philosophical implications of Nazi volunteer work. The pure domesticity of it all felt more surreal than the giant robot fight, which was… I’m using that word wrong, aren’t I?

Either way, it was almost nice enough to make him forget the phantom weight still pressing against his palm, the way his fingers sometimes closed themselves around a hilt that wasn’t anywhere to be found. 

Too many nights in a row, the Veder rooftop had an occupant of one staring out at the bay where Leviathan had landed, Greg busy mourning a friend. Gonna miss you, buddy.

“So,” Eric said, pulling him out of his sad-swordlessness spiral with a big bright smile on his blue-headed face, “how long have you had your powers, anyway?”

The question landed with the subtlety of a fart in church as the entire living room seemed to dial down a notch. Now, the ambience didn’t stop completely, but Greg’s ears were too good to miss the sudden shift in it. Manpower was still chuckling at something Vicky had said, Brandish was locked in some intense conversation with Mom that looked like it involved moral philosophy, or as close to that a lawyer could understand. But no one who wasn’t a complete liar could deny that the energy in the room had gone left as nearly a dozen sets of ears suddenly tuned into their frequency.

Great. All eyes on the lab rat.

His fork came down as he speared a final, defiant piece of cheesecake, buying time as he tried to talk his way around this. “Uh… about four… no, wait.” He clicked his tongue, trying hard to seem like he didn’t remember to the day exactly.  “Five months? Yeah, five and a half, something like that.”

Mom’s head whipped around like she’d been slapped, eyes wide with fresh shock that made his stomach clench. “Five months?”

He swallowed the cheesecake, the rich pastry suddenly tasting like regret. “Did I not mention that?”

“No, Gregory, you did not ‘mention that’!” His mom wasn’t angry, even with the slight raise in her voice. Frustrated, sure, which was fair, but he knew angry and this wasn’t even it. “I learned you were a cape on my front lawn two weeks ago before you jumped off to swordfight an Endbringer! Your origin story didn’t exactly come up in the middle of the apocalypse! When? How?”

A low slow hiss escaped Eric’s teeth, both Vicky and Crystal flinching in sympathy along with him. 

Greg blinked between all three of them, confusion written clear on his face for a full second before…Oh, right. The T-word. He nodded slow. The big one. 

Greg really didn’t know that many capes personally — at least none he hadn’t sprinkled Veder brand fairy dust on to join his personal band of Lost Boys — but thousands of hours of doomscrolling PHO had taught him that asking about trigger events was like asking a veteran about their worst day in ‘Nam. 

Just wasn’t done.

Unfortunately, his mom, bless her civilian heart, was completely oblivious. 

But she wasn’t stupid, not the way she mmediately clocked the sudden heavy awkwardness descending on the room like fog rolling in off the bay. Not the way she paled a little as she glanced around at the uncomfortable expressions painting every parahuman face in sight.

Well, all of them but one.

“Susan…” Sarah detached from her conversation, maternal energy radiating almost as strongly as her actual purple light blasts as she put a comforting hand on his mom’s shoulder. “It’s… not really the best idea to ask someone how they triggered. Simply put… it’s something of a… a sensitive topic. For many of us, it was quite literally the worst day of our lives.”

“Oh.” Greg fought a flinch as his mom’s voice got small, clearly aware she’d hit the motherlode of social quicksand situations. “Oh, I… I didn’t know.”

“Course you didn’t,” Eric jumped in, voice cracking slightly as he tried to ease the tension. “It’s not like there’s a handbook or anything. Most people don’t know about the, uh, the whole trigger thing.”

“Well, we don’t gotta get deep into it, y’know, people… guys, not really a problem over here, really, like, I’m fine,” he winced at the rambling mess spilling out of his mouth, the sudden weirdness already eating the entire room alive.. “Really. Mom just didn’t know it was a thing. She’s just… processing a lot of new information right now.”

“Processing,” Mom repeated slowly, those blue eyes of hers shooting him a worried look that promised a very long conversation in their immediate future. “R-right… processing.”

Okay, yeah, no, I’m putting a moratorium on this right now.

“I mean, not really?” The words slipped out as casual as he could get them. Casual as they were, the entire room still went a new kind of silent, as if the Pope himself had the whoopie cushion. Manpower’s big booming Papa Bear laugh died somewhere in his throat. Flashbang stopped mid-sentence, mouth still open. Even Vicky was half-frozen where she’d been sitting on the stairs.

Oh, yeah, great, just kill me now, God. Ripped the Band-Aid off the soul of the party.

Vicky was staring at him like she’d never seen him before, brow furrowed into a perfect blonde caterpillar situation. “Huh?”

His fork went down, hands up in surrender mode as every eyeball in the room laser-focused on his face. Showtime, apparently. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait. I’m not ragging on anybody for anything, for real. Full respect for trauma, one hundred percent.” 

Greg gave a quick glance around the room, already regretting how everyone’s posture had shifted into full attention mode. “But no, for me, it was… not that. There was no traumatic event. No car crash, no burning building, no supervillain monologue about the futility of hope before dunking me in a vat of acid. I just… got it one day. Out of nowhere.”

The sixteen-year old turned toward his mom, her face still halfway from just printing out an error message. “Mom, remember that time back in March you threatened to ground me for a month because you were convinced I was hiding something and acting weird?”

Mom just stared back at him, expression completely blank. “You are going to have to be significantly more specific.”

“Alright, okay, a little harsh but not uncalled for,” he conceded with a nod, because honestly, fair point. “It was the Sunday right beforeI got suspended for a little tussle in the halls and you had to meet with… she-who-shall-not-be-named for the first time.”

Comprehension dawned on Mom’s face like sunrise over a garbage fire, followed immediately by fresh confusion. “Oh.” She blinked, actually processing now. “Oh.” Then her eyes went a new kind of wide. “So you’re telling me… you got your powers because I grounded you?”

A few of the New Wave crew exchanged bewildered looks, Brandish and Photon Mom being the big two. Crystal covered her mouth to hide what was definitely a smile, and Manpower’s massive shoulders were shaking so hard the man would be less obvious if he just let the laugh out.

“What? No! God, no,” Greg’s hands waved frantically in front of him, already playing catch-up in trying to dispel the tension that had bogged down the night. “That would be terrible. ‘Boredom Man, with the power to procrastinate at supersonic speeds.’ No, I just… well, I honestly just woke up like that. That morning. One minute I was a normal, ridiculously handsome, and incredibly humble teenager—”

“Oh my god,” The snort Crystal let out could wake the dead.

“—the next, I could glow and heal fast. It was weird.”

“Weird,” his truest-bluest brand new friend of the night shook his head, the slightly younger boy’s voice cracking slightly “That’s… that’s actually really weird. Like, nobody just gets powers.”

“I mean, apparently I do?” Greg simply shrugged at that. He knew it was different than what everybody said, but what else was he going to say? “Maybe I’m just special like that.”

“Or maybe you’re lying,” Amy muttered from her corner, with maybe her fifth full sentence of the night being used for evil.

“Amy,” Photon Mom shot her a look, while Carol raised an eyebrow, clearly thinking the question was fair.

In fact, she said as much. “Sarah, it’s possible.”

Mom blinked again, still processing. “Oh.”

Vicky muttered under her breath, definitely audible, “Oh is right.”

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Barely an hour later, more or less, the two Veders were standing by the front door, the ‘nice’ part of the night officially over. Let’s go back home already.

Back to the awkward reality of being a teenage super-something trying to make good impressions on superhero friends’ parents while Mom did that thing where she got all formal and polite. Goodbyes were happening in that adult flurry of handshakes and promises to ‘do this again soon’ that probably meant more politeness than actual intent.

“It was a lovely dinner,” the words were something Mom had repeated almost verbatim among a bunch of others as she went from adult to adult in the room, her newest handshake partner Vicky’s tired-looking dad.

Speaking of…

The girl in question bounced over to him, phone already in hand, a near-blur of blond. “So, um… I was thinking. Since we’re both, you know… around. Maybe you’d want to hang out sometime? When we’re not fighting giant city-destroying sea monsters?”

A flush of red crept up Greg’s neck, a blush that had absolutely nothing to do with his body’s higher-than-average core temperature. Play it cool, Veder. You can handle Glory Girl’s phone number.

“Sure, Vix,” the words came out smoother than he felt, which was honestly impressive considering his brain was unsure if this could potentially lead to a team-up. In more ways than one.‘ “Sounds good.”

“Cool!” She brightened, her aura making that more literal than anything else. “I mean, awesome. We could… I dunno, train together, or do something normal.”

“Normal people,” Eric snorted from across the room. “Right, because we’re totally normal.”

“Eric, why don’t you go play with your shields?” The words came with a smile, but the smile was through gritted teeth.

“Just sayin’.”

After they finished tapping numbers into each other’s phones, Greg couldn’t help as his eyes drifted across the room and landed on Amy, Vicky’s sister sitting at the coffee table, seemingly a million miles away from her family’s cheerful chaos.

Huh…

Before he knew it, before he could even stop himself and consider whether it was a good or bad idea, his feet were already carrying him over.

The freckled Dallon looked up the second he came to a stop, curly hair falling into her face as she stared him up and then down, her eyes coming to rest on his outstretched hand

“Hey. I wanted to thank you.”

Amy raised a single eyebrow, the look so skeptical it practically radiated waves of ‘don’t try me’. “For what?”

“For saving my mom.” He winced, the sound of his Mom’s soft gasp behind him almost like a knife to the back, but didn’t look back. “I mean it. Months ago. During the ABB bombings. You were at the hospital. I know you probably don’t remember, you must heal hundreds of people. But she was… it was bad.”

Amy blinked, a half-dozen different emotions and thoughts flickering across her face before she eventually settled on something closer to her usual default of gruff. “She already thanked me. Tonight too.”

“Yeah, I’m sure she did. But I need to.” A breath came deeper, the memory of those manic days of near-suicidal vigilantism still sharp enough to cut. “Hell, the city probably needs to thank you. If she wasn’t still around, I would have probably gone a liiiiittle crazy. And I owe you. Million times over.”

Greg flourished out his extended hand, leaning into a bow as he let some of his knightliness slide into his voice. “So I’m making you an offer. A boon, if you will.”

A faint, humorless grunt escaped the small girl. “Please don’t.”

Greg pulled back his hand, throat clearing slightly as he stood up straight again. Okay, easing up on the bit. Did it sting a little? Sure, but he was a big boy and he’d get over it. “Right. Uh. Well, the offer stands. You can ask me for anything, and I’ll do it.”

The look on Amy’s face was worth a thousand words, or at least it would have been if it was a picture. Unfortunately, seeing as it only lasted a second before it vanished into a frown again, it was about a single one. “What?”

“Anything,” he repeated, keeping his gaze steady because as much as he was saying it with a smile, he was also dead serious. “You need a million dollars? I’ll get it for you. I’m your personal genie, your fairy godfather, your real Godfather, whatever you wanna call it. You want someone… taken care of?”

“Greg.” Mom’s voice cut through the room.

Greg glanced over at the gathered adults and the laughing collection of Crystal, Vicky and Eric staring back at him. “I’m joking! Totally joking, don’t worry.” The blond boy leaned in closer to Amy, voice dropping to conspiratorial stage-whisper territory. “I’m not joking. Anyone you want off this earth, I’ll make it happen.“

“Gregory Lucas Veder!”

“Seriously, just a joke!” He straightened all the way back up while simultaneously mouthing to Amy, ‘No, I’m not.‘ 

A strange sound escaped the girl in front of him. Strange in the sense that Greg didn’t think it came out of her often. 

A snort, specifically; a small incredulous laugh that clearly surprised even her judging by the way her eyes went wide for a second. She shook her head, a flicker of something almost like amusement crossing her face. “You’re weird, you know that?”

“That’s what all the ladies tell me.” Wink followed automatically before his brain could file the proper paperwork declaring it a terrible idea. Smooth, Veder. Real smooth. That was fedora-level pickup line territory right there. He had actually even tried on a fedora once, not even too long ago, just after Lung even. The thing was barely on his head for a full second before he tossed it off and shook his head. Not even me.

She actually rolled her eyes, but the faintest ghost of a smile touched her lips. “Fine.” She reached her hand out and—

Amy Dallon froze.

It wasn’t a small thing either. 

A sharp ragged gasp tore from the lips of the world’s greatest healer, Panacea looking like she’d grabbed a live wire. The entire room went dead silent as she made a choked noise, the girl stumbling backward with eyes gone wide and raw as if she’d just seen death itself.

What the—

His own eyes widened, shock and confusion hitting like a bomb to the chest as the room exploded into motion around him. Vicky appeared at her sister’s side as fast as her flight could take her, her mother and aunt surging forward behind her. “Amy!” Vicky’s voice cracked with panic, hands hovering over her sister’s shoulders like she was afraid touching might make things worse. “What’s wrong? What happened?”

Amy didn’t answer, barely even seeming to hear her sister’s voice. Those eyes, pupils shrunk down to tiny terrified pinpricks, stayed locked on his face like he’d suddenly sprouted horns and started speaking Latin. 

The mousy girl in front of him was shuddering, face gone snow pale, expression carrying this utter disbelief mixed with horror so profound it seemed to leach color from the entire room.

F-fuck, fuck, did I break Panacea? Is that even possible? Did my healing factor do something weird? Is there something—

“What the fuck are you?”