Rick Flag Jr.

Richard Rogers Flag Jr. was born in Washington, D.C. in 1980 to Richard Flag Sr. and Sharon Race. His father was career military and his mother worked as a military codebreaker, though Rick spent a lot of his childhood in Alabama while his father went through flight training. Most of what stuck with him came from Sharon. She taught him codes, puzzles, and how to actually think before he acted, even if he wasn't always great at that last part.

Rick was good with computers, radios, encryption, and anything mechanical from a pretty young age. He studied information security before going to West Point, where he met Guthrie Quinn Edwards. They shouldn't have gotten along as well as they did, considering Rick followed rules and Quinn seemed personally offended by them. Quinn eventually flunked out, but they stayed close, and years later he became Rick's second-in-command and probably the person Rick trusted most outside his family.

Rick married Marie in his early twenties. She was a bioengineer working with experimental military medicine, and at some point she used an early supersoldier serum on him. It made him stronger and harder to kill, but it also altered his biology enough that their daughter Clara inherited parts of it. Clara was sick a lot growing up because of it, which made Rick almost obsessive about knowing her doctors, medications, labs, and exactly what was wrong whenever she ended up in the hospital.

Around the same time, Rick's personal life started falling apart in other ways. His father was presumed dead during a classified mission, and Sharon later developed dementia. Rick handled both badly in different ways. His father's death made him angry, while watching his mother forget things she had once taught him left him with absolutely nothing useful to fight.

Rick eventually joined ARGUS and became the field commander for Task Force X under Amanda Waller. He was good at the job, even if he slowly started realizing how much he hated the way Waller treated people as disposable. His relationship with June Moone only made that worse, since Waller was willing to use June against him whenever it was useful. By then, Rick and Marie had also divorced, leaving Clara as the one part of his civilian life he still guarded almost violently.

By 2021, Rick had spent years doing Waller's dirty work while convincing himself there was still some line he wouldn't cross. Corto Maltese finally showed him where it was. Inside Jotunheim, he found proof that the U.S. government had been involved with Project Starfish and human experimentation. Rick decided the evidence needed to get out, even knowing Waller would never allow it, and he was killed trying to protect it.

Rick didn't stay dead. After Corto Maltese, a resistance fighter with Sol Soria, secretly brought him back. She was a necromancer. It worked, but his body didn't come back right, especially his heart. Eventually he got a biometric replacement that kept him alive, though it came with its own problems.

Officially, Rick Flag was still dead. He disappeared into Louisiana and spent the next few years working off-grid taking mercenary jobs and living under fake names. He didn't trust anyone completely, but most were good at keeping him hidden. Somewhere in all of that, he had Ezra, which gave him something besides survival to care about.

Marie eventually started digging into Rick's death because the story didn't make sense. By 2024, she had successfully challenged the official version of what happened, and Rick being alive couldn't stay buried anymore. Waller was removed from ARGUS and eventually imprisoned for what happened with Corto Maltese and Project Starfish. Rick also found out his father, who he'd believed was dead for twenty years, was alive and had returned as a General.

Rick's return wasn't clean. He had been legally dead, spent years as a mercenary, had a replacement heart, and wasn't exactly in great shape mentally after everything that happened. Richard Sr. still allowed him back into ARGUS, with Quinn remaining close at his side. Rick hated that his father now had authority over the same system that had buried him in the first place.

Once Rick was legally alive again, he fought for custody of Clara and won. Marie died not long afterward, leaving Rick to deal with the fact that however angry he was with her, she was still Clara's mother. Fenrir Pharmaceuticals was dismantled after her death, but Clara was still living with the effects of the serum Marie had used on Rick years earlier. Rick eventually went to Ari because he had run out of other people who might actually be able to help.

Ari studied what was left of Marie's work and eventually developed a treatment for Clara. It couldn't give Clara her childhood back, but it finally stopped her life from being controlled by the serum. Rick had spent years convinced something done to his body had ruined hers before she was even born. Seeing Clara finally get better was probably one of the few things in his life he couldn't find a reason to feel guilty about.

By 2026, Rick is alive, but he's not really the same man who went into Corto Maltese. He's been declared dead, resurrected, rebuilt, dragged back into ARGUS, and forced to deal with a father who apparently took the same approach to death that he did. Most of his life has been shaped by classified lies and people deciding someone else's body was acceptable collateral. At this point, Rick mostly cares about keeping his kids from paying for any more of it.