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armageddon-generation · 7 years ago

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The C-Lister’s Club

(The Fall and Rise of Booster Gold)

AU where the major Justice League characters all sacrificed themselves saving the earth.

Only C-list heroes are left, who are only effective against major threats with government support. These heroes become unwitting propaganda figures

Booster Gold is the only one onboard with this (he’s finally getting the fame he’s always wanted)

Hero work essentially becomes a warped kind of reality TV show business

Booster’s publicists manipulate his naivety and vanity to get him to rat on heroes that start fighting against the system and doing ‘unscripted’ hero work

Eventually Booster becomes the new system’s figurehead, their equivalent of Superman (Finally! he thinks)

His publicists begin rewriting history so Booster is given credit for the old Justice League’s greatest achievements

The other heroes are given the option to get with the programme or retire. Blue Beetle retires and becomes a recluse in his mansion, Plastic Man becomes a bum because his criminal record stops him holding a steady job

All this time, without any other heroes to give him a reality check, Booster is in his happy bubble of luxury and celebrity, willingly unaware of the totalitarianism he is being used to create.

The government replaces his robot buddy with an audience tested new model, who is ridiculously chipper and doubles as Booster’s butler (which he loves)

They even create a parody of the Super Freinds cartoon with Booster as the lead character. There’s an awkward moment when he has to do publicity photo shoots with an actor dressed as Blue Beetle (whom he has been avoiding since his retirement)

He keeps chasing validation (awards, medals, licensing deals, public adoration) because he’s convinced they will finally make him happy. Finally make him feel heroic.

But they never do, and he slowly sinks into depression.

All this time the next generation of the Justice League (Damian Wayne, Jon Kent, Emiko Queen, Mar’i Grayson etc) have gone underground and are attempting to fight the system

They have to sacrifice their civilian identities and become full time ‘terrorists’ (like how people see Rorschach in Watchmen).

Booster starts to drift. On a whim he tracks down his ancestors in this time and finds a broken family of washouts and nobodies. They remind him too much of who he was before he travelled back in time from the future, and seem to confirm to him that all his fame is pointless and he will always be a loser

Booster’s life becomes a cycle of public appearances, increasingly rare (and fake) heroics and meaningless relationships he destroys to punish himself. Occasionally, just to twist the knife a little deeper, he’ll stalk his ancestors from afar (he has a government detail monitoring them at all times) and watches them fall apart

The government (who slowly confiscated all superhuman related substances when the League died) start adding an infusion of Poison Ivy’s mind control spores to government-approved food and drink they advertise with Booster’s face

Skip forward a few years and the new Justice League mounts an assault on Booster Gold’s penthouse, expecting to defeat him and force him to make a public address and denounce the totalitarian government

Instead they find an uncaring asshole with substance addictions and self destructive tendencies

Booster’s only ‘freind’ is his robot butler, but only because the robot is programmed to tell him exactly what he wants to hear

The government haven’t actually used Booster for hero work in months; they’ve begun using Brother Eye satalites (converted from old ARGUS satalites) to control random members of the population (using the additive in government approved foods), imbue them with powers and dress them up like Booster. This is a test run for widespread mind control

This infuriates the new League. Damian in particular, who has grown to dearly love his civilian life in its absence, starts hitting Booster, demanding he fight back. Damian hates Booster for forcing him to become the full-time terrorist (and perceived monster) the League of Assassins wanted him to be

Booster doesn’t fight back and the others have to pull Damian off him and flee: They’ve wasted months planning to take down a useless figurehead

Booster goes to see his ancestor family to punish himself, but accidentally ends up having a conversation with their youngest member, a curious ten year old girl (his great great about twenty other greats grandmother)

They end up pulling him into their house for dinner, and he realises he had them pegged wrong: the family are trying to pull themselves back together, and seem to genuinely care about each other

This experience (and the Justice League meeting) shakes Booster enough that he goes to visit Blue Beetle (whom he’s been avoiding talking to since he retired)

Booster has to break through BB’s advanced security, and the experience reminds him (unwillingly) of hero work

He still gets caught in a trap; BB doesn’t want to see him after what he did)

(Think of BB as like George Clooney’s character from Tomorrowland)

Booster is stubborn and they keep playing this game for days: getting through the grounds of BB’s mansion is like a huge hi-tech assault course

With each run of the course Booster gets closer BB’s front door, ignoring the constant orders to give up and go away- he is convinced that if he gets to the front door he will be able to mend their friendship

(Think of this like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow - repetition again and again, being creamed again and again)

When he eventually does get to the door Booster is angry and confused when BB still refuses to open up

Booster wants to apologise for what he did but BB says that’s not enough - Booster is caught up in his Hollywood fantasy, the real world doesn’t have clean endings like that. He has to live with the shitty thing he did. Actions speak louder than words

Booster still refuses to leave and sleeps on the porch, but eventually has to admit defeat and goes back home.

Booster tries talking to His ridiculously chipper robot butler, but for the first time actively realises how unfulfilling their conversations are

Instead goes off (in disguise) to private therapy. He acts like this should be a huge honour for the therapist. Who is his therapist? None other than Carrie Kelly, Damian Wayne’s old therapist

Carrie takes none of Booster’s bullshit and initially he storms out of their sessions

Unfortunately for Booster, all the other therapists are too intimidated by his connections to the government to be effective at their jobs - their conversation is just as bad as the robot butler’s

So he and Carrie are stuck with each other. They don’t get on, and Booster mostly tries to hide weakness with ego and humour

Slowly, Carrie begins to challenge his perceptions of the world and himself. She is secretly still a rebel and reports about Booster to the new Justice League

The League ignore this (Booster is a nobody and they are concerned with the government’s new mind controlling satalites)

Booster’s new routine becomes filled with therapy and visiting the family of his ancestors

Listening to his stories as he starts to open up and be more honest with her, Carrie has the idea for Booster to write a memoir that tells the truth about himself and his life, thereby exposing the lies the government are telling the world

Carrie becomes Booster’s ghost writer and making the book forces Booster to re-evaluate himself

His family is viewed differently in comparison to the ancestors he is now good friends with - he begins to appreciate the simple life he had before he traveled back in time

He begins to recognise that exterior validation won’t make him happy, though he still has a hang up over trying to convince Carrie that he was an innocent victim, and deep down he’s a good person

Comes back to what BB told him about actions outweighing words. Booster’s conscience sounds like BB’s voice in his head, but over the course of his therapy the voice begins to sound like Carrie

Carrie is like no-one he’s talked to in years. A rebellious punk who genuinely cares about people, doesn’t give a shit about her appearance and has a scathing intelligent wit the plastic idiots he’s used to can’t touch

Between her friendship and his adopted family (whom he now views as a chance to undo his mistakes with his real family, and to whom he has become a zany uncle figure, showing how his feel-good Hollywood mentality hasn’t disappeared) Booster is the happiest he’s been for years ...

... so of course he fucks it all up. Because Carrie is the only person who really understands Booster, he becomes reliant on her. He mistakes that reliance for attraction and makes a move on her

Carrie (of course) has none of this and kicks Booster out of her office. This is the first time Booster has been refused something he truly wanted in years. He also hasn’t cared about something this much, so it stings twice as much. AND it brings back memories of Blue Beetle, his best friend, turning him away at the front door

In a fit of pettiness Booster takes the only digital copy of the manuscript of his memoir with him, so Carrie can’t even use that against the government

Booster runs to his ancestors family for comfort, but they also turn him away, furious. They have just found out about the government tail Booster put on them for years and want him as far away from their children as possible

Booster flees home and relapses into binge drinking and skim reads Carrie’s bitingly honest ghost-written memoir of him

He becomes fixated on his old robot companion Skeets, the only friend he thinks hasn’t betrayed him yet.

On a bender, Booster locates Skeets in an old government storage facility, takes him home and reactivates him.

Booster uploads his memoir into Skeet’s memory banks and, still drunk, rants to him about how cruel the world is

Skeets counters each of his complaints with intelligent logic, but this only infuriates Booster further.

As a last resort Skeets begins projecting old news footage of the original Justice League saving lives onto the wall. This is the first time Booster has seen the unaltered footage in years and he breaks down.

There he is, head on the table, weeping, when Booster hears his own voice over Skeets’ speakers. It’s a tiny story, a few minutes long, about a family he saved from a fire back when he was a C-Lister. Hardly important compared to the big stuff. But Skeets reminds him that family is alive because of him. He was a real hero once.

At this point Damian Wayne breaks into Booster’s house. Damian has heard Booster tried to force himself on Carrie and is here to kill him.

Booster is out of practice and barely holds Damian off: he is only saved when Jon Kent arrives to stop the fighting, though he makes it clear he’s there for Damian’s sake, not Booster’s

At this point, Booster’s government-built robot butler walks in to investigate what is causing all this noise. The robot sees Skeets, who should be in storage, projecting an illegal newsreel on the wall, and Booster talking to the two most wanted terrorists in the world.

The robot attacks. Booster and Skeets (who know how it works) destroy it and save Damian and Jon.

Before it gets destroyed the robot sends out an alert about Booster being an enemy of the government

Remembering the government detail he ordered on his ancestors, Booster and Skeets race off to save his family from a danger he put them in.

Jon and Damian follow Booster. Together they save the family and Jon peesuades Damian to help the family go into hiding

The look on the youngest girl’s face looks exactly like the family Booster saved from the fire in the news footage Skeets showed him, and this is the first time Booster feels genuinely proud of himself in years.

Booster comes up with a plan to get his memoir (which is in Skeets’ data banks) out to the public

He returns to Blue Beetle’s mansion with the new Justice League in tow. He is now backing up his words with actions, so Blue Beetle lets them in. There is still no easy reconciliation; BB is suspicious and pointedly ignores Booster, talking only to League.

They use BB’s tech genius to hijack the government’s mind controlling Brother Eye satalites and use them to beam Booster’s memoir straight into the head of everyone on Earth, exposing the government’s lies

Booster also adds a promise to make it up to everyone he hurt

This doesn’t spark a rebellion as Booster had (big headedly) assumed, but now the people have two versions of the truth in their heads and the freedom to choose which they believe in.

Blue Beetle takes advantage of this and beams a message from the resistance to the people to galvanise rebellion. This is Booster’s big moment: he recognises that this isn’t all about him and lets the new Justice League take the lead

Booster now feels very exposed: Carrie’s brutally honest telling of his life story has been read by all his new allies. He is suprised when instead of judging him for what he did they trust him quicker for this honesty.

The new Justice League now has enough of a foothold in the public consciousness to rally more allies, and they begin an all out war against the totalitarian government

To his surprise, Booster becomes the emotional rock of this team; all the new members begin paying his honesty back in kind and confide all their deepest fears in him. Only Blue Beetle keeps his distance

The new League members holding Booster up as the reason for them joining up becomes too much for Booster because it’s too close to the way the government used him as a propaganda figurehead. Everyone has a story of oppression, and Booster is painfully aware that those stories are his fault.

Booster starts to spiral again , but Blue Beetle arrives to pull him out of his pit and take him away

“Where are we going?” / “You need a therapist.”

BB deposits Booster in a room where Carrie Kelly is waiting (whom the Justice League has just fake kidnapped)

At first Booster is incredibly awkward but Carrie is much more forgiving than BB and is proud of his progress. They resume therapy

Together Booster and Carrie save the Justice League; Booster as their emotional support, Carrie as their therapist

One day (with Jon’s support/gentle bullying) they even get Damian to open up about missing his family and his civilian life

Booster teaches the new recruits (the old C-listers like Plastic Man) to prioritise the kind of work they were doing before the old League died (damage control and saving civilians) over everything else. They can’t hurt the mind controlled civilians the government throw at them.

Slowly, Blue Beetle starts to talk to him again, until one day Booster is fighting next to him again. Trust is back

Embrace their small-time roots

And there is a global war between the growing Resistance against waves of superpowered mind controlled civilians (Think the World War Z zombies) and the next generation of the Justice League lead them to victory and are the heroes everyone names, but Booster Gold is the hero everyone knows but no-one needs to name.

And he is (close enough) to happy

#dc comics #au #booster gold #justice league #fanfiction #my writing #blue beetle #damian wayne #jon kent #carrie kelley #dystopia #basically 1984 meets Hunger Games #i canabalised bojack horseman #how did i get here

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