Project ROWDY 2-2

The GDA's rec lounge was the aggressive beige of something that could only be explicitly government-approved; designed by committee till the point someone clearly just gave up and picked the least offensive shade they had to choose from. 

Brick couldn’t exactly hate on them for that, especially when they had gone to the effort of also making sure the place came complete with furniture specifically stress-tested for idiots with super-strength.

Two of them, specifically. All of it was reinforced hyper-steel frames and industrial fabric that probably cost more than actual comfortable stuff. Last but not least, the air hummed with those big purifiers that made everything smell like nowhere, the whole place scrubbed clean of anything that might remind you this was a government building full of people who killed very scary things for paychecks.

Today someone had tried real hard to make it not look like that.

An over-large banner drooped from the ceiling letters screaming HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY in three different colors bright enough they hurt to look at. GDA agents in full armor (and definitely getting some kind of hazard pay) stood around in awkward clusters holding paper plates, cake slices bleeding into each other, bright red and sickeningly sweet punch in plastic cups that looked ice cold from here. Everyone smiled too much, backed by that hum of we-were-ordered-to-celebrate energy that made Brick's teeth itch.

Dead center of the whole stupid spectacle, there sat three reinforced chairs. 

Three paper hats. 

Three boys who'd spent the last seven years being a problem, the last two-and-a-half months unconscious, and the ten months before that pretending they were more heroes than hellions.

Brick's hat sat dead-center on his head, elastic band cutting into the soft part under his chin in a way that probably would have hurt if said part wasn’t also tough enough to withstand a plasma beam. Not gonna touch it. He set his teeth tight, mouth a blank line. Not gonna give them the satisfaction. Back straight, hands on his knees, he kept the perfect poise of polite-tolerance, something that worked on most adults if he held it long enough. 

Across from him, Donald stood with a camera, looking less like a cyborg deputy director and more like someone's dad who got way too into documenting everything. "Alright, boys, on three! Big smiles!"

Donald's voice had that chipper warmth that seemed to come out of nowhere, a far cry from the half-stoic cyborg they had known before they went under after Omni-Man tore through them like Boomer through his ninth slice of cake.

Violently.

Butch's hat was already wrecked, crushed on one side and tilted back. It nearly fell off as Butch leaned back, groaning loud enough it carried through the entire room. "Dude, we're not five. Let’s get back to the damn cake already!"

“Mmffffpf!” Boomer agreed, mouth full and face stained with frosting and fondant. “Mpff-mpf!”

"Smile for the camera, Butch sweetheart."

Britney Penrose laughed a little as her voice drifted over from a nearby table, the woman’s whiskey-warm drawl somehow sounding both completely serious and entirely joking without the slightest shift in her tone. Hair white as snow, and chest tight against a white silk shirt, the superhuman GDA agent sat next to her also-empowered older brother; Brit looked a little under half his one-hundred-and-thirty-seven years of age as he grunted something that might've been agreement. Jessica, the blonde fiancée who was somehow engaged to a century-old superhuman, just laughed.

"C'mon, Butch, it's our first-ever real birthday party!" Boomer bounced in his seat, hat sliding sideways off his blonde hair, already holding cake as Brick rolled his eyes at his brother..

Like he hadn’t been holding cake since the millisecond he saw cake existed. 

Boomer could only giggle at the sight of Brick’s half-lidded blood-red eyes as if reading his brother’s mind. "C’mon, this is, like, way better than that time Mojo and HIM fought over who got to give us the cooler death ray."

Donald winced but the camera flash went off anyway, bright enough Brick saw white spots for all of a split-second before his eyes adjusted.

"That's one for the GDA archives."

Great. Brick's eye twitched. Official government record of him in a pointy paper hat. 

Archived. Permanent. Fantastic.

The room was full of people who would never ever be in the same space under normal circumstances. Debbie Grayson sat with Beatrice Ferguson, both of them doing what Mark had told Brick was called ‘mom-conversation’, a thing where they talked without needing to check if the other person cared. Speaking of Mark…

Invincible looked entirely too focused as he stood off to the side in a yellow polo. For whatever reason, he was clearly trying to explain something to Immortal, the other man listening with the intensity of someone being briefed on an extinction event.

"...so the season pass gives you access to exclusive skins, right?” He gestured with both hands in front of him, all five fingers together as he did what seemed to be a very lazy rendition of semaphore. “And you can level up the battle pass by completing challenges..."

Immortal's face was stone-serious. "And these... skins. They provide tactical advantage?"

"Uh. No,” Mark rubbed the back of his head. “They just look cool."

The Celtic caveman nodded slowly, blinking at the younger superhero’s way with an expression that bordered on threatening while Mark just looked like he regretted everything.

On the other side of the room, younger chaos formed as Rex was in Butch's space, gesturing with a plastic fork, both of them doing that thing where an argument was three seconds from being a fight. Too much time around the older teen was making Butch's vocabulary worse.

"I'm just sayin', little green bro, if you stack it three high, the base layer's gonna have structural failure," Rex waved the fork in Butch’s face, white plastic brandished like a weapon. "It’s uh, whaddya call it, basic physics, dude."

"Physics is for nerds who can't punch good… and my big bro." Butch reached for another slice even while talking, whole movement screaming watch me prove you wrong. "Watch me."

Eve sighed from nearby, fingers already at her temples. The redhead once again wore pink everywhere, reminding Brick of a certain PowerPuff if said Puff was eighteen and done with everyone's shit. "Rex, for the love of God, don't make him prove it."

Damien Farell leaned back in his chair, Butch's friend from Grissom tall and built even for someone his age (probably hit puberty at ten, lucky bastard), as he smirked at whatever joke had just landed. 

The Black kid rolled with weirdness better than most, which made sense considering most of his immediate family were superheroes down to the DNA. Hell, the guy’s great-grandfather was a literal World War II relic, said relic currently laughing with Donald across the room.

It was amazing how both of them suddenly had so much in common, old guys and cyborgs finding common ground in being half-machine. Standing next to the old patriot was his daughter Liberty, the blond woman enjoying all the benefits of being born with super-soldier blood in her system as she looked all of twenty-five with a sixteen year old son. Justice; her brother, standing right next to her in full costume, looked just as old for being closer to forty than anything else.  

Their much younger half-siblings, Elizabeth and Justin, sat at the table next to them, both of Brick’s classmates busyhaving what looked like a drinking contest.

With punch.

Libby... Brick's jaw tightened to hold back the urge to snort out loud.

Amazing how the older girl somehow managed to be all preppy and proper in the halls of Grissom, but the second you take her out of school and suddenly she was chugging fruit punch trying to prove something. Competitive ran hard in that family right down to the molecular level, it seemed; Super-Patriot's super-soldier DNA not fucking around.

“My super watch!”

Red eyes flicked across the room. Boomer had ditched the cake entirely (shocking absolutely everyone), as he bounced around in front of Hannah Washington and Shrinking Rae, wrist shoved forward to show off his new GDA-issued watch. Bulletproof stood awkward nearby, the orange-suited kinetic absorber looking for an exit that didn't exist yet.

"-hows a hologram of the whole world! And this button, i-it tells you the weather in, like, eight different countries!" Words stumbled and tumbled their way past his lips fast and loud, excitement and barely-restrained joy leaking everywhere. "I mean, I asked for a spellbook, but I guess those are too hard to find or somethin’.”

Hannah's hair clips caught the fluorescent lights as the black girl beamed at his brother. "It's pretty cool, Boomer."

"Real cool, kid,” Shrinking Rae added, mouthful of punch thickening her words even more than her accent.

"Yeah, little man, that's... that's gucci," Bulletproof managed, clearly out of his element as he gave a stilted thumbs up. The newest member of the Guardians of the Globe had been having some… adjustment issues, from what he could tell.

At the very least, it seemed that way from what Brick could tell in the short time he’d been conscious.

Something about not having expected to be sidelined, pushed back to second-rate, after joining what used to be the world’s premiere team of heroes or something. The complaints were many and they weren’t subtle, but Bulletproof hadn’t actually voiced them officially. Unfortunately for him (and his conception of privacy), the Global Defense Agency had a security apparatus that had access to damn near everything, including phone calls and texts.

Movement registered left, the Red Rowdyruff pulled from his thoughts of governmental overreach as someone slid into the chair beside him. Brick didn't need to turn to know who it was, the scent of burnt confectionery sugar and ozone telling him all he needed to know. It was a specific smell, faint enough that almost no one without their levels of enhanced senses would pick it up, yet molecular manipulation left traces in the air the same way Butch left marks in the auras of people he punched for days and Boomer…

Well, getting hit by lightning didn’t exactly leave you scot-free.

"I think your brother’s trying to explain the moral themes of One Piece to Shrinking Rae," Eve said, clearly amused.

Brick glanced over to see Boomer doing the hand gestures, big sweeping motions, eyes wet in that way that meant fictional pirates were hitting emotional beats and even more emotional deaths. Rae listened with smoke-gray patience, Hannah half-draped over him while Bulletproof snuck his way over to the punch bowl.

"He gets emotional about fictional pirates," Brick didn’t waste time in answering back, eyes still roaming the room. "It's a thing."

"So." Eve's tone shifted, softer. "First birthday party, huh?"

Brick took a slow bite of cake instead of answering right away. Tasted like sugary plastic, frosting saccharine, synthetic and satisfying. He swallowed slowly, trying to hide exactly how much he wanted to rush each bite. I’m no better than Boomer. "Our creation day was usually marked by... competitive gift-giving. Usually very competitive."

Archdemons weren’t really one to lose in any way that was close to graceful. No… Brick’s frown deepened. Grace is more for angels. HIM and Mojo had turned the whole thing into a bloodsport, each trying to one-up the other with weapons or powers or increasingly dangerous presents until someone's lair caught fire or the PowerPuffs came their way, fists ready. 

Three out of seven years, actually. It was amazing how much of a fight a mutated monkey could put up against a reality warping devil. Good times.

"Right.” Eve winced. “Of course." She cleared her throat for a moment, clearly unsure what else to say. "Well, for what it's worth... happy birthday, Brick."

The words landed somewhere in his chest and stayed there, solid and unfamiliar. No angle, no competition, just genuine sentiment offered freely without expecting anything back. He couldn't pull out his usual clipped dismissive bullshit, unable to make it sarcastic or cold without sounding like a little shit.

"...Thanks, Eve." The words felt wrong in his mouth, too honest. When did that become hard?

Across the room, Brit and Jessica approached Butch with wrapped something in hand. Butch grabbed it and tore; wrapping paper shredded in one violent motion, revealing toxic green leather. The jacket was reinforced with materials Brick couldn't identify from here; substances that definitely didn't exist in normal stores, catching light in ways regular fabric didn't.

"Whoa." Butch's bravado cracked wide open, a look that seemed more at home on Boomer’s face sliding into a face more used for anger and vicious smirks. "This is... this is siiiiick."

Brit grunted, old man wiping his nose with a thumb and a sniff. "Figured you might like a jacket that wouldn't… eh, you know, disintegrate every time you get into a fight. So we had this little thing put together.” He snorted, nodding once. “Happy Birthday, brat.”

 “We…” Britney rolled her eyes. “I had the idea for the fuckin’ thing and had it commisioned, Brit over here just said ‘make it look like leather.’”

Brick's red eyes flicked up and away, focused from the heart of the room and towards the very far end all of a sudden. The party chatter suddenly cut itself short as the main doors to the rec room slid open with a heavy loud hiss, GDA security doing its best to sound imposing and immediate.

There he is.

The He in this case was obvious, a man whose name went unspoken in black-ops circles for fear the man might be listening. To be fair, he probably was.

Paranoid old bastard. The smile on Brick’s face was something he could barely keep hidden, though. Took you long enough.

The Director of the Global Defense Agency walked in, dress shoes clicking quietly as the room went quiet like a coral reef when a great white swam on the scene. He wore his usual suit, black and crisp and pressed to perfection. Still, for some reason, the signature red tie hung much looser than it should have, almost like Cecil was already done with the day.

Which Brick knew was bullshit, because the man literally never slept.

Is he in the party mood?

"How's everybody doing?" The old man’s Southern drawl came out low and lazy, pulling every eye in the room toward him without effort as GDA agents straightened their backs and heroes tensed up.

"Happy birthday, gentlemen. Sorry I'm late." The director’s smile didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "Had a bit of a mess to clean up over Brussels."

He didn't elaborate. Mess probably meant bodies. 

Multiple. Great.

"Got you something."

Director Stedman gestured over to Donald, the Deputy Director’s hand transforming into a tablet that the cyborg simply tapped with his other one. Out of a ceiling port, a GDA drone descended with a small crate, setting the thing gently on the table. 

Butch didn’t hesitate, grinning bright as he burst forward in a flare of toxic green. In front of everyone, he pried the thing open with bare hands like a gremlin; wood splintering loud in the sudden silence, foam packing material scattering. Inside sat three custom ear-comms, sleeker than their current models, metal catching light in ways regular tech didn't.

"Some upgraded comms for the triplets," the old man tilted his head to the side ever so slightly, easy authority in his tone. "Full-spectrum encryption, biometric locks, and they won't short out if a certain someone gets a little too excited."

Brick watched his youngest brother's face do the sheepish thing, ears going red.

"Sorry," Boomer muttered.

One hand went up and waved aside the apology, barely even looking at the blue Rowdyruff as he did so. "Now that the pleasantries are out of the way." His tone shifted; lazy warmth gaining more than a hint of business to it. "You boys ready for your close-up?"

Brick's head snapped up as thehe part of his brain that had been blissfully offline for the last hour flared back to life, running numbers and angles and why is he asking that here, now, in front of everyone.

Brick preferred when Cecil’s smile was all business; shark-like is right, he’s too happy. "You boys are going on a media tour."

Butch dropped the toxic green jacket on the table, whole body jerking forward as a single word came out with a roar. "WHAT?!"