Living in an Angsty Hologram @ancientwastedlores - Tumblr Blog

Jun 4

Chapter 1 - Mother Nature (Soldier Boy x Unnamed OC - Eco-horror themes)

Takes place when Soldier Boy was working with Hughie and Butcher to find Mindstorm.

A/N: “can’t you just write a normal fluff fic?” NO. You will get SB caked in wet earth and be happy about it.

About: Forest witch has infected Soldier Boy in a way that he first likes, and then very much doesn’t like. You will find that I put more effort into the fic than into this blurb, which is why I may never be successful as an author.

Word count: 10,706 (I know, I know. Be glad it isn’t the first draft, which was 15K words.)

Trigger warnings: kinda gross if you are not into dirt/soil, creepy forests, and some body horror.

Tag list (you guys liked my other Soldier Boy fic, “Father of God,” so I hope you’ll enjoy this too!) @1inacerulean @sammysweetheart @witch-of-letters @monkievonkie @spnfamily-j2 @mornixgstar18 @glowingtoenails @kathypellar @spookybitchdreams @chxrrybomb22 @calyyypsooo @audreybea @ladykitana90 @happinessisaloadedgun @kizzylori @babesplzreadthz @blissfulwatermelons-blog @porcelanalux @nbhrhn @welikeclownsinthishouse @inkmm0ne @nightlark100 @prettybiching @monteyli77 @delightfulmusictiger @valencia-somerhalder-morgan @brainmp4 @verco @lmillsy97 @mathews78 @stellervoid @winterstar67 @whereve-e-r-you-are @lawrence-d777

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Mother Nature - Chapter 1

The forest was always quietest before the predator pounced.

Soldier Boy had been in enough jungles, enough war zones, enough godforsaken stretches of nowhere to know when a place was holding its breath. No birdsong. No frantic scratch of squirrels in the brush. No insects worrying at the bark. Even the wind seemed to move carefully, slipping between the trees without disturbing them.

Something was hunting.

That was fine by him.

So was he.

He had a rifle in his hands, mud on his boots, and irritation carved deep between his brows. The whole place smelled wet and old and honest in a way that annoyed him. He preferred battlefields after the smoke cleared. Concrete. Gun oil. Blood drying in the sun.

Things a man could understand.

This?

This was trees whispering to each other like old women at church.

Mindstorm had run this way.

Soldier Boy knew it in his bones, in the little twitch at the base of his skull that came with years of being a good tracker. Mindstorm was fast, but not fast enough. Panicked people always left signs.

He spied a flash of movement between two pines.

Butcher and Hughie were somewhere behind him… or to the left. Or dead.

He didn’t know, and right now he didn’t particularly care. He could only track one bastard at a time, and the bastard currently at the top of his list had a brain that could turn a man inside out without laying a finger on him.

Soldier Boy slowed when he saw him.

Mindstorm darted between the trees ahead, one hand pressed to his side, his shoulders hunched as if he could make himself smaller. His breathing came in ragged bursts. The man was afraid.

Mindstorm glanced back.

Soldier Boy immediately looked down, jaw tight. He stared at the man’s boots instead, at the mud kicking up behind them, at the blur of his legs as he vanished deeper into the woods.

“Not today, you glassy-eyed son of a bitch,” Soldier Boy muttered.

He broke into a run.

Branches whipped his face. Cold air tore through his lungs. Beneath him, the ground softened, becoming less snow and stone and more rot, more black soil. Each step sank deeper than it should have. The forest thickened with the rude confidence of something that did not want him there.

Up ahead, Mindstorm burst into a clearing.

Soldier Boy stopped just short of it, one hand closing around the trunk of a tree. He leaned out enough to see without offering his eyes.

There was a girl in the clearing.

No. Not a girl. A young woman, maybe. It was hard to tell at first because the woods seemed to have claimed her. She was filthy. Her dress, or shirt, or whatever ragged thing hung on her body, was smeared with mud and leaf-stain. Her hair was tangled with burrs and pine needles. Her bare feet were blackened up to the ankles. She looked exhausted in a way that went way past hunger, way past cold, way past merely being lost in the woods.

She looked like someone the forest had chewed up and not yet decided whether to swallow.

Mindstorm saw her too.

Soldier Boy could see the exact second the idea hit him.

Coward.

Mindstorm staggered toward her, his head lifting. The woman turned.

For one strange moment, she did not look afraid. Her eyes moved over Mindstorm slowly, as if she had been expecting someone to come through the trees eventually and was almost disappointed by what had arrived.

Then Mindstorm caught her gaze.

Her body locked as a sound tore out of her. Her knees hit the mud, and her hands flew to her head, fingers clawing into her hair as if she could dig him out. She bent forward, back arching, every muscle in her body straining.

Then she began to cry. A thin, terrible, broken sound that scraped against the cold air and seemed to go up into the branches. She writhed on the ground, heels dragging trenches through the mud, her mouth open around words that would not come.

Mindstorm stood over her, panting, one hand trembling at his side.

Soldier Boy’s grip tightened around the rifle.

Something else was wrong.

The soil under Mindstorm and the girl had begun to vibrate.

At first, Soldier Boy thought it was him. Maybe Mindstorm was fucking with his brain somehow, or it was adrenaline or rage. Maybe some tremor in his hands from having this bastard so close.

But no. The mud was shivering. Pine needles trembled. Little beads of water quivered in the moss.

And the smell.

“Jesus,” Soldier Boy breathed.

Earth.

That was the only word for it, and it was a dumb goddamn word because he was standing in a forest. Of course it smelled like earth. But this was different. It was too much—too rich, like rain on soil, but deeper. Like something buried had opened its mouth. Like wet roots and mushrooms and old leaves mashed into the back of his tongue. It didn’t just sit in his nose. It seemed to be inside him… the walls of his nostrils, his lungs, in his throat, his eyes, between his teeth.

That did it.

Soldier Boy moved like a cat.

Mindstorm never heard him.

He crossed the clearing in three hard, silent strides, came up behind the twitching bastard, and grabbed his head with both hands.

Mindstorm barely had time to gasp before Soldier Boy twisted his neck.

The crack sounded obscenely small in the clearing.

Mindstorm’s body went slack and dropped.

Everything stopped.

For a few seconds, there was only Soldier Boy breathing hard through his nose and the soft patter of snowmelt dripping from branches. He stared down at Mindstorm’s body, waiting for some last trick. Some last twitch. Some last psychic little fuck-you.

Nothing.

The woman lay on her side in the mud, catching her breath. Then, slowly, she pushed herself up.

Her hands sank into the soil. Her fingers spread against it, trembling. Her head bowed, hair hanging over her face. She breathed once. Twice. Three times. Then she looked up at him.

Her eyes were clear. Too clear. Dark and damp-looking. She looked at him with the stunned softness of someone waking from a nightmare.

“Thank you,” she said.

Her voice was quiet. Almost gentle. Soldier Boy snorted because that was easier than thinking about the way she’d said it.

“You’re wel—”

The word died halfway out. Mindstorm’s body moved.

Not on its own.

The earth moved around him. Vines rose from the mud.

Soldier Boy took one step back.

They came up slowly at first, thin as cords, slick and black and green, some alive and glossy, others half-rotten, splitting at the seams, leaking brown pulp. They slid over Mindstorm’s boots, his legs, his torso. One curled around his wrist with almost tender patience.

Then they found his face.

The vines pushed into Mindstorm’s mouth. His dead jaw opened wider than it should have.

More came. Into his ears. His nostrils. The corners of his eyes. One fat black root punched through the soft place beneath his ribs with a wet crack. Another threaded itself into the hollow of his throat.

Soldier Boy watched, disgust tightening his mouth, as the body began to sink.

The earth softened beneath Mindstorm like a bed being made. Mud rose around him. His chest caved inward as something below pulled. His head tilted back, mouth stuffed full of roots, eyes already clouding as pale mushrooms pushed up through the skin of his cheek.

And then it stopped.

He lay there among churned mud and a few trembling vines.

Soldier Boy looked at the woman.

“That you?”

She was sitting on her knees in the mud. Her breathing had steadied. Her face was streaked with tears, dirt, and something faintly green beneath the skin near her jaw.

“Yeah,” she said.

Soldier Boy stared.

“That’s fucking disgusting.”

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t look offended. In fact, she smiled. It was small. Tired. Almost amused.

“It’s not disgusting once you’re in it.”

Soldier Boy’s brows lifted.

“Lucky for me, I don’t want to find out.”

Her smile widened by the tiniest degree. For a second, neither of them moved. Then Soldier Boy became aware that she was looking at him.

Not the way people usually looked at him. Not with awe or fear. Not even, to his disappointment, like a woman who spied a man built like a wall. This was different.

This was assessment.

She studied his chest first, the rise and fall of it. His shoulders. His hands. The mud on his boots. The place where his heart must be under armor and muscle and years of government lies. Her gaze moved over him like fingers testing fruit for bruises.

He was still breathing hard. He hated that she noticed.

“We got a problem?” he asked.

She tilted her head. The forest tilted with her. Or maybe it only felt that way.

“No,” she said slowly. “But I think you do.”

Soldier Boy’s mouth opened.

Then he felt it.

A pressure under his ribs.

Small at first. Like someone had slipped a thumb between the bones and pressed upward. Then, his nostrils flared. The smell of earth thickened. A cough climbed into his throat. Not a normal cough. Not smoke or dust. This was something trying to become a word. Something trying to come up with roots.

He swallowed it down. It pushed back.

Soldier Boy’s eyes snapped to her.

That was the moment he understood.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” he demanded.

The cough broke out of him before he could stop it. It bent him forward, one hand bracing on his knee. The sound was rough, violent, ugly. He tasted metal. Soil. Rainwater.

The woman rose slowly to her feet.

“Don’t fight it,” she said.

Softly. Like she was comforting him. Like he was the frightened thing. Soldier Boy reacted exactly how he should have.

Violently.

His chest lit.

The light started beneath the armor, a hot, nuclear glow blooming through seams and cracks. The air snapped tight around him. Leaves lifted off the ground. The woman’s hair blew back from her face, revealing the sudden wideness of her eyes.

Good. Fear looked better on her.

“Back up,” he snarled.

She didn’t. So he let go.

The blast ripped through the clearing.

Gold-white fire exploded from his chest and slammed into her hard enough to throw her off her feet. Her body flew backward through brush and snow and brittle branches. Trees snapped behind her. Birds erupted from the canopy in a black, frantic storm.

The vines shriveled instantly.

The mud steamed.

Mushrooms burst and blackened.

The whole clearing flashed hot and bright, turning winter into one violent second of summer death.

Spores burned gold in the air. Millions of them. They glittered around him like dust in church light, like ash, like tiny suns dying one by one.

Soldier Boy fell to one knee.

The cough tore through him again.

This time it hurt.

Something inside his chest burned with him, a bright little shard of pain lodged under his ribs. He pressed a fist to his sternum and breathed through clenched teeth.

The forest crackled.

Charred branches fell. Steam rose from the mud. The air smelled scorched now, the rich earth stink beaten back under smoke and heat.

He spat into the dirt.

“Yeah,” he rasped. “That’s what I thought.”

For one beautiful second, he believed it.

He believed the thing inside him had burned with the rest of it. He believed the woman was dead. He believed the world still worked the way it was supposed to work: man hits harder, man wins.

Then something moved beyond the broken trees.

Soldier Boy lifted his head.

She got up. Slowly. Awkwardly. Like a woman climbing out of her own grave.

Her clothes were burned. Her skin was blackened across one shoulder, one cheek, the side of her throat. Her hair smoked. One hand hung at a strange angle.

She looked down at herself. Then at the forest around her.

The scorched trees. The steaming mud. The dead vines.

For the first time, she seemed truly surprised.

She blinked.

Then she closed her eyes and lifted her face toward the canopy.

The forest answered… a wet, tearing sound echoed across the floor, then the ground split. Roots punched up through mud and melted snow, thick and pale and obscene, twisting over one another like intestines pulled from the earth. Luminous mushrooms erupted in clusters where Mindstorm’s body lay, fat white caps breaking through black soil, then blue ones, then bruised purple growths that pulsed at the edges.

Black vines crawled up the scorched trees, invading. They wrapped around burned bark and squeezed until flakes of charcoal fell away. New bark pushed through underneath, too fast, too wet, the color of raw flesh before deepening into brown. New leaves unfurled in violent shudders. Moss spread across stones in crawling patches.

It was not beautiful… it was far too greedy for that.

A cancer of green.

Soldier Boy stared as the blast radius healed itself badly, eagerly, hungrily.

Her burned skin knit back together, too.

Not cleanly, like some shiny supe trick Vought would show in their films. The blackened parts split open and flushed green underneath before turning brown, then red, then skin again. Tiny filaments crawled across her cheek and sank beneath the surface. Her broken wrist snapped back into place with a soft, woody crack.

The spores he’d burned were still everywhere, golden motes drifting through the clearing, settling into mud, bark, wounds, breath.

Fuel.

His blast had been fuel.

She finally opened her eyes.

“That’s…” He swallowed, the movement rough. “That’s not supposed to happen.”

The woman stared at her own hands. She looked as unsettled as he felt. Then her gaze flicked to his chest. A strange expression crossed her face.

Recognition, maybe.

Or hunger.

Soldier Boy straightened.

“Hey,” he snapped. “Don’t look at me like that.”

She took a step back. Then another. The forest behind her seemed to make room.

“Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

She stepped behind a tree.

Soldier Boy moved after her immediately, boots tearing through the soft, restless mud. He circled the trunk fast, Glock up.

Nothing.

No woman. Not even a footprint.

Soldier Boy stood there, breathing hard.

“What,” he said.

The forest dripped. He turned once, slowly, scanning the trees.

“The.”

A breeze moved through the branches.

“Fuck.”

Behind him, someone crashed through brush with all the grace of a drunk bear.

“Oi!” a voice cut through the trees. “Soldier Boy!”

Soldier Boy lowered the rifle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The cough waited under his ribs. He forced it down.

Butcher appeared first, coat swinging, eyes sharp. Hughie stumbled after him, pale and breathless, one hand braced on a tree.

Butcher’s gaze moved over the clearing before settling on the body.

“Bloody hell,” Butcher said. “Is that Mindstorm?”

Hughie took one step closer and immediately regretted it.

“Oh my God.” He pressed a hand over his mouth. “Jesus, what happened to him? He looks like he’s been decomposing for a week.”

Soldier Boy rolled his shoulders.

“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat. It came out rougher than he wanted. “All in a day’s work.”

Butcher looked at him. Soldier Boy pretended not to notice.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I need a damn drink.”

He started past them. The cough hit halfway through the first step. He stopped, bent slightly, and coughed hard into his fist.

Once.

Twice.

The third one dragged something up from deep in his chest, wet and dark and burning. For a second, his vision speckled gold.

Hughie’s expression changed.

“Uh… you okay, man?”

Soldier Boy straightened too fast.

“I’m fine, Nancy.”

Soldier Boy walked on, and as he moved closer to Butcher, the other man’s face shifted.

It was subtle. Butcher was good at being subtle when he wanted to be — tiny tightening around the eyes, slight flare of the nostrils. His gaze dropped to Soldier Boy’s chest, then rose to his face.

Soldier Boy stopped.

“What?”

Butcher gave him a slow once-over.

“Nothing.”

“Didn’t look like nothing.”

“Then you’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Soldier Boy leaned in a fraction. Butcher didn’t move. For a second, the two men stood close enough for violence to become a language.

Then Hughie coughed awkwardly.

“Hey, maybe we can do the macho staring contest somewhere that doesn’t have corpse mushrooms?”

Butcher’s eyes stayed on Soldier Boy one second longer.

Then he smiled.

Not warmly.

“Come on then,” he said. “Drink’s on you.”

***

The diner looked like every diner Soldier Boy remembered, and none of them at the same time.

Red vinyl booths. Chrome edges. Fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. A pie display by the register, sweating sugar under a plastic dome. Coffee that smelled rancid but did the job.

He liked it immediately.

A waitress at the counter dropped a spoon as soon as he’d entered. Another woman, older, with a pencil tucked into her hair, pressed a hand to her chest. A college-aged girl sitting with two friends stopped chewing her food.

Soldier Boy smirked.

“Finally,” he said. “Civilization.”

“That what we calling this?” Butcher muttered.

They took a booth near the window. Soldier Boy sat facing the room because he wasn’t an idiot. Butcher slid in across from him. Hughie sat beside Butcher and reached for the sticky laminated menu.

The waitress appeared before they’d even settled.

She was blonde, middle-aged, tired around the eyes, and suddenly smiling like she’d discovered God had shoulders.

“Well,” she said. “What can I get you boys?”

“Coffee,” Butcher said.

“Same,” Hughie added. “Please.”

Soldier Boy leaned back.

“Whiskey.”

The waitress laughed. Then stopped when he didn’t.

“Honey, we don’t serve whiskey.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

Her cheeks flushed. Butcher rubbed a hand over his face.

“Coffee for him too.”

“And pie,” Soldier Boy said.

“What kind?”

He looked toward the display.

“Apple.”

The waitress smiled again, too wide. “On the house.”

Hughie looked up.

“Oh. Cool. Uh, could I maybe get—”

She had already walked away. Hughie’s mouth stayed open for half a second.

“Great,” he said, turning to Soldier Boy. “Happy for you.”

Soldier Boy grinned.

“Don’t hate the player.”

“I’m not hating the player. I’m hating the sociological structure surrounding the player.”

Butcher snorted. The pie came first. The waitress set it in front of Soldier Boy with a fork and a little extra whipped cream melting at the edge.

“For you,” she said.

She blushed, as if she had confessed something. Butcher stared at the pie.

“Any chance our coffee’s coming before the Second Coming?”

The waitress blinked, as if noticing him for the first time.

“Oh. Right. Sorry.”

She left. Soldier Boy took a bite of pie. It was sickly sweet. He ate it anyway.

“Still got it,” he said, his mouth full.

Hughie watched the waitress refill coffee at three other tables and skip theirs entirely.

“Yeah. This is magical.”

At first, Soldier Boy enjoyed it. Of course he did.

People kept looking. Women especially. Some openly. Some pretending not to. One woman at the counter turned fully around on her stool and just watched him lift his fork to his mouth like it was an event.

It was good. It was familiar. It was proof that whatever had happened in the woods was behind him.

Then it got weird.

A man in a trucker hat near the window leaned forward and sniffed.

Soldier Boy paused with the fork halfway to his mouth.

The man looked embarrassed and immediately stared down at his plate.

Soldier Boy’s eyes narrowed.

Another woman walked past their booth on the way to the restroom and slowed as she passed him. Her pupils were huge. She looked dazed. Not aroused, not exactly afraid. More like she had heard music no one else could hear.

“You smell nice,” she whispered.

Hughie slowly lowered his menu. Soldier Boy turned his head.

“What?”

The woman blinked, horrified by herself.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I don’t know why I said that.”

Butcher went very still. Soldier Boy looked at him.

“Don’t.”

Butcher lifted both hands.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The waitress finally returned with coffee. She filled Butcher’s cup. Then Soldier Boy’s. Then, instead of moving to Hughie’s, she stood there staring at Soldier Boy’s hand where it rested on the table.

Hughie waited. His empty cup waited.

The universe waited.

“Coffee?” Hughie prompted.

The waitress startled.

“Oh! Sorry.”

She poured. Missed half the cup. Coffee splashed into the saucer.

“Wow,” Hughie said softly. “I may be invisible.”

At the booth behind them, someone began to cry. It wasn’t loud; just a sudden, quiet hitching sob, but enough to make Soldier Boy turn and see a young woman, maybe twenty, sitting with both hands over her mouth. Tears ran down her face. Her friends looked alarmed.

“Kayla?” one of them said. “Babe, what’s wrong?”

The crying girl stared at Soldier Boy.

“My grandma,” she said.

Soldier Boy stared back.

“What?”

“My grandma used to smell like fresh earth after rain, too.”

Silence spread through the diner. Hughie’s face did something complicated. Butcher looked down at his coffee, lips twitching.

Soldier Boy set his fork down slowly.

“Okay?”

The girl sobbed harder.

“She died when I was twelve.”

“Yeah, well.” He shifted in his seat. “Sorry about that.”

“That was almost sensitive,” Hughie whispered.

Soldier Boy kicked him under the table.

“Ow!”

The girl’s friend pulled her close, glaring at Soldier Boy like he had personally resurrected the memory of Grandma. Soldier Boy leaned toward Butcher.

“What the fuck is happening?”

Butcher took a sip of coffee.

“Fuckin’ beats me.”

Soldier Boy’s expression darkened.

Another person passed by and looked back at Soldier Boy with that same unfocused softness.

Like recognition.

Like longing.

Soldier Boy felt the pressure under his ribs again. This time, it was less pain and more… movement. Something unfurling inside of him, desperate to spread but being actively suppressed.

He coughed once into his fist.

Butcher saw it. Hughie saw Butcher seeing it. Soldier Boy saw both of them and hated them for it.

“I said I’m fine.”

“No one said anything,” Hughie replied.

“You were about to.”

“I was actually about to ask for my coffee to be refilled, but apparently that’s too much to expect.”

Soldier Boy stood, and the diner turned with him. Heads lifted. Eyes followed. A spoon clinked against a plate and kept clinking because the hand holding it had started to tremble.

He had been watched before.

This was not being watched. This was being hunted.

“We’re leaving. Now.”

Butcher did not argue. That was how Soldier Boy knew it was bad.

***

The motel sat off the road behind a dying neon sign that promised VACANCY in red letters and threatened tetanus in every other detail.

The woods pressed close behind it. They rose up beyond the parking lot in a thick black wall of pine and bare branches, decorative during the day and carnivorous at night.

Soldier Boy stood outside the office and stared at them.

The pressure under his ribs pulsed once.

He looked away.

Inside, the lobby smelled like dust, lemon cleaner, and an ashtray someone had lied about emptying. A small bell sat on the counter. Behind it, an old woman in a cardigan flipped slowly through a paperback with a shirtless cowboy on the cover.

Butcher rang the bell.

The woman looked up, and her eyes went straight past Butcher to Soldier Boy. She stared. Her expression emptied.

Not attraction, that would have been easier. This was recognition again. Slow and deep and wrong.

Butcher snapped his fingers in front of her face.

“Oi,” Butcher said. “Keys.”

She didn’t move. She barely breathed.

“Lady?” Butcher insisted. “We paid for two rooms. Unless you’re planning to tuck us in yourself, hand over the keys.”

The old woman blinked.

“Oh,” she said.

She reached below the counter and brought up two keys attached to ugly green plastic tags. But when she held them out, she did not look at Butcher.

She looked at Soldier Boy.

“The woods behind the motel are nice,” she said.

Hughie accepted one key because Butcher did not.

“Okay,” Hughie said carefully. “Thanks?”

The old woman kept staring.

“Especially after rains.”

Soldier Boy’s throat tightened. Butcher took the second key from her hand.

“Sure. We’ll be sure to leave a glowing review for the haunted shrubbery.”

They walked out. The night air hit colder than before. Soldier Boy stopped at the edge of the parking lot. The woods behind the motel stood dark and patient.

For one second, he thought he saw her there.

Between two trees. Dirty face. Dark eyes. Head tilted.

He looked harder and saw nothing. Only pine trunks.

Hughie came up beside him.

“Did you see something?”

Soldier Boy’s jaw worked.

“No.”

Butcher stood a few feet away, watching him with that sharp, mean patience of his. Soldier Boy looked at the woods one last time.

Deep in his chest, something shifted like a root finding softer ground.

***

The motel room smelled like damp carpet, stale cigarettes, cheap soap, and whatever sins the previous guests had succeeded in hiding from the cleaning lady.

Soldier Boy improved it by lighting another cigarette.

He sat in the armchair by the bed, one boot planted on the stained carpet, the other ankle hooked over his knee like he was posing for a recruiting poster nobody had asked for. The TV was on mute, washing blue light over the peeling wallpaper. A woman on-screen laughed soundlessly at something a man in a suit had said. Outside, wind dragged itself along the windows.

Hughie sat at the little desk near the corner, laptop open, one knee bouncing so fast it made the chair squeak.

Butcher had taken the bed nearest the door without asking. He was cleaning his gun with the sort of tenderness he reserved only for weapons.

Soldier Boy exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Hughie coughed once. Soldier Boy ignored him. Hughie coughed again, more pointedly.

“You know,” Hughie said, turning in his chair, “secondhand smoke is still, like, a thing.”

Soldier Boy looked at him.

“So’s first-hand shutting the fuck up.”

Hughie opened his mouth, thought better of it, then got up. He crossed the room and pulled back the curtain.

The window groaned when he shoved it open. Cold air slipped into the room at once, sharp and wet, carrying the smell of pine and dark earth from the woods behind the motel.

Soldier Boy’s cigarette paused halfway to his mouth.

The smell found him too quickly. It crawled under the smoke. Under the stale carpet and the chemical lemon of the bathroom cleaner. It slid into his nose like a finger pressing against a bruise.

His ribs tightened. He drew on the cigarette anyway.

Hughie leaned toward the open window, breathing in the cold air like it was saving his life. Then he went still.

“Uh…” Hughie said.

Butcher didn’t look up from his gun.

“What?”

“Butcher?”

That got Butcher’s attention. The small, horrified lift in Hughie’s voice, the part he could never completely kill despite the horrors, always did.

Butcher rose and crossed the room.

“What is it?”

Hughie pointed down. Butcher looked out the window.

Three people stood in the parking lot below. The crying girl from the diner. The trucker-hat man who had sniffed the air like an embarrassed bloodhound. The waitress who had forgotten Hughie’s coffee and stared at Soldier Boy’s hands like they were religious artifacts.

They were standing under the motel’s flickering exterior light, faces tipped upward. They all looked desperate and hopeful and loving. The girl had tears shining on her cheeks. Her mouth trembled with the effort of holding something back. The trucker-hat man clutched his cap against his chest. The waitress stood with both hands folded beneath her chin, her expression soft and ruined.

They were looking up at the motel window.

Butcher squinted.

“Those the cunts from the diner?”

“Looks like it,” Hughie said.

Hughie slowly backed away from the window.

“Are we being watched?”

Soldier Boy stood.

The old floorboards creaked under his weight as he crossed the room. Hughie moved aside before being moved aside. Butcher stayed at the window, jaw tight, eyes tracking the three figures below.

Soldier Boy looked down.

The waitress smiled. It was not flirtatious now. There was only worship in it, and not the kind he got off on watching as he fucked a woman.

Soldier Boy’s face changed. He grabbed the window and slammed it shut. The old frame rattled. He yanked the curtains closed with enough force to nearly rip them off the rod.

For a second, no one said anything.

The room felt smaller with the curtains shut. The cigarette smoke hung low and thick. Butcher was still standing close to him.

Too close.

Soldier Boy turned just in time to see Butcher inhale.

It was subtle. Involuntary. A small flare of his nostrils, a tiny pull of breath through the nose, but Soldier Boy saw it.

His head snapped toward him.

“Did you just fucking smell me?”

Butcher froze.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I did not.”

“You just sniffed me like a goddamn dog.”

Butcher’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Soldier Boy stepped toward him.

“What the fuck is wrong with all of you?”

Butcher looked annoyed. Then he looked, for half a second, unsettled.

“Look, mate,” he said, voice rougher than usual, “you look like a war crime, but you smell like a pine forest. It’s a little odd, considering we’ve been asking you to take a fucking shower and you refuse to.”

Hughie made a tiny, strangled noise. Soldier Boy turned on him.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just… accurate.”

Soldier Boy pointed at him with the cigarette.

“You wanna join the parking lot fan club?”

“No. Very much no.”

Soldier Boy shoved the cigarette between his teeth and stalked toward the bathroom.

“Whatever. I have to take a leak.”

He had barely made it two steps before Butcher’s hand closed around his arm.

It was fast. Too fast for him to have thought about it. Fingers around his bicep. A grip meant to stop him.

Soldier Boy stopped.

Slowly, he looked down at the hand touching him. Butcher looked down, too. For one stupid, stunned second, both of them stared at the contact as though it had happened without either of their permission.

Then Soldier Boy lifted his gaze.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Butcher let go immediately. He flexed his hand once, like he didn’t recognize it.

“No idea why I did that.”

Soldier Boy glared at him. Butcher glared back. It should have ended there.

It didn’t.

Because Butcher was breathing.

And every breath dragged more of Soldier Boy in.

The scent had gotten worse in the closed room, thickening under the smoke. Pine needles crushed under boots. Wet bark split open. Soil after rain. Something green and ancient and darkly clean beneath the layer of blood, leather, ash, and masculine rot Soldier Boy usually carried.

Butcher’s nostrils flared again.

His eyes flicked down.

To Soldier Boy’s mouth.

Then lower.

To his chest.

Then back up.

Something ugly and alarmed went through Butcher’s face. Soldier Boy moved before anyone could blink. He caught Butcher by the throat, lifted him off his feet, and slammed him into the wall, teeth bared.

The lamp rattled. Hughie yelped. Butcher’s gun hit the carpet.

“What the fuck are you looking at?” Soldier Boy snarled.

Butcher grabbed his wrist with both hands, boots kicking once against the wall. Hughie surged forward. Soldier Boy didn’t even look at him.

“Take one more step, and I’ll put you through the fucking ceiling.”

Hughie stopped, hands half-raised.

“Okay. Okay. Nobody’s going through any ceilings. They charge for damages.”

Butcher’s face had gone red.

“You’re fuckin’ paranoid,” he choked out. “Fuckin’ fossil.”

Soldier Boy tightened his grip. Butcher’s eyes watered. Hughie’s voice jumped an octave.

“Hey, Soldier Boy, just lay off the weed, maybe?”

Soldier Boy finally looked at him.

“How about you gargle my ballsack?”

Hughie recoiled.

“Wow. Okay.”

Soldier Boy jerked his chin toward Butcher.

“Bet your boy Butcher would like that. Looking at me like he wants to take me to fucking prom.”

Even while being strangled, Butcher managed to look offended.

“Put me down, ya cunt!”

Soldier Boy held him there for another second. Just one. Long enough to make a point. Long enough to feel Butcher’s pulse hammering against his palm. Long enough for something uncomfortable under his own ribs to answer it.

A faint pressure, begging to be set free. The shrapnel in his chest, burning a hole.

Soldier Boy dropped him.

Butcher hit the carpet hard, coughing and cursing. Soldier Boy stepped back, breathing through his nose.

“Don’t fucking look at me again.”

He walked into the bathroom and slammed the door.

Inside, the air was worse.

The bathroom was tiled in a yellow that had once been optimistic and was now only damp. A strip light buzzed above the mirror. The sink had rust around the drain and a crack running from one corner like a vein.

Soldier Boy gripped the edge of the basin and looked at himself.

He looked fine. Of course he looked fine. His hair was a little dirty. His jaw was shadowed. His eyes were bloodshot from smoke, lack of sleep, and being surrounded by idiots. But he looked like himself. Solid. Unkillable.

Then the cough came, and it folded him in half.

He slammed one hand against the sink and coughed hard enough to make the mirror tremble. The sound tore through him from somewhere deep and wrong, somewhere below the lungs, below the ribs.

He spat into the basin.

Black specks dotted the porcelain.

Red blood spread around them in thin, watery lines.

Then something else came out.

Thin and pale, almost white. Like a hair.

Soldier Boy stared.

The hair curled, all by itself, on the porcelain. It was slow and deliberate, almost like it was assessing its environment.

Soldier Boy recoiled so hard his hand crushed the edge of the sink. A crack shot through it with a sharp pop.

“Motherfucker.”

The thing twitched toward the blood. He slapped the tap on and let water blast into the basin. The hair clung to the porcelain for half a second, impossibly strong, its pale thread bending under the pressure.

Then it vanished down the drain.

Soldier Boy stood there with both hands braced on either side of the sink, breathing hard.

His reflection looked back at him.

For the first time all night, it did not look entirely convinced by him.

He turned the water hotter. Steam began to rise.

He rinsed the sink until the blood was gone. Then he rinsed it again. Then he cupped water in his hands and splashed his mouth like he could wash out whatever was already growing in there.

When he came out, Butcher was waiting in the hall.

That alone was enough to make him suspicious. Butcher did not wait outside bathrooms. Butcher did not hover. Butcher did not have the emotional range for concern or care unless it served him to be that way.

He stood with one shoulder against the wall, arms crossed, throat still faintly red where Soldier Boy’s hand had been. His eyes lifted immediately.

“You sick?”

“No.”

“You look like shit.”

“I always look good.”

“You coughed like a dying old man.”

Soldier Boy’s face hardened.

“You been listening to me piss too?”

Butcher’s jaw flexed. He was standing too close again. Close enough that Soldier Boy saw the exact moment he caught the scent. The way his face tightened, like a man taking a punch and refusing to show it.

“Step the fuck back,” Soldier Boy said.

“Oh, don’t start again.”

“I’ll finish it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Big man. Nuclear tits. We all know.”

Soldier Boy took one slow step toward him. Butcher did not move. Behind them, Hughie appeared in the doorway of the room, laptop forgotten in one hand.

“Okay,” Hughie said carefully. “Look. Something happened to you in that forest.”

Both men turned to him.

“And,” Hughie pushed on, voice going a little faster because fear always made him more honest, “instead of dealing with that, you two are doing this… whatever this is.”

Butcher looked at him flatly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Hughie looked between them. The red mark on Butcher’s throat. Soldier Boy’s clenched jaw. The air in the hallway, thick with pine and smoke and testosterone and something that did not belong indoors.

“Can we just talk about it instead of trying to kill each other?” Hughie asked.

Then, because Hughie apparently had a death wish, he added, “Or… fuck each other?”

Silence. Soldier Boy moved. Hughie squeaked and threw one hand up.

“I’m sorry! Bad timing! Very bad read of the room!”

Soldier Boy was halfway to punching him when the cough hit again. Harder this time. It came out of nowhere and seized him by the ribs, dragging him sideways into the wall. He caught himself with one hand, fingers digging into the peeling wallpaper.

Butcher’s face changed. Hughie forgot to be scared.

“Jesus, are you o—”

A knock sounded at the door. All three of them froze.

Three taps against wood practically falling apart. Not housekeeping, too soft for that. Probably someone more careful.

“What?” he called.

For a moment, there was nothing. Then a woman’s voice came through the door.

“Please,” she said. “Let me in.”

Hughie’s face went pale. Butcher lifted the gun. Soldier Boy stared at the door.

The voice was not the waitress or the old woman from the front desk. Younger, maybe. Trembling. Wet with longing.

Butcher stepped closer to the door, gun angled low.

“Who are you?”

“Please,” the voice said again.

A hand pressed against the outside of the door. They could hear it. A soft drag of palm against painted wood.

“I just… I need to see him. Please.”

Hughie and Butcher both looked at Soldier Boy. Ordinarily, that would have been his cue. He should have smirked. Made some comment about women being unable to resist him. Said something crude enough to make Hughie wish he had been born without ears.

But the joke did not come.

Because there was too much to this now. Some rot that had settled in his lungs, some inexplicable mojo drawing old women, young women, old men, violent men, to him. And the fucking cough… the feeling of something lodged in his chest, desperately trying to get out.

And underneath all of it, deep where arrogance usually sat, something small and cold had opened its eyes.

Fear.

Butcher saw it.

“Fuck off, lady,” Butcher called.

Silence.

A second later, a small sob, followed by soft footsteps pitter-pattering away.

Butcher kept the gun trained on the door for a few more seconds before stepping back.

“Right,” Hughie said, rubbing both hands over his face. “Let’s just try to sleep, okay? Which is an insane thing to say, because there are woodland groupies outside, but I’ve had enough weird shit for today.”

No one answered.

Hughie pointed toward the adjoining wall.

“I’ll be in the next room tracking the other supes in Soldier Boy’s old crew. Try to stay alive till morning.”

He looked between Soldier Boy and Butcher again.

“Separately, ideally.”

Soldier Boy gave him a look that promised future violence. Hughie nodded.

“Yep. Goodnight.”

He slipped into the next room and shut the door. Butcher dragged the motel chair under the handle of the main door. Soldier Boy watched him do it.

“Think that’s gonna stop something?”

“No,” Butcher said. “But it’ll make me feel less stupid.”

For once, Soldier Boy had nothing to say to that.

They did not talk after.

Butcher took the bed by the door. Soldier Boy took the other one, boots still on, one arm folded beneath his head. The TV stayed on mute. Blue light flickered over the ceiling. Outside, the wind moved through the trees behind the motel.

Soldier Boy shut his eyes.

Sleep took him badly…

He was on the ground.

Cold, black soil beneath his back. Wet enough to soak through his clothes. The sky above him was gone, replaced by a ceiling of roots, thick and knotted, woven together like veins under skin. Somewhere above those roots was the world, but he could not see it anymore.

He was bleeding. He knew that before he saw it. He felt it leaving him.

Warmth spilling from his chest, his mouth, his palms, his ribs. Blood ran down his sides and into the soil beneath him. It should have hurt. It should have enraged him. He should have fought, should have cursed, should have clawed his way upward and found something to kill.

Instead, relief washed through him so strong, it was almost pleasure.

There had been too much blood in him, anyway.

That was the thought.

Too much blood. Too much heat. Too much noise. Too much old violence packed under skin and muscle. His body had been a sealed thing for too long—a bunker, a weapon, a fist refusing to open.

Now it was opening. Now he was emptying.

The soil drank greedily.

He could feel it. Every drop taken. Every wound welcomed. The earth beneath him softened around his back like a mouth, like a bed, like hands.

He was getting lighter.

Freer.

Happier.

His armor sank first. Then his shoulders.

The soil closed around his arms, hugging him gently. Mud pushed between his fingers with almost tender pressure. Roots brushed his wrists. Worms moved near his knuckles, blind and purposeful. Beetles clicked in hidden pockets of earth. Fungal threads stretched in pale webs through the darkness, finer than hair, connecting root to root, bone to seed, rot to beauty.

He saw things he should not have been able to see.

A dead fox curled beneath a cedar, ribs clean and skull full of moss.

A century of leaves pressed into black memory.

White larvae turning blindly in the sweet meat of a fallen branch.

Old rain.

Stone sleeping deeper down.

Seeds waiting with the patience of little bombs.

Roots everywhere. Always reaching. Drinking. Speaking in pungent chemical whispers.

He sank deeper. The blood kept leaving him. The soil loved him for it. Not like a woman, not like a cheering crowd outside Vought Tower, not like a country that pretended to respect its heroes. This love had no face and no mercy. It wanted all of him because all of him could be used—blood to feed, bone to cradle, breath to sweeten darkness, and heat to wake the sleeping spores.

Nature, his dreaming mind told him.

Normal.

The way it was meant to be. This is soft. This is natural. This should happen.

It should happen. It should happen. It should happen. It should happen.

Let it happen. Let it happen. Let it happen.

He opened his mouth to breathe.

Soil poured in.

He did not choke. It filled his mouth, warm and wet and granular. It slid over his tongue. Packed behind his teeth. Pushed down his throat.

His eyes filled next.

Then his nose.

The earth entered him gently.

Completely.

Soldier Boy woke with a violent jolt. He sat upright in the motel bed, dragging air into his lungs in huge, ugly gulps.

For one second, he did not know where he was.

Blue TV light. Peeling wallpaper. The stink of cigarettes. Butcher in the other bed, awakened by the noise and already staring at him.

Then Soldier Boy started coughing.

It tore through the room.

He doubled over, one hand braced on the mattress, the other clamped over his mouth. The cough kept coming, worse than before. Like something inside him had grown while he slept and now resented being woken.

“You good?”

Soldier Boy coughed into his fist until his shoulders shook. When it finally stopped, the room rang with the sound of his breathing.

He stayed bent over.

Slowly, he opened his hand.

Blood slicked his palm.

Dark red. Too much of it. And in the blood, a black thread twitched. Thin as a root hair and all too alive.

It curled once against his skin.

Soldier Boy stared at it as fear washed over him all over again. He closed his fist around it, then looked at Butcher.

“Okay,” he said.

His voice was low. Hoarse.

“We’re going back.”

***

The forest welcomed Soldier Boy back like it had been expecting him.

That pissed him off.

It should have looked different now that he knew what was hiding inside it. More dramatic, maybe. More obviously wrong. There should have been a line somewhere, some threshold marked by dead birds or bones or trees bending backward from the path in warning.

Instead, the forest was simply… there. Patient and expectant like all rude forests.

They crossed the old service road just past dawn, though dawn did very little for the place. The light came down weak and gray, trapped in a low ceiling of cloud before it could warm anything. Snowmelt ran in thin veins across cracked asphalt. Black moss had climbed into the fractures, pushing through the road as if the earth had taken the man-made thing personally and was slowly prying it open with its fingers.

Soldier Boy stepped off the asphalt first.

The soil gave beneath his boot. His heel sank half an inch, and something under the ground shifted in answer.

He stopped.

Behind him, Hughie stopped too. Butcher stopped because Soldier Boy had stopped, which annoyed all three of them for different reasons.

“What is it?” Hughie asked.

Soldier Boy stared down at his boot. The mud sat around the sole like a mouth that had not yet decided whether to bite.

“Nothing.”

“That’s becoming my least favorite word,” Hughie muttered.

Soldier Boy kept walking.

The trees leaned over the path in a long, dark arch. Pines mostly, with a few skeletal oaks scattered among them, their bare branches clawing at the colorless sky. Everything had a wet shine to it: bark, stones, dead leaves, the underbellies of mushrooms growing in thick shelves along fallen trunks. The air had that same impossible density as before, the same too-rich smell of soaked roots and split bark and rain pulled from deep earth.

Hughie was keeping his distance with impressive commitment. He trailed several yards behind, one hand clamped over his nose and mouth like a child walking past a garbage truck. Every so often, he lowered it to breathe properly, regretted that instantly, and covered his face again.

“Just so everyone is clear,” Hughie said through his fingers, “this is not me being cowardly. This is me making a very rational choice based on recent events.”

Soldier Boy and Butcher both ignored him.

Butcher walked closer.

Not shoulder-to-shoulder, but close enough for Soldier Boy to feel him there. Close enough for Butcher’s boots to crush the same leaves a second after his own.

Soldier Boy noticed.

Normally, he would have enjoyed it. There were not many pleasures left in the modern world, but making William Butcher uncomfortable was absolutely one of them. The man was hard to rattle in the way roaches were hard to kill. Watching him fight his own body, watching his jaw tighten every few seconds like he was physically dragging himself backward from a ledge, should have been funny.

It was not funny because Soldier Boy knew why.

Every few steps, his chest tightened. Every few steps, something deep in him pulled toward the trees. Not pain. Pain was simple. This was worse, though he didn’t quite feel like scrambling for the vocabulary to explain why.

His throat burned. His lungs felt damp from the inside, as if condensation had gathered where breath should be. He turned his head and spat into the dead leaves.

Black flecks landed on the ground.

The leaves underneath them curled, as if burning from contact. Then the stems softened and the brown surface darkened. Something tiny and white broke through the center vein of one leaf, a thread no thicker than hair.

Hughie made a small, distressed sound.

“That’s… new.”

Soldier Boy wiped his mouth with the back of his glove.

“It’s not new.”

“It is extremely new to me.”

Butcher stared at the black flecks for half a second too long. Then he looked away like he had caught himself doing something worse.

Soldier Boy turned on him.

“What?”

Butcher’s expression stayed hard.

“Nothing.”

“Then stop looking.”

“I’m looking at the disease you’re leaking all over the fucking place.”

Soldier Boy’s eyes narrowed.

“You were looking at my mouth again.”

Butcher’s head snapped toward him.

“Say that one more time.”

Soldier Boy took one slow step toward him. Butcher did not step back. That was Butcher’s problem. Maybe his whole problem. He never knew when to step back until the thing in front of him had already put its hand around his throat.

“Alright,” Hughie said quickly, voice pitching high. “Maybe we don’t do this in the cursed forest.”

The trees creaked.

Not from wind. From attention.

It moved through them in a slow ripple, a soft complaint of wood against wood. Branches shifted even though the air was still. Needles trembled. Somewhere nearby, water dripped in a steady rhythm that sounded too much like counting.

Soldier Boy tightened his grip around his shield. The leather strap groaned under his fingers.

Then, somewhere ahead, a woman laughed.

It was almost fond. Even Soldier Boy, who was always ready for a fight, couldn’t find a shred of malice in it.

Butcher raised his shotgun in one clean movement. Hughie took one meaningful step backward. Soldier Boy did not move.

The smell thickened. Wet earth. Rain. Mushrooms splitting open in the dark.

She stepped out from between two trees.

The woman looked better than she should have, and Soldier Boy hated that.

The last time he had seen her, she had been burned open by his blast, skin split and smoking, roots knitting themselves through the wounds while the forest erupted around her in a frenzy of wrong growth. Now she stood barefoot on the wet ground with her hair loose around her shoulders. Her dress hung from her body in pale green and beige layers, something between cotton and soft linen. Mud still marked her calves, and a thin vine circled one ankle like jewelry.

She looked more human now.

Until she tilted her head, and Soldier Boy caught the movement under her skin.

Not veins. Not muscle. Something… branching. A shadow of roots traveling beneath the surface, delicate and alive.

She smiled at him.

“You came back.”

Soldier Boy lifted his gun and fired. Hughie yelped behind him. Butcher did not.

The bullet should have gone straight through her chest. It did, technically.

Her body opened around it.

The place where her heart should have been separated with horrifying grace. Skin, ribs, and tissue dissolved into a thousand fine black-green particles, like a swarm of insects moving with one mind. The bullet passed through clean air. For one second, Soldier Boy could see the trees behind her through the gap in her torso.

Then the pieces came back together.

A woman again.

She looked down at herself, then back up at him.

“That was rude.”

Soldier Boy fired again.

This time, her shoulder opened. The bullet cut through nothing but the space she had made for it. Her body moved aside in a living cloud, neat and intimate and revolting, then sealed back into shape.

He kept firing.

Chest. Throat. Stomach. Face.

Each shot made a temporary absence.

A hole through her cheek where her smile remained somehow intact. A gap below her collarbone where darkness fluttered. A tunnel through her ribs revealing wet bark and pale morning beyond. Every time the swarm of her parted, let violence pass, then returned to the idea of a woman.

Hughie looked like he might throw up.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “Oh my God, that is so much worse than healing.”

Butcher’s shotgun stayed aimed, but he had gone very still.

She took one step forward. Soldier Boy pulled the trigger again. The gun clicked empty. The sound was small and humiliating.

She glanced at it.

“Feel better?”

He threw the gun aside.

“Not even a little.”

Her gaze slid over him. Not flirtatious… worse.

Her eyes moved from his mouth to his throat, down to his chest, then lower to the hand curled around the shield strap. She was studying him the way doctors studied lab results.

“You’re sweating,” she said.

“It’s humid.”

“It’s actually cold.”

“Then I’m pissed off.”

“You’re coughing less now, too.”

His jaw tightened.

Her eyes moved down to his chest, and something in him answered before he could stop it. A loosening. A sick, traitorous ease.

“Your body knows where it is,” she said.

Butcher made a sharp little sound, half laugh, half disgust.

“Your body knows where it is. Ain’t that lovely.”

She looked at him. Then she smiled properly.

Butcher’s breath stalled. His fingers tightened around the shotgun. His eyes flicked over her face, dropped to her mouth, then tore away with a violence that made the movement more obvious than if he had simply stared.

Her smile deepened.

“Awww,” she said softly. “You too.”

“Me too, what?” Butcher asked.

“You want him too. Like all the others.”

Butcher looked like he had just been stabbed directly in the pride.

“I’d rather fuck Hughie.”

“Thanks, man,” came Hughie’s voice from the back.

Butcher looked at her. “You so much as breathe in my direction, I’ll turn you into compost myself.”

She blinked, calm as rainwater sliding down bark.

“Your pulse changed when you threatened me.”

She turned back to Soldier Boy, amused now. Curious, he stepped closer to the woman.

The relief hit him so fast it almost dropped him. His lungs opened. The pressure beneath his ribs loosened. The buzzing in his bones went quiet, as if someone had taken a power tool away from the inside of his skeleton.

For the first time since the motel bathroom, his body felt like his own.

She saw that too. Her expression turned pleased in a way he did not like.

“There,” she said. “All better now.”

Soldier Boy’s shield came up.

“Don’t say that like you fixed something.”

“I kind of did.”

“You caused it.”

“Also yes.”

“Get it out of me.”

Her smile thinned.

“I can’t.”

The forest seemed to go quiet around the answer. Even Hughie stopped breathing for a second. Soldier Boy stared at her. Then he laughed once, coldly.

“Wrong answer, doll.”

“I can calm it.”

“Didn’t ask for calm.”

“No,” she said. “But what you want is not possible.”

He took another step toward her. The ground softened beneath his boot. Butcher’s shotgun shifted.

“That’s close enough, Mother Nature.”

She frowned. “My name’s Blackroot.”

“'Course it is, love.”

Hughie looked at her. “What’s your real name?” he asked.

“Don’t know it,” she said, still walking towards Soldier Boy. “Don’t need it.”

“Stay back,” Butcher warned her again.

Soldier Boy did not look back.

“I got it, thanks.”

“You very clearly don’t got it,” Butcher said. “You’ve got half a salad bar growing in your lungs and every poor bastard within a mile trying to climb you like ivy.”

Her eyes glinted. Soldier Boy turned his head slowly.

“You done?”

“Not even started, mate.”

She moved closer, and Soldier Boy felt the thing inside him answer.

With hunger. With recognition.

His grip tightened around the leather strap.

She stopped just outside arm’s reach. Close enough that he could see the flecks of green in her eyes. Close enough to smell the forest on her, though that was stupid, because the whole forest smelled like her. Or she smelled like the whole forest. He no longer knew which way it went.

“You were chosen.”

“No shit. What for?”

She ignored the question. “When you were breathing all over the place.”

“Was I not supposed to breathe?”

“You were supposed to be easier,” she said simply. “You’ve got something in you now. You inhaled it after you killed Mindstorm.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You looked like you needed help.”

“I did.” She looked at him with unbearable calm. “And then I used what was offered.”

Butcher muttered, “Wow. Romance ain't dead.”

Soldier Boy shot him a look sharp enough to cut bark. She continued, unbothered.

“Most of the spores you breathed in burned away when you tried to fry me. Your blood is hostile, your cells repair too fast. You have a bad body.”

“Congratulations,” Soldier Boy said. “You’re the first woman to complain.”

Her gaze flicked over him with faint amusement.

“But one stayed,” she said. “You kind of burned it into yourself. So, really, it’s your fault.”

Hughie, despite himself, glanced at Soldier Boy. Soldier Boy pointed at him without looking.

“Don’t.”

Hughie closed his mouth. She lifted her hand toward Soldier Boy’s chest, but he caught her wrist before she could touch him.

Her skin felt cold and alive.

Under his fingers, something shifted toward him. A tiny flex beneath her skin, as if the thing inside her recognized the thing inside him and pressed closer to say hello.

Butcher took half a step forward. Then stopped as if his own body had startled him. Her eyes slid toward him again.

“Goodness,” she said softly. “You are fighting so hard.”

Butcher’s face went dark.

“Listen here, you swampy little—”

“Your feet keep moving before you tell them not to.”

He looked down. He had, in fact, moved closer.

Her wrist was still in Soldier Boy’s grip. She looked up at him, her expression almost gentle.

“The spore can’t take over you,” she said. “So it calls.”

Soldier Boy’s fingers tightened around her wrist.

“Calls what?”

“Anything that can carry it back to us. People. Animals. Insects, eventually. Anyone who breathes near you long enough.”

The forest seemed to listen to itself after she said that. Soldier Boy looked around and, sure enough, a beetle crawled over a fallen branch nearby, its shell slick and black. A crow shifted somewhere overhead. Beneath the leaves, the ground gave a soft, secret crackle, like hundreds of tiny legs moving all at once.

Soldier Boy’s stomach turned.

His hand tightened around her wrist.

Butcher’s voice cut in.

“That’s enough exposition, love.”

She looked at him. He jerked his chin toward Soldier Boy.

“Blast her.”

Soldier Boy’s mouth flattened. Butcher looked at him.

“What?”

“No.”

Butcher stared.

“No?”

“That’ll make her worse.”

That surprised him. For the first time since stepping into the forest, Butcher’s disgust cracked under genuine alarm.

“Come again?”

Soldier Boy shoved her wrist away and took one step back.

Immediately, his chest tightened. The relief he’d just felt vanished like a hand pulling away from a wound. His lungs clenched immediately. The annoying tickle in his throat and burning shrapnel in his chest returned.

He ignored it.

“I hit her with the blast last time, and she just got stronger.”

“Because the spore had settled inside you already,” she piped up. “It changed you, therefore it changed what you do. Made you our ally instead of our enemy.”

“Therefore?” Butcher spat. “Are we in fucking biology class?”

“Someone should be,” she sighed, too comical for the situation.

Hughie made a small, despairing noise.

“Okay. So the radiation blast that usually depowers supes is fertilizer for her. Great. That’s… yeah, that tracks. Why would anything just be easy for us?”

Soldier Boy looked at her.

“Get it out of me. Or calm it, whatever.”

She smiled.

“Now, now.”

His eyes hardened.

“You need something from me,” she said, “and I need something from you. So let’s help each other out.”

“No.”

“Fair enough.” Her smile sharpened. “I lied, anyway.”

A long, wooden groan passed from trunk to trunk, the sound of an old house settling, except there was no house.

“You need me,” she said, “and I can do just fine without you.”

Soldier Boy stared at her.

Then he laughed. It was not a good laugh. It had no humor in it. Just teeth.

“You think I’m gonna bargain with a weed?”

Her eyes stayed on his. The ground moved. Hughie sucked in a breath.

At first, Soldier Boy thought the mud was rippling from his own pulse, the way it had in the clearing before Mindstorm’s body disappeared. Then the leaves around her feet began to lift, not blown by wind but pushed from beneath. Thin white threads surfaced through the wet soil, dozens of them, then hundreds. Fungal filaments. Root hairs. Tiny searching things that tasted the air and withdrew when they touched Soldier Boy’s boot.

Hughie backed up another step.

“Okay, no, that’s bad. That’s very bad.”

Butcher raised the shotgun. The woman did not look away from Soldier Boy.

Then Hughie whispered, “Butcher?”

Butcher’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek.

He had moved another step towards Soldier Boy without knowing it. He looked down at his own feet with naked hatred.

Her voice softened.

“It’s not desire. Not the way you think of desire, at least. Your body is older than pride. Older than disgust. It knows what it’s made of. It knows where it goes when it is done pretending. And I—we—just help accelerate the process.”

Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper, almost a plea. “Don’t you want to come home?”

“Shut up,” Butcher said.

“Everything living wants to return.”

“I said shut up.”

“Even you.”

Butcher fired.

The blast tore through the forest with a deafening crack. Birds exploded from the canopy at last, black wings thrashing through gray light. The shot hit her square in the shoulder.

For half a heartbeat, she broke apart.

Her upper body became a storm of black-green particles. The shot passed through the swarm and shredded the bark of the tree behind her.

Then she reformed.

But not perfectly.

Something new grew from the wound… a dark cluster of mushrooms pushed through the torn fabric near her shoulder, blooming in seconds. Their caps opened wet and glossy, black at the center, pale at the edges. They pulsed once.

Hughie gagged.

“Why did it bloom? Why does shooting her make her bloom?”

She glanced down at the mushrooms. For the first time, irritation crossed her face.

“That hurt.”

Butcher cocked the shotgun.

“Good. I have another few rounds in here.”

Soldier Boy grabbed the barrel and shoved it down.

“Are you retarded?”

Butcher rounded on him.

“You want to stand here and let Poison Ivy’s depressed cousin negotiate terms?”

“I want you to stop making her worse.”

“She’s already fucking worse.”

She touched the mushroom cluster again. One cap split softly under her fingers, releasing a faint golden dust.

Soldier Boy’s ribs seized. He coughed once, violently. She watched with interest. The spores drifted between them in the weak light.

Hughie pulled his sleeve over his face.

“Nope. Absolutely not. I don’t want to start getting hot for Soldier Boy.”

Soldier Boy opened his hand. There was blood across his palm again.

In the blood, one black thread twitched.

Again.

Her expression softened. Soldier Boy looked up at her.

Something in his face must have changed, because Hughie stopped moving. Butcher stopped cursing. Even the forest seemed to hold itself back.

The arrogance had not left him completely. It never would. It was welded into him too deeply, part of the same old machinery as his violence, his pride, his refusal to kneel even when the floor was already rising to meet him.

But fear had carved a place beside it now.

“What do you need?” he asked, defeat evident in his voice.

She smiled.

--------------------------------------

Consider this the “pilot” for testing. I have the outline for the second chapter, and if you guys want it, I’ll flesh it out and post it in about 2 weeks.

And if you want to be added to the taglist for the second one, lmk <3

Hope you guys like it, lmk what you thinkkkkk <3 <3

#the boys #the boys fanfiction #soldier boy x you #soldier boy fanfiction #soldier boy x reader #soldier boy x oc #the boys amazon prime #the boys s5 #vought rising #soldier boy #solider boy #eco-horror fanfic #the boys au #the boys alternate universe

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