An AU sort of fixit thing. For anyone who wasn't happy with the events of Countdown to Infinite Crisis, anyone who misses Blue Beetle, or anyone who just plain likes wacky hijinks.
This diverges from DC's wild and wacky version of comics reality...some time after Batman shows everyone Beetle's goggles and Booster tries to blast him.
(Booster/Beetle slash, eventually.)
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Prologue
In which Booster's villainy is ignored.
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When Booster Gold sulkily threatened to become a supervillain one day, no one paid it much mind. When, mere minutes later, he sent a goodly portion of the (excuse the expression) Super Buddies to Hell (or a reasonable facsimile), nothing much was made of it except the coining of a new phrase: "boostered".
What seemed to escape everyone's notice, even after Booster dropped the dumb blond facade to put forth some fairly well thought out theories on their predicament, was that Booster Gold had, in his few minutes of supervillainy, been more successful than many of the well-established villains. And, despite Booster's Hell-induced show of intelligence, Blue Beetle seemed to be the only person to remember that he actually had a brain under the hair and good looks, and he certainly wasn't in any position to remind people.
So it was not, perhaps, surprising that no one listened to Booster when he again threatened to become a supervillain. Somehow it escaped everyone's notice that Booster Gold really didn't have anything left to lose. It didn't escape notice when Booster dyed his hair black and started occasionally wearing a fake black goatee, but that was partly because he hadn't bothered to do anything about his blond eyebrows and it looked kind of odd.
The reason for the new look was that Booster, in a fit of drama, thought it would better suit his new supervillain persona. Also, he was hoping that, if it came to it, the goatee would throw people off and make them think he was actually the evil duplicate of Booster Gold from an alternate universe. He had been around long enough to know how these things worked. He had also tried an eyepatch, but it threw his depth perception completely off and he didn't want to be the kind of supervillain who couldn't hit the broad side of a Pottery Barn.
The matter of his name was left up in the air after a Beverly Hillbillies marathon had not only reminded him of where he'd heard the phrase before, but also ensured that his briefly considered name of "Black Gold" would set the theme song running through his head whenever it was used. Having old theme music running through one's head while going up against superheroes, he thought, was probably not conducive to successful supervillainy.
In a stunning display of underestimation, no connections were drawn when magical objects started disappearing across the board soon after Booster Gold's threat of a return to villainy. And as anyone not mind-controlled or angsting like it's going out of fashion could probably tell you, underestimating people can lead to quite a number of things, not least of which is making you look like an ass.
It was also how Booster managed to get away with it. That and his last minute decision to trade his highly noticeable shiny gold suit for a more subdued all-black combo, complete with hooded sweatshirt.
Booster was not, by nature, a magic-user. He was much more inclined to rely on technology (having been born and raised surrounded by it) than the occult. However, he had been a superhero long enough to know that magic was real and usable. He had even used it, briefly, during the Super Buddies in Hell incident. So while he didn't come by it naturally (or even legally), Booster Gold set out to find the right magic to do his bidding.
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