Greg Vs Raid 9-6

A beautiful Saturday morning was the delight of anyone’s week, a day to relax.

The Sabbath day, if he knew anything about Judaism. 

A day of rest.

And today was no different in Casa de la Veder.The morning light filtering into the kitchen was soft and peaceful, a hazy golden wash that felt like a deliberate apology for the electric over-stimulated chaos of the previous night. 

It was the opposite of real though, the picturesque American morning nothing but a ruse for what he knew was coming next. Greg Veder knew he was sitting on the edge of a cliff and at any moment, the reincarnation of the roadrunner in the body of his precious mom was gonna send him “wa-hoo-hooing” off the edge.

For now though, the peace was there and he was going to enjoy it while it lasted.

And he was doing that in his own special way, one of which was a common tradition on weekend breakfasts. Strategic pancake engineering, his old morning hobby was back for a vengeance as he tried his best to enjoy the peace and silence he loved so much, because even during imminent family crisis, his mind defaulted to treating breakfast like a tower defense game.

He was building a fortress of pancakes, a glorious syrup-drenched bastion against the inevitable conversation that was circling the kitchen like a hungry shark; each bite was a delaying tactic, each deliberate chew a filibuster. Viva la revolucion, we will never surrender to the imperial dogs of maternal interrogation. 

Still, she didn’t say anything, just letting the peace sit and the tension build to a roiling boil as she just made her way around the kitchen.The gentle scrape of a spatula against the non-stick pan. The precise crack of an egg against the rim of a bowl. The rhythmic, almost frantic whisking that followed each crack. 

It’s like she was doing it on purpose, to torture him.

Focus on the syrup distribution, he told himself, carefully nudging a rivulet of Aunt Jemima into an unsaturated quadrant of pancake number three. Optimal coverage is key here. Can’t have any dry zones. That’s how you lose the pancake war, and losing the pancake war means facing the music, and the music is definitely gonna be some kind of death metal remix of ‘we need to talk.’

Mom plated her toast, the bread achieving that perfect uniform golden-brown that spoke to years of practice and probably some kind of mom-trained attention to detail, then sat down opposite him. Her coffee mug became a shield, held in both hands like she was trying to absorb its warmth through osmosis. She wasn’t eating though. Just watching him… really watching the hell out of him.

She was triaging him. Great. Getting the full medical assessment at breakfast. This is fine. Everything’s fine.

It was nothing new, nothing he wasn’t used to. She’d been doing it for months, anyway, but it was only the last two weeks that she’d been so obvious about it, almost undressing him with her nurse-diagnostic eyes. You’re not gonna get my Analyze just by staring hard, ma.

Not like that would stop her. Hell, if this went on any longer, he was almost expecting her to tell him to bend over, turn his head and cough at some point. Okaaaay, joke too far.

“Greg…” Her voice was soft as it hit his eardrums, too soft, but still managing to pull him out of his own head as he winced. She wasn’t going to run out of steam when she wasn’t going into it frustrated at least. 

Damn it.

“Greg…”

The man of the hour didn’t look up. No, he was too busy laser-focusing on the logistical challenge that was obtaining the perfect ratio of pancake, scrambled egg, and syrup speared clean on his fork. “Yeah, Mom?”

“About last night.”

“What about it?” The words came out slightly muffled by a mouthful of breakfast. “The roast chicken was a little dry, maybe a six out of ten, but the cheesecake was a solid nine. Eric’s new shield-waiter trick is pretty cool though. Very high-concept. I give that a nine as well.”

“…Gregory.”

He continued to saw at a pancake, the tines of his fork making this grating sound against the ceramic that probably wasn’t helping the tension levels. “Yeah, Mom?”

“We need to talk about what happened last night… with Panacea.”

The sigh that burst out of him would have gotten him the lead role in the World’s Most Put-Upon Teenager, Greg closing his eyes for a second. Alrighty then.

Opening them again, he looked up from his pancake pagoda to finally look his mom in the eyes, those same blues just like his own but seeming less bright every day in comparison. Right now, they were swimming with this deep worry that had him wishing he was anywhere else but here right now. Yeah, you can bomb an Endbringer in the shoulderblades but a real convo with your mom is too much, ya big baby. 

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he finally blurted out, unwilling to let the silence go for a second longer while his mom stared at him with sad looking eyes. “Amy’s weird. I’m weird. We had a weird moment. End of story. Chapter closed. Roll credits. Fin. That’s all, folks.”

Wow, way to oversell it, Veder. 

“She looked like she’d seen a ghost,” Mom pressed, voice low but firm, refusing to let him squirm away from the current convo. “She jumped back from you like you were on fire. The Dallons didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to say. Greg, the poor girl went and locked herself up in her room.” His mom’s mouth hung open, working silently for a few seconds as his mom tried to find the words. “I… look, whatever you call it, that is not a ‘weird moment,’ that is a… a severe reaction. To you.”

Greg jabbed his fork down onto a piece of pancake with more force than necessary, fork scraping against the ceramic like nails on a chalkboard. Great, now I’m taking out my emotional issues on breakfast food. What’s next, interrogating the orange juice? “Okay. So she had a reaction. I don’t know what to tell you. I didn’t do anything. My hands were clean, no buzzers, no whoopee cushions, nothing.”

“That’s the point,” Mom said, leaning forward as her voice dropped further, as if she was scared of anyone else listening in on them. “You were just standing there. You shook her hand. What did she see, Greg? What is it about you that would make a girl with her abilities react with that kind of… horror?”

Unsure what he really wanted to say right now, Greg ran a hand through his hair. “It’s… complicated.”

“I’m a nurse who has raised a parahuman who pilots giant robots made of garbage,” she said, voice flat as roadkill, every word placed like a perfectly aimed sniper shot. “My tolerance for ‘complicated’ is quite high at the moment. Try me.”

He looked at her then, actually looked, instead of just seeing Mom-shaped anxiety in his peripheral vision. Greg looked past the tired lines around her eyes, past the scrubs she wore like armor even on her days off. He knew his mom was always in his corner even when she had her own issues to deal with, and that she’d been through her own version of hell; shitty divorce, a son who was a magnet for trouble, an Endbringer attack that nearly stole him away. 

And she was still here, demanding answers, refusing to be pushed away.

He owed her that much at least, Greg knew it. 

Plus, lying to Mom is like lying to a human lie detector who also changes your diapers for sixteen years. Not that he was in diapers for sixteen years, of course. Purely the normal number of diaper years. She’s got your number, your social security number, and could probably guess what color underwear you’re wearing.

“My body… it’s not the same as it was,” The words felt like they weighed about fifty pounds each; not much but still harder to get out than he’d like.. “After the… fight. After everything. It’s different. Stronger.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her knuckles went white where she gripped the coffee mug. “I can see that. You’ve… filled out.” Massive understatement given that he’d gone from five-seven to six-easy, an inch for every month he had powers, and he’d gotten thicker too. 

They both knew it was bullshit but sometimes bullshit was a comfort blanket.

“It’s more than that,” Greg frowned, already poking his brain with a mental stick to get it to come up with the right analogy, to find the right filter to make the truth easy for her to take. Just something that won’t give her night terrors. 

Greg already knew to avoid the specifics; the white-hot agony of dragon blood, feeling his body dissolve into raw mana soup, the horrifying time-lapse process of his healing factor knitting him back together from practically nothing. She didn’t need those particular mental images cluttering up her brain space. “My power…” 

Is to level up. I slay the dragons, save the princess, and get loot.

But it wasn’t that simple, was it? It never had been and never would be. Half the time, his insides were excavated and used to quite literally paint the town red. Hell, his DNA was all over town at this point if someone wanted to clone him up a mini-me.

Greg sighed long and low again, looking away from his mom’s eyes as they begged him to continue. “Look, mom, it’s… it’s not a static thing. It grows. Every time I get hurt, every time I push myself past my limits… I get stronger. Not just my powers. Me. My body. It adapts. It… it levels up.”

She stared silently, mouth open.

Right, nurse brain doesn’t process RPG terms. “I’m pretty sure… that if I wanted to, I could go outside right now and toss that minivan across the street three blocks over easy.”

He winced again as the words left his lips, his mom’s face going a new level of milk-white-pale that seemed closer to blood loss than anything else. Maybe leading with the van-tossing demonstration wasn’t the smoothest route… I guess. Really, he thought it was pretty tame but tame to him was getting shot a couple times at this point, so it’s not like he knew shit about what was normal anymore. Should’ve started smaller. Like, hey Mom, I can benchpress a refrigerator now, how’s your coffee?

Mrs. Henderson’s beige car, the hatchback the color of boring, was still parked innocently by the curb like it wasn’t currently being discussed as potential projectile ammunition. It may have gotten a little bit of water damage from Leviathan but the thing still looked and ran fine. I can give mom a little demo if she wants, not like she likes Old Lady Henderson anyway.

“That’s… not…,” his mom whispered, voice lacking any real conviction. Like she was trying to deny gravity while watching an apple fall. “Not… possible?”

He knew she hadn’t really seen him in action, but Mom still had a very junior varsity idea of what he could pull off. Nah, ma, I’m in the majors now. 

“It kinda is,” he answered, voice as flat as the kitchen table. “Being real, that’s probably not even with much effort really. No lie, I don’t know the exact physics of it, the tensile strength of my ligaments versus the curb weight of a 2006 Dodge Grand Caravan, but yeah.” Leaned back in his chair, wood creaking in protest as he let out a laugh that sounded slightly unhinged even to his own ears. “Van-tossing is definitely on the table now.”

Should probably mention the whole ‘could accidentally put my hand through the kitchen wall if I’m not careful’ thing, but baby steps, right? “If I had to put it into words, my life is pretty much a game now. The more damage I take, the more experience points I get, and the higher my stats go. Leviathan was… a lot of experience points.” Greg sat there, having basically told his mom what his whole deal was. Huh… never thought I’d get this far without her either passing out or grounding me until I’m thirty.

“So, what Amy saw…” Mom began, voice barely a whisper.

“Was probably that,” Greg finished, words making the syrup in his mouth taste all kinds of bitter all of a sudden. “She’s a healer, right? She sees biology. Like probably real down deep, she knows all the little itty-bitties of a person. And mine is… probably not what the textbooks would call regular anymore.” Greg shrugged again, unsure what else to say. “Could just be that my power doesn’t make sense with my body. It’s trying to catch up, I guess. I dunno.”

Susan stayed quiet for a full minute, gaze unfocused. “So this is it, then?” she finally asked, voice fragile as spun glass. “What we’re doing now?”

Greg tilted his head, a weird noise leaving his mouth like a lazy tiny goose. “Well, what I’m doing. You kinda just have to do your thing an-”

“What? Wait for you to come home?” His mom snapped back, actual heat slipping into her voice for a split second.

…you don’t gotta say it like that but, “…yeah?”

His mom made her own tiny goose sound. “You just go out, you fight… villains. And you come back… more.” The word was heavier than it should have been, Greg hating it as much as he couldn’t deny it.

A sigh slipped out.

“I’ promise… I’ll always come back, Mom. ”His hand crawled over the table to meet hers and his mom squeezed his back tight. “And I’ll always be me. Just… a version of me that can throw vans. And pilot giant robots. And who still has to do the dishes.”

A small watery smile touched her lips. “You most certainly still have to do the dishes. And take out the trash. Don’t think for a second that saving the world gets you out of your chores.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, his own smile finally reaching his eyes.

“Eat your toast, Mom,” he said softly. “It’s getting cold.”