SUMMARY: When Homelander hears Ashley yelling at you, and catches you crying in the bathroom after, he gets attached and possessive of you. With lots of manipulating, he tries turning you into his perfect girl.
MDNI (18+!) dead dove do not eat | c.w: Manipulation, brainwashing, angst, homelander being icky
W.C: almost 4k (this is a long one | NOT PROOFREAD)
Literally hate Homelander but had to write about him...
Rain hammered against the glass walls of Vought Tower hard enough to blur the city lights below into streaks of gold and white, and by the time you stepped out of the elevator onto the thirty-seventh floor, your nerves already felt shredded thin.
It was nearly ten at night.
Most of the office lights were off except for the long strip above your department, flickering faintly over empty desks and abandoned coffee cups, and your heels clicked too loudly against the polished floor as you hurried toward your office clutching the stack of files against your chest.
You shouldn’t have forgotten the quarterly reports.
Ashley had called you twenty minutes ago screaming so hard through the phone that you’d had to hold it away from your ear.
-“If those numbers aren’t on my desk by tomorrow morning, I swear to God—” Then the line had gone dead. So now you were here. Alone. Again.
You pushed into your office with a sigh, dropping your bag beside the desk before bending to search through the disaster of paperwork scattered across the surface.
The storm outside rattled faintly through the windows.
Your phone buzzed. Maya. You answered immediately, relieved for the distraction.
“Hey.”
“You’re still there?” your friend asked. “It’s ten at night.”
“I forgot the reports.” “Again? Jesus. That place is killing you.” You laughed weakly, rubbing at your eyes. “Tell me about it.” You could hear traffic on her end, muffled music in the background.
Normal life.
Outside life. For a second, you envied her so badly it hurt.
“You still coming tomorrow?” she asked. “Brunch. Eleven. Don’t cancel this time.”
“I won’t.”
“You said that last week.”
“That was different.”
“You always say that.” You opened your mouth to answer—
—and froze.
There was someone standing outside your office.
Tall. Broad shoulders, still as a statue behind the glass wall. Your stomach dropped so violently it almost hurt.
The hallway lights reflected faintly off the blue of his suit.
Homelander. You stopped breathing.
Maya was still talking through the phone. “…and if your boss says anything, tell her to go fu—” You hung up instantly.
His eyes followed the movement. Even through the glass, you could feel it. That unbearable pressure of his attention.
Then he smiled. Slowly. And pushed open the office door.
“Hi.”
Your throat tightened immediately. “H-Homelander.” He stepped inside casually, glancing around your office like he belonged there. Maybe he did.
Everyone in the building belonged to him in some horrible way. “You’re here late,” he said.
You forced yourself to straighten. “Just finishing reports.”
“For Ashley?” You nodded. A flicker crossed his face. Barely there. Displeasure.
“She works you too hard.” The way he said it made your skin prickle. Not sympathetic. Possessive. Before you could answer, he glanced toward your phone still sitting on the desk.
“Who were you talking to?” “My friend.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No.”
Too fast. You hated how fast you answered. His smile widened slightly.
“Good.”
The room suddenly felt very small. You tried to laugh politely, but it came out thin and nervous. “Did you need something?” Homelander walked slowly around your desk instead of answering immediately, fingers brushing over the edge of the wood surface.
Calm. Relaxed.
Like a predator already certain the prey wouldn’t run. “I noticed you’ve seemed stressed lately.” Your pulse started climbing. “I’m okay.”
“No,” he said softly. “You’re not.” He stopped beside you. Too close. You caught the clean, expensive smell of his suit, something sharp beneath it like static in the air before lightning strikes. “You look tired,” he continued quietly. “You skip lunch half the time. Your shoulders tense every time your phone rings. And every morning you come into this building already anxious.”
Your mouth went dry.
Because those were things no one should know. Things no one could know unless they’d been watching. Homelander tilted his head slightly when you didn’t answer.
“I pay attention to you.”
Something cold slid down your spine. The storm cracked outside, thunder rumbling through the glass.
You took a careful step backward.
“I should really finish these reports—”
“Ashley screamed at you today.”
You froze.
His expression didn’t change.
“She made you cry in the bathroom afterward.” Your heart started pounding so hard you could hear it.
How did he—
“She shouldn’t have done that,” he said, and the softness in his voice scared you more than anger would have.
You swallowed hard. “It’s fine.”
“No,” Homelander murmured. “It isn’t.”
The office lights buzzed faintly overhead. Outside the windows, lightning flashed silver across the city skyline. Then Homelander reached up and touched your face.
Gentle. Careful.
His thumb brushed just beneath your eye like he was handling something fragile. You should have moved away.
You knew you should. But shock rooted you in place. His voice dropped lower.
“People are very cruel to you.”
Your chest tightened unexpectedly. Not because he was right. Because nobody had ever said it out loud before. Everyone always acted like you were overreacting.
Too sensitive. Too emotional. Too weak for the industry.
And now the most terrifying man on earth was looking at you with something dangerously close to tenderness.
“I can take care of it,” he said softly.
Alarm shot through you immediately. “No.” His eyes sharpened slightly.
“No?”
“You don’t have to… do anything.”
Silence. Then that smile returned. Pleasant and artificial.
“You’re scared of me.” Your stomach twisted. Because denying it felt impossible.
Homelander watched your expression carefully, and for one horrible moment you saw something wounded flicker underneath his calm facade.
Not guilt, neither shame. Loneliness.
“I wouldn’t hurt you,” he said quietly. The words should have comforted you. Instead they made your pulse spike harder. Because you suddenly understood that he wanted you to believe him.
Wanted it badly. You stepped away from his hand carefully. “I should get back to work.”
For a second, the room went still. Completely still. Then Homelander smiled again and stepped back.
“Of course.”
Relief flooded you so fast your knees almost weakened. He moved toward the door.
Stopped. Without turning around, he asked:
“Why do you flinch every time someone raises their voice at you?”
Your breath caught and he glanced over his shoulder. Those bright blue eyes pinned you in place effortlessly.
“I hear things,” he said softly. And then he walked out.
—
Three days later, Ashley disappeared. Nobody explained it. One minute she was storming through meetings throwing binders and screaming at assistants, and the next her office sat empty with the blinds drawn shut.
People whispered about scandals.
Transfers. Rehab? Nobody knew.
But the new department head smiled at you too much and approved your vacation request without even reading it. And every time you passed security downstairs, people suddenly avoided eye contact.
Like they knew something you didn’t.
By Friday, you couldn’t sleep. Every tiny sound in your apartment made your heart race. You kept remembering Homelander’s hand against your face. That awful gentleness.
The way he’d said “I can take care of it.” You told yourself it was coincidence, because it had to be-...It had to be.
Until Saturday night.
You were standing in your kitchen making tea when your phone buzzed with a text from Maya.
you:
Running late. Some creep followed me off the subway lol
You frowned immediately.
you:
What?
No response. You stared at the screen. One minute. Two. Then your phone rang. You answered instantly. “Maya?”
Static and heavy breathing. Then a man’s voice.
“Cute friend you got.” Ice flooded your veins. “What the fuck—”
The line disconnected.
You grabbed your coat so fast you nearly dropped the phone, panic rising sharp and ugly in your chest as you rushed toward the apartment door—
—and found Homelander standing outside it, making your entire body lock up instantly. He looked immaculate as always. Cape draped perfectly behind him. Hair untouched by the rain. Like he’d stepped out of a commercial instead of into the hallway outside your apartment at eleven-thirty at night.
“Don’t panic,” he said calmly.
You stared at him in horror. “My friend—”
“She’s fine.”
“How do you know that?” He smiled slightly. “I handled it.” your blood ran cold once again.
“What did you do?”
“He scared her.” Homelander shrugged. “So I scared him more.” The hallway suddenly felt suffocatingly narrow.
You backed away instinctively. “Did you kill him?Homelander’s expression shifted almost imperceptibly.
Not anger.
Confusion. Like the question itself was unfair. “He touched someone important to you."
The word hit hard enough to make your stomach twist. “You can’t just murder people!”
“Why not?” The sincerity in his voice terrified you. Genuine confusion. As if morality simply worked differently for him.
You shook your head, breathing unevenly. “You can’t solve everything like that.” Homelander stepped closer slowly. “You were terrified when you opened that door.”
You said nothing. “And then you saw me,” he continued softly. “And part of you relaxed.” Your chest tightened immediately because he was right. You hated that he was right. He watched realization cross your face and smiled faintly.
There it was again. That look. Like he was learning you piece by piece.
“You don’t have to do this alone anymore,” he murmured. The rain battered against the apartment windows behind you. Your pulse hammered painfully. Homelander reached up carefully and tucked a strand of hair behind your ear with unbearable softness.
“I take care of the things that hurt you,” he whispered.
And standing there in the dim apartment hallway with fear tangled so tightly with relief you couldn’t separate them anymore— you realized that was exactly how he wanted it.
The first thing you noticed was that the building had become quieter around you. Not all at once. Not enough to alarm you immediately.
Just slowly, subtly, over the course of a few weeks after Ashley disappeared. Conversations stopped when you walked into break rooms. Coworkers who used to dump work on your desk now smiled too quickly and told you not to worry about deadlines.
People moved out of your way in the hall.
Even the security guards downstairs straightened when they saw your ID badge, suddenly polite in a stiff, nervous sort of way that made unease crawl beneath your skin every single time.
At first, you tried convincing yourself it was coincidence.
Then one morning, you overheard two assistants whispering near the elevators.
“—I’m telling you, he watches her.”
“Shut up, are you insane?”
“I saw him leave her floor last week—”
The elevator doors opened before you could hear more. The moment they noticed you standing there, both women went pale. One of them physically stepped back.
Like you were dangerous too.
By the time you reached your office, your hands were shaking hard enough that you spilled coffee across your desk. You stared at the spreading stain blankly. Your heart wouldn’t slow down. Because deep down, beneath all the rationalizing and denial, you already knew.
Homelander. Everything kept leading back to him. The promotions. The sudden kindness. The fear in everyone else. You pressed trembling fingers against your forehead. This was insane- You needed distance, and space- and something normal.
Which was why, by six-thirty that evening, you were sitting in a tiny Italian restaurant downtown across from Maya, trying desperately to force yourself back into reality.
The restaurant smelled like garlic and wine and fresh bread, warm light glowing softly from little candles on every table, and outside the rain drizzled steadily against the windows while traffic blurred red and gold across the wet streets.
It felt normal. And safe. Thank god. Maya was halfway through complaining about her boss when she stopped abruptly and frowned at you over the rim of her wine glass.
“Okay, seriously. What’s wrong with you?”
You blinked. “What?”
“You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.”
“Sorry.”
“You look exhausted.” You stared down at your untouched pasta. The knot in your chest had been there for days now. Tight. Constant. Every time your phone buzzed. Every time someone looked at you strangely at work. Every time you imagined blue eyes watching from somewhere above the city.
Maya leaned forward slightly, concern softening her face.
“Is this about Vought?” You hesitated. Too long, thats what makes it obvious. Her expression shifted immediately. “Oh my God. It is.”
“It’s nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
You laughed weakly, but it came out strained. Maya lowered her voice. “Did something happen?” You opened your mouth. Then stopped.
Because how could you even explain it?
I think the most powerful man in the world has become obsessed with me.
It sounded delusional. Worse—it sounded impossible. And yet every instinct in your body had been screaming danger for weeks. “I just…” You swallowed hard. “I think I need to quit.”
Maya blinked. “Then quit.” “It’s not that easy.”
“Why not?” Because he would notice. The realization slid into your mind so naturally it made you feel sick.
Homelander would notice, because he noticed everything. The thought alone made your pulse jump. Maya stared at you carefully now, really looking. Then her expression changed. Not fear. Recognition. “You’re scared.”
You looked away immediately. Outside, headlights smeared across the rain-streaked windows. “I’m just stressed.”
“No.” Maya’s voice softened. “You look terrified.” Something sharp tightened painfully in your throat. Because she was right. You were terrified. Terrified in that exhausting, constant way where your body never fully relaxed anymore, where every shadow felt watched and every silence stretched too long.
And somehow the worst part wasn’t even fear of what Homelander might do to you. It was fear of what would happen if he suddenly stopped paying attention altogether. That realization horrified you enough that your stomach twisted. Maya reached across the table and touched your hand gently.
“Hey. Talk to me.”
Warmth spread suddenly behind your eyes. You hadn’t realized how badly you needed someone normal to touch you. Someone human.
Your voice came out small. “I think something’s wrong with me.” Maya frowned immediately. “What?”
“I keep…” You laughed shakily. “I keep thinking about him.” The words tasted poisonous. Maya went still.
“Who?” You already regretted saying it, but exhaustion cracked something open inside you.
“Homelander.”
Silence. Not the comfortable kind, but the heavy kind. Maya stared at you for a second like she genuinely thought she’d misheard. Then
“…Homelander?” You nodded once, humiliated instantly.
“He keeps showing up and talking to me and I know it’s weird and I know I should report it or something but every time he looks at me I feel like I can’t think properly anymore—”
You stopped abruptly, breathing unevenly. Maya’s face had gone pale.
“You need to stay away from him.”
“I know.”
“Y/n, I mean it.”
“I KNOW.”
Several people glanced over, making you lower your voice immediatly, and Maya leaned closer across the table.
“Listen to me very carefully. Men like that— men with power like that— they don’t get attached normally.”
Your stomach dropped once again, because attached was exactly the word you'd been searching for- Not 'interested' nor 'flirting'.- attached. Like something tightening around your ribs day by day. Maya squeezed your hand harder.
“This is how it starts.”
Fear curled sharply through you, traveling from your toes to your chest.
“How what starts?”
But Maya never answered- because suddenly the restaurant went silent. Instantly.
With conversations getting cut off and forks being set down, the air itself seems to tighten, and your blood turned to ice before you even looked up. Maya’s grip on your hand loosened slowly. Around you, people stared toward the front windows. Toward the figure descending from the sky outside the restaurant in a blur of red, white, and blue.
Your heart stopped.
No.
No no no—
The entire restaurant watched as Homelander landed lightly on the sidewalk beyond the glass, cape settling behind him in perfect waves despite the rain- People immediately started reaching for phones. Someone whispered- “Holy shit…”
Maya looked at you. Really looked at you. And the horror that crossed her face made your stomach lurch. Because she understood instantly.
Homelander smiled the moment he saw you through the window. Not at the restaurant, but at you. That terrifyingly soft expression spread across his face like he’d finally found what he’d been looking for.
Then he walked inside. The atmosphere changed the second he entered. The restaurant owner rushed forward nervously. People stared. Nobody breathed properly. But Homelander ignored all of them. His eyes stayed on you the entire time, fully focused.
“Maya,” you whispered urgently, panic clawing up your throat, “don’t say anything.”
Too late.
Homelander reached your table smoothly, smiling down at you like this was some perfectly ordinary surprise visit.
“There you are.” Your pulse hammered violently. “How did you know I was here?” He tilted his head slightly.
“You told someone at work you were getting dinner downtown." Jesus fuck, had he been listening then too?
Maya slowly pulled her hand away from yours under the table. Homelander noticed immediately. Of course he did.His gaze flickered briefly toward her before returning to you.
“You left work early,” he said softly. “I was worried.” Worried. The word wrapped around your lungs like silk. You could feel the entire restaurant staring. Maya sat rigidly beside you now, fear written plainly across her face.
"i have to use the bathroom." She excuses herself quietly. Traitor, leaving you with him. Homelander noticed that too. And smiled. Not in a polite way, just Patient. Like he understood something she didn’t yet.
“You seem tense,” he murmured to you. No shit, your voice barely worked. “I’m fine.”
“No,” he said gently. “You’re frightened.” The way he said it made heat creep shamefully into your chest. Like he was the only person observant enough to notice. Like fear itself had become intimacy between you.
Homelander crouched slightly beside your chair then, bringing himself closer to eye level, and the entire restaurant seemed to disappear beneath the weight of his attention.
“You know I’d never let anything happen to you,” he said quietly, and your throat tightened.
Because part of you believed him completely. That was the worst thing. Not the fear. Not even the obsession. It was the unbearable safety you felt whenever he appeared. Like no matter how terrifying he was, nothing else in the world could possibly touch you while his eyes were on you.
Homelander saw something change in your expression then. He saw it happen. His smile softened with slow, terrifying satisfaction.
“There she is,” he whispered.
And you realized with sudden horror that he was watching you become dependent on him in real time.
Just waiting.
By the time Maya returned to the table, your head already felt strange, Like the entire evening had slipped sideways into something unreal while you weren’t paying attention.
Homelander had moved back slightly by then, posture relaxed again, one arm hooked lazily over the back of your chair as if he’d always belonged there, as if seeing the most powerful man in the world sitting in a tiny downtown restaurant beside an ordinary Vought employee was somehow normal.
But nothing felt normal anymore. Not the way people stared at you now. Not the way your pulse reacted every time his attention settled fully onto you. Not the awful, humiliating relief spreading slowly through your body whenever he spoke in that low, gentle voice.
Maya sat down carefully, eyes flicking between the two of you. You could tell she’d been crying in the bathroom. Shes always been an emotional person. Her mascara looked slightly smudged beneath the dim restaurant lighting. Guilt twisted sharply in your chest. Because she looked scared.
Not for herself, but for you.
Homelander smiled at her pleasantly. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” she answered too quickly. You noticed she didn’t look at him anymore when she spoke. Only at you, like she was trying to communicate something silently.
Run. Leave. Wake up.
But then Homelander’s hand settled lightly against the small of your back beneath the table and every thought scattered instantly. The touch wasn’t forceful, and that was the problem. His fingertips barely rested there at all through the fabric of your dress, warm and steady and impossibly careful, yet the moment he touched you, your body reacted before your mind could.
The tension in your shoulders loosened, your breathing slowed and Homelander felt it happen. You knew he did because his thumb stroked once, slow and approving.
A tiny movement. Still your stomach flipped violently. Maya saw your expression change.
Horror flashed across her face immediately, if thats even possible at her current expression anymore. You looked away from her first because you hated yourself for that.
Dinner ended not long after.
Nobody argued when Homelander quietly insisted on taking you home.
How could they?
Outside, the rain had gotten heavier, pouring silver beneath the city lights while crowds gathered along the sidewalk behind barricades and security trying desperately to catch a glimpse of him. Phones flashed constantly. People shouted his name. But Homelander barely acknowledged any of it.
His focus stayed on you as you stepped outside beside him, arms wrapped tightly around yourself against the cold night air. The second the rain touched you, Homelander frowned.
Then his cape settled around your shoulders, making you feel warmer immediately. It smelled like him.
“You’ll freeze,” he murmured.
The crowd noise seemed distant suddenly. Muted. Like the entire world had narrowed down to the warmth wrapped around you and the terrifying softness in his eyes.
You should have refused.
Instead your fingers clutched the edge of the cape tighter around yourself automatically.
And Homelander smiled. God, that smile. Not public, an' not performative. Atleast he makes you think that.
Maya stepped closer quickly before you could move.
“Text me when you get home,” she said firmly. Too firmly. Like she was trying to remind you of something. You nodded immediately. “I will."
Homelander looked between the two of you, quietly observing, or rather analyzing. Then he asked softly-
“Do you always worry this much about her?” Maya stiffened.
“She’s my best friend.”
At that, something unreadable crossed Homelander’s face, its gone almost instantly. But you felt his hand press slightly more firmly against your back. Possessive.
Maya noticed too, And you could see fear rise behind her eyes again. Then Homelander smiled warmly at her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take good care of her.”
The words should have sounded reassuring.
Instead, they landed like a threat.
Maya heard it too. You saw it in her eyes.
But before either of you could say anything else, Homelander’s arm wrapped around your waist. The movement was smooth and natural enough to almost seem casual. Except the second he pulled you against his side, your entire body locked up from the sheer overwhelming awareness of him.
Strong.
Not human.
His hand rested securely against your hip while the rain poured harder around you, the city glowing gold and red beneath blurred stormlight.
“You ready?” he asked softly near your ear. Your throat tightened. What is he talking about?
“For what?” His smile deepened slightly, and then the ground disappeared. A startled sound tore from your chest as the world dropped violently beneath you, wind rushing past in freezing waves while the city exploded into dizzying lights below. Your fingers grabbed his suit instantly. Instinct.
Homelander laughed quietly at the reaction, one arm tightening around you effortlessly as he carried you high above Manhattan. “Easy,” he murmured. The sound of his voice vibrated through his chest beneath your hands. You couldn’t breathe properly.
Not from fear alone, no-...just, from him. From the overwhelming closeness of him.
Rain whipped through the air around you while clouds swallowed the city lights below in silver haze, and you buried your face against his shoulder automatically as another gust of wind hit.
Immediately, Homelander’s expression softened.
“There you go,” he whispered, too soft for a disgusting Manipulator. Like he liked seeing you cling to him. Like he wanted it. The realization made heat twist low in your stomach despite the terror.
You hated- no, despised- how safe he felt.
Hated how his arms around you made the rest of the world disappear completely.
The penthouse came into view slowly through the rain.
Massive windows glowing gold high above the city.
Isolated & untouchable. Your stomach flipped hard at the sight. Because suddenly, horribly, it didn’t feel like he was taking you home. It felt like he was taking you somewhere that belonged to him.
Somewhere above everyone else. Into his Nest.
Homelander landed smoothly on the balcony, barely jostling you despite the force that cracked faintly beneath his boots.
But he didn’t let go immediately afterward.
His arms stayed around you.
Keeping you close against him while rainwater slid down the sharp line of his jaw and the city glittered endlessly beneath the storm behind him.
For a second, neither of you spoke, not being able to.
You became painfully aware of your hands still gripping the front of his suit.
Of how close your bodies were.
Of the way he was looking at you.
Not hungry. -actually, hungry. Really fuckin' hungry. Your pulse stuttered unevenly.
“I should go home,” you whispered.
Homelander’s eyes searched your face quietly.
Then very gently, he brushed wet hair back from your cheek.
“You don’t want to be alone tonight.”
The words wrapped around your exhausted mind so softly that for one horrible second, you almost nodded.
Because after weeks of fear and confusion and pressure and loneliness—
the thought of leaving him suddenly hurt. He saw the exact instant your expression weakened, and something dark and deeply satisfied flickered behind his eyes.
Not victory, just ownership. His thumb brushed slowly across your cheekbone.
“Come inside,” he said quietly, knowing just what tone to use. Not a command- worse. An invitation he already knew you wanted to accept.
Lightning flashed across the sky behind him, illuminating the enormous penthouse windows glowing gold in the dark like something beautiful and dangerous waiting with its mouth open.
And after a long, trembling hesitation—
you followed him inside.
He did it. You're his perfect girl now.
Okay, thus is so bad its literally embarassing. 💀💀 Where even is the plot fml
pairing; soldier boy x supe!reader word count; 6.4k ☔️
summary; before vought and all the superhero bullshit, ben had you. there was a time you both believed your love could conquer anything, but you soon realize that was nothing more than wishful thinking.
tags/warnings; language / heavy angst / fighting/violence / mentions of torture / time jumps (pre and post vought rising era) / childhood best friends to lovers to strangers to ? / op supe!reader / good friend bombsight / canon-divergent / lowkey a 5x06 fix-it / hurt/comfort / mentions of suicidal ideation and depressive thoughts / sad feels / ambiguous ending / the boys season five spoilers, 18+ only ✮.ᐟ
⋆˚࿔ notes; and here we have another case of getting possessed by a new idea before finishing the rest of your wips, lol. i'm still lowkey upsetti spaghetti with the VR rollout, but it's fun playing around with his backstory pieces. <3
♪ now playing; after hours by the weeknd
I know I made you fall
then said you were wrong for me
I lied to you, I lied to you, I lied to you (to you)
can't hide the truth, I stayed with her in spite of you
ben masterlist ᝰ. main masterlist ⟢ series masterlist
He pictures your face more often than he'd like to admit.
Specifically from that night, when he ripped your heart from your chest and threw it aside without a second thought. He chose his power, his fame, and her over you. Like it was nothing.
And he's had to stew in that regret for decades.
Nobody could fill the void you left behind—not Clara, nor the women who threw themselves at him, or his dancers, or even Countess.
None of them compared.
Even now as he smokes a joint next to Firecracker, he feels that ache in his chest, the place you used to fill now empty and hollow. Thanks to his little trip, facing one of his ghosts at Harmony, he thinks about that day—when he last saw you.
"This is all temporary, Ben! We're nothing more than glorified puppets, cogs in a machine we don't truly understand. Why can't you see that?"
"We didn't go through all that shit to sit pretty on our asses doing nothing. We're meant to do something with these powers. To be great. Clara gets that, why can't you get it through your thick fucking skull?"
"Shut the fuck up, don't even get me started on her, she's obviously playing with you. Tell me, how many times did she tell them to lock you in the radiation room, hmm?"
“It made me stronger—”
“It was torture—”
"You don't know shit—"
"I know enough. And I'm telling you Benjamin, these people don't truly have your back. They wouldn't even spit on you if you were on fire. Keep going down this path and it's only going to lead you towards a sad and lonely life."
"Where ya off to?"
He didn't even realize he'd sat up, forgetting where he was for a moment as he got lost in the memory before grumbling out a short response and leaving the room.
Off to find more answers, in fucking LA of all places. Great.
Surely the universe must be messing with him.
"The fuck did you just say?" He growls, holding Mister Marathon's leg in his grasp.
He groans in pain, voice strained. "I'm telling you man, only person who'd know where fucking Bombsight's at is Nova and she's even harder to track. The average person doesn't even know she exists, only the most dedicated collectors do."
Ben clenches his jaw, getting lost in his thoughts before Homelander appears, crushing Marathon's head with his foot. "What happened?"
"I took care of it." He grouses. "No lead on Bombsight, cocksucker was full of shit. Means we gotta find him on our own for the V1."
Homelander says something he tunes out, his thoughts only focused on his next move, on finding you.
the past
Ben lived on the edge of a wealthy neighborhood growing up, despite whatever lies Vought sold the public about rags to riches.
It was always riches.
Located right next to a little group of smaller houses, the closest one being yours. You'd met when you were thirteen, when he caught you climbing one of the trees in his backyard for an apple red handed, literally.
He didn't snitch though, instead helping you down and asking for your name. You weren't sure why you trusted him with it, he wasn't sure why he kept your cover, but that had been the start of an unlikely friendship.
Where he was met with coldness and dismissal at home and at school, he found warmth and solace with you.
Soft, kind, humble—you were everything he felt he couldn't be. As the time passed and the world hardened around him, he did too. But not you. You remained gentle, compassionate. It made sense you decided to become a nurse, to help as many people as you could.
Somewhere along the way in your dynamic there was a shift. Years of something unspoken between the two of you coming to light when one of his comrades asked if you were married.
An uncomfortable feeling churned in his gut, sour taste in his mouth at the thought of anyone else with you. He realized then, what he felt for you was beyond simple friendship. Not that he'd admit it first.
But lucky for him he didn't have to, seeing as you kissed him first that same night on the roof of the building, under the beautiful night sky.
It was mutual, you were happy...for about three years. The period of calm before the series of raging storms.
Because he got the call about his mom in January of 1944, and it was downhill from there—the beginning of the end.
His father grew even more resentful, more bitter, after his wife's passing. And no matter what you'd say you couldn't ward off the thoughts of doubt, hurt and shame swirling within him at his father's disappointment.
He decided to enlist in the Army, make him proud, just like his brother. There was only a slight hesitation at the sight of your tears, but it wasn't enough to deter him fully. Not even when you expressed deep concerns at the revelation of the experiment he'd be participating in.
"Ben are you sure about this? It's dangerous."
"It'll be worth it, you'll see. It's gonna work."
"M'not worried about it working, I'm worried about you. Ben these are experiments, they're going to be pumping you full of god knows what. It'll probably hurt like hell, and who knows if you'll even survive." Your voice cracks at the last word, a tear making it's way down your cheek. "It's not worth your life, baby."
He brings a hand up to your cheek, wiping the droplets with his thumb gently. "Come with me. I'm sure they're in need of nurses, I can talk to them. You can watch over me yourself, see that I'll be fine."
You bit your wobbling lip in contemplation. It's not like you had roots tying you down here anyway, nothing major keeping you to the town besides Ben.
That made your choice for you.
And he was right, they were in need of another nurse. So you followed him to Fort Harmony, a place you grew to despise fairly quick.
Clara Vought, wife of Dr. Fredrick. She made it clear she didn't like you the moment you met. Watching you move with disdain, always a snarky remark to make, indulging in your stress and slight fear. It was highlighted especially when the day came for Ben to get injected with the Compound V.
He was terrified, there was no hiding it. You've all heard the echoing screams, the wails coming from down the hallway. Quinn mocked him from the other side of the room as you fastened Ben's restraints, making sure they weren't too tight on him.
"Quinn hush, you're getting injected next, if I were you I wouldn't be laughing." The monotonousness of your voice is what actually makes him quiet down. During your time here you were never unkind to anyone, always speaking with clarity and sincerity to both staff and patients (you were also the only who who called them that, everyone else referring to them as subjects).
Your voice softens when you lean down to whisper at Ben. "You want me to get you out?"
He shook his head no. "M'fine."
You run a gentle hand through his hair, soothing him with a kiss on his forehead. "I'm right here, okay? Not going anywhere."
The moment is interrupted when Clara walks in, a few scientists trailing behind her. She scowls at the sight of you so close to him, eyeing you with disgust. "It's time." She tightens his restrains, much to your chagrin, scolding you for leaving them 'so loose'.
"Actually I don't think you even need to be in here right now, I'm administering the dose." She quips, but Dr. Vought himself intervenes. "Leave her, Clara. The calmer he is the better, needs to save his strength to get through this successfully."
She glares at you, and you hold eye contact before focusing on Ben again instead, a hand on his arm and one atop his head, resting gently to soothe him, for support. Five minutes later they pumped the blue liquid into his veins.
His screams tore right through you. Agonizing sounds ripping from his throat, painful spasming from under the straps. You kept your hands on his skin the whole time, careful not to reach for his hand despite how much you wanted to. He'd completely crush it, no doubt.
It went on for minutes, as the poison got acquainted with his system. Your gentle hands were his anchor, grounding him in a way everybody could see. In which the previous subject was already convulsing half to death by now, Ben was holding strong, leaned into your orbit as the waves of pain kept washing over him.
And when it's done, he passes out quietly, successfully. He survived, and the gears in Mr. and Mrs. Vought's heads began to turn.
Clara had her husband with her when she was getting injected, and Ben had you. They determined the key was keeping the subjects' heart calm enough to withstand what it was getting put through with the serum.
So you found yourself with a new assignment—keeping the patients calm during the injection process. Granted it wasn't the same, you and Ben loved each other and had years of history behind you. These other people you didn't even know.
But your kindness made all the difference. With each person, you were gentle, patient. You explained the process so they could brace for it, kept a soothing hand on their shoulder.
Quinn ended up wetting himself, but you didn't mock him for it.
The blonde woman started having a panic attack, and you calmed her down by talking in her ear the whole time, reassuring and comforting.
There was the guy with light brown hair and eyes blue enough to rival the liquid in the vial who managed pretty well, being the only one to muster up enough energy to thank you before passing out.
The last man was startlingly quiet, in comparison to the others. He didn't say anything as you prepped him, opting to try and contain himself during the procedure, helped massively by your arm rubbing circles on his shoulder for support, though he wouldn't admit it then.
In between it all you would look after Ben, observing his vitals, his progress and recovery. It was on you to make sure he was stable enough before they continued with any sort of test.
Clara disagreed, wanting to start immediately but her husband refused, agreeing with you about how important it was to take their time. The best food is made over time on a low simmer, my dear. He told her in their native language, and it only enraged her against you more.
She hated you and your softness, thought it made you weak, nothing more than a fucking liability. So she brought in one more subject, without Fredrick's approval.
He'd gone to an important meeting in the city, and she brought in some random civilian—enticing him with her looks and her voice, vaguely promising great things. She ordered you specifically to administer the dose, much to your confusion, parting from Ben with the promise to come back. The feeling only intensifying when you didn't see Dr. Vought in the room.
"It's not your job to wonder, it's your job to be a fucking nurse." She'd snapped when you asked, and you swallowed your remark with a glare and clenched teeth.
Clara "secured" his restraints as you prepare the needle, leaning down to whisper in his ear. "Might not be the best time to tell you, but she's about to inject you with something that's going to hurt. Really bad. Those screams you hear down the hall? It's because of this, because of her."
The man looks worried, and scared. Weary as she moves away and you approach. You ease him, same as you've been doing, but once he spots the needle inching closer to his arm he panics.
He breaks out of the loose restraint, grabbing your arm mid air. You're caught off guard, gasping in surprise and pain at his iron grip. In his fright, he takes the syringe from your hand after freeing his other one and jabs it into your chest, pushing the serum in.
It burns instantly, making you stumble back and fall over in agony. You scream so loud and so long it burns your throat, the pained sound ringing throughout the facility.
All the others look around in confusion, but Ben recognizes your voice in a second. He rushes out of his room, shoving off anyone in his way. Though everyone slowed when they realized he wasn't trying to escape, he was going straight to where you were within the facility.
Clara smirks at the sight of you before slipping the mask back on, shooting the man in the head before he can utter another word. Ben rushes in seconds later, zeroing in on your convulsing form on the floor. "Hey hey hey, it's okay, you're okay."
You thrash in his arms, tears running down your face nonstop, sweat soaking your forehead and small pained whimpers escaping your scratchy throat. He angrily looks up, "What the fuck happened?"
She feigns bewilderment, "I-I don't know, he broke out of his restraints and injected her with the serum instead, must've been crazier than we thought. And you know how careless she can be with the straps." She couldn't help but add in that last bit of snark, and he nearly growls in anger.
He holds you through it, reassuring you the same way you did for everyone else. After what feels like an eternity you slump in his arms, looking at him through bleary eyes for a moment. He knows you want to say something, he just nods and kisses your cheek gently understanding you can't get the words out. "I'm sorry." He whispers against you, before you pass out in his embrace.
There wasn't really a choice from there, seeing as you survived. You were now officially one of their test subjects.
Fredrick was furious, snapping at Clara for being so reckless, so stupid. And unfortunately her frustrations and anger with him, she took out on you.
You were held in a different sector, isolated from the others despite Ben's protests."You both need to focus, to get stronger, better. Believe me, you are the ultimate expression of what we could be, darling. You cannot grow, cannot blossom into your full potential if you're running to each other every time we need to run a test. Just be patient, it will all work out. I take care of you, don't I? I'll take care of her." She purred into his ears.
And he believed it.
He didn't know her plans for you were different. Sadistic.
She did to you things she wouldn't do to the others—beatings, other injections, radiation, various methods of torture. It was fun for her, your pain and suffering. A month in you would beg her to end it. Pleading for the sweet release of death, anything would be better than the anguish she was putting you through everyday. She'd just smile at you, condescending, mocking you at every opportunity.
"Adapt or die, sweetheart."
It was a complete 180 with Ben.
Without you the others got stuck with colder nurses. Ones who were only there for the money, or the mission. Nobody with your compassion. So Clara would use that to her advantage, manipulating who she could.
She was a wolf in sheep's clothing, sending them to the radiation chamber then feigning concern as if she wasn't the one who ordered it. Then she'd pander to their ego.
You're doing so much better than everyone.
You are meant to do great things.
All eyes will be on you.
Ben and Robbie ate it up the most, Angel gained her confidence, Quinn remained skeptical and Torpedo, well, remained quiet. Hard to get a read on that one.
But of course, she bit off more than she could fucking chew.
Months of everything she was doing to you, your abilities developed, solidified into something they could no longer control. It got to the point she couldn't hurt you anymore, couldn't kill you.
Not for a lack of trying, she got very creative.
Until you finally snapped.
She had you strapped against a diagonal platform, facing a massive ray. Laser. Powerful. Heat blast. You heard the scientists muttering.
Fredrick was in the room for once, observing. He usually focus on the others, letting his wife take the lead on your project. But he decided to stick around, being so close to the release date—the start of the next phase for Vought.
Everyone else was ready. Now it was time to see if you were too.
With her thick accent, Clara starts presenting you like cattle at an auction, a cold sadistic smile on her face. She powers up the massive ray after her spiel, after everyone's made it a safe distance, and it beams onto you.
You scream, the blast burning your chest enough for you to feel it, but not enough to penetrate your skin somehow. After a moment the air shifts—from somewhere within yourself you feel an energy pulse and release, amplified by your emotion. With a yell you snap from the restraints, focusing your power on the ray still blasting you.
Everyone watches in abject shock how you slowly turn the red hue into blue, slowing down it's effects, freezing it. Fredrick turns the machine off before it implodes, though it'll never work again.
With a purple flash you teleport directly in front of Clara, scooping her up by the neck and shoving her against the wall with a sharp crack, the concrete breaking from the force.
You begin choking her out, the guards shooting at you.
But the bullets merely roll off you. Even with her enhanced strength, she was no match for yours and your rage. She tries using her powers but can't focus with the disruption of her air supply, and she was starting to grow more and more desperate until—
"Let her go, or Benjamin dies."
From her left, Fredrick holds up a small remote. "One button and they kill him on my orders. They're not all as durable as you, we have our ways. Release my wife now."
Reluctantly you drop her, and she crumbles to the floor with a gasp.
"Y-you fuckin-g, bitch." She stutters out, and you scoff, teleporting across a safe distance from everyone in that room.
"Clearly, you can't kill me anymore. And if you do kill him, I burn down everything the two of you have built, I can promise you that. I have more than enough fucking motive." You spit, watching him help her up, a pensive look on his face. He knew you were right. They both did.
And you'd found yourselves at a stalemate, having to make a truce.
They would leave you and Ben alone, wouldn't hurt him. You'd have to play nice with Vought, be civil in return. Especially in front of the public.
You were released to a small house in a designated neighborhood, the only people on the block being the ones who survived the trials. It's for public safety, they said. But you know it's actually about control.
The second the door clicked shut, Ben was on you. Pouring months of separation, longing and love into every kiss, every touch, every press of his skin on yours. Relishing in your shared strength, in how passionately you could get reacquainted with one another, without the fear of injury.
For him, it was celebratory.
For you, much needed affection.
And for just a week, you lived in tranquility—closest thing to it before this whole mess anyway. Then he got a call from home, about his brother.
He went to war with a heart full of grief. It's like a flip in him, switched. And he focused on his power, the things he could control.
You hardly saw him as the time passed, Vought having him run around for their propaganda and whatnot with the rest of the team, the one you weren't publicly a part of. Only working in secret, behind the scenes. You were too much of a liability, they'd be fools to give you the power of positive public perception on top of everything else.
Things were strange for you, lonely. You tried calling your parents, but they never answered. So you teleported home to check on them. To your shock, you were met with nothing but pure disdain and resentment from them both.
"You chose to be a whore, followed that man without a ring on your finger into something you were never supposed to be a part of, and now look at yourself. At what you've become. You were always difficult, but now, instead of someone honorable you're a complete and utter abomination."
Your mother's words would ring in your ears for the longest time—your dad's look of disappointment and disapproval cutting deeper than anything he could've added.
It only got worse back at the house after Ben returned. He'd gone on about how they were going to honor him with a parade, the love and adoration he was getting from his coworkers, from the public. He went on about Clara, how she was mentoring him into greatness.
After everything you'd gone through over the last few years, you couldn't take it anymore.
"What if we run away? Somewhere far, somewhere peaceful. Just you and me."
He scoffs. "You can't be serious, did you even hear me? Everyone loves me, I'm at my fucking prime sweetheart. I'd be crazy to walk away from it."
"It's a cage, Ben. A massively glamorized one at that." You raise your voice in frustration. "They will suck you in and spit you out at their own convenience, their support isn't genuine. It's selfish."
He clenches his jaw. "You don't believe in me."
"I'm the only one who believes in you."
His father's cruel words from earlier echo in his mind for a split second, and ain't that the truth. He shuts the little voice in his head up, getting angrier by the minute. "Then why are you so against this? So many women would kill to be in your spot. And I haven't even laid a hand on a single one of 'em, because I choose you."
Oh yeah big thanks for not cheating you think, rolling your eyes.
"This is all temporary, Ben! We're nothing more than glorified puppets, cogs in a machine we don't truly understand. Why can't you see that?"
"We didn't go through all that shit to sit pretty on our asses doing nothing. We're meant to do something with these powers. To be great. Clara gets that, why can't you get it through your thick fucking skull?"
"Shut the fuck up, don't even get me started on her, she's obviously playing with you. Tell me, how many times did she tell them to lock you in the radiation room, hmm?"
“It made me stronger—”
“It was torture—”
"You don't know shit—"
"I know enough. And I'm telling you Benjamin, these people don't truly have your back. They wouldn't even spit on you if you were on fire. Keep going down this path and it's only going to lead you towards a sad and lonely life."
He had enough, and you saw it in his eyes.
The moment he chose it all, over you.
"Well then I guess I'll get a head start and take my lonely ass to get some company at Vought HQ, with somebody who gives a shit."
Your eyes sting. "With Clara?"
He pauses, taking one last long look at you. "It's done. Go sing to animals in the forest or whatever the fuck it is you wanna do. Fade into obscurity. Meanwhile I'll be the most powerful man in this goddamn country. A proper, supportive dame on my arm."
Your lip trembles, but you don't give him the satisfaction of watching you fall apart. "Goodbye, Ben." You manage to whisper before you teleport away, falling to your knees and crying your heart out on a quiet beach moments later, far away from it all.
Nothing but the wildlife around to hear your sobs of despair.
He never heard from you again.
the present
Everything was fucked.
Just when he'd started warming up to the insufferable twerp, he finds that damn footage. Clara reduced to nothing more than a charred cocksleeve—he couldn't believe it.
Still, it's not his main focus. There were no leads on you.
You seemed to be a complete ghost, no record of you anywhere. He doesn't even know how Marathon knew of you, collector or not. Growing more frustrated by the day, he was getting dangerously close to snapping completely.
And then he got a ping from the strange rectangle they called phones these days.
Cleo; Bombsight will be at these coordinates, right now.
He finally had a goddamn location, now all he needed were answers.
Upon arrival he sees Butcher and his crew scattered around, Goldie in a wheelchair and the jackass from his past standing in front of her. With a single punch he knocks him back, rolling him a few feet away.
"Hiya Robbie."
"Ben." He smiles.
Soldier Boy side eyes the antsy crew for a moment, before turning his attention back in front of him.
Robbie had become a nuisance to him the longer they worked together. Jealous of his status, the attention he got, from the world and especially Clara. Poor guy looked like a kicked puppy when she let him down, sneaking off with Ben instead.
There was a mutual resentment built between them both.
Because while Robbie envied everything Ben was gaining, the simple fact that the former was adored by everyone, including you (considering how he'd left things) filled him with an ache and jealousy he couldn't name, can't explain.
It's completely irrational, but it's just the way he feels.
"You know how long I've wanted to smash in that pretty face?"
Ben smirks. "Buddy the queen sat on this face, it's a national fucking treasure."
Bombsight simmers with rage, twitching to punch the shit out of the smug bastard. Until he remembers, he has the upper hand.
"What's so good about that if you're gonna use it to be an asshole? What would Nova think of you?" He pulls a small pager from his other pocket, pressing the small button.
Ben rushes him in a fit of rage at the mention of you and they start trading blows, the impenetrable skin actually hurting his hand. They kept fighting, and a few series of strong punches push Ben backwards to his extreme annoyance. He breaks a pipe off the valve in front of him, ready to beat Robbie with it, but as he brings it down it gets blocked by a sheer purple force field.
He looks over at Goldie but she's still sitting there, protected by it too.
Seconds later, a figure materializes into the compound with a purple glow, and for the first time in over eighty years, Ben lays his eyes on you once again.
You freeze at the sight of him, taking in your surroundings with caution. "What the hell Robbie—"
"I'm sorry, Goldie's in danger. I wouldn't have paged you if it wasn't serious." Those large sad puppy eyes are on full display when he talks about his love, and it softens you the smallest bit.
"Y'know I used your heart as the anchor for the bubble, it's covering her too. So freaking sweet, you absolute sap." You muse, rearranging the figures in the room with simple hand movements. Your fingertips and hair glow at the slight use of your powers.
You zap Robbie and Goldie next to each other, a good distance from the others. Standing protectively beside them, you finally acknowledge your ex in front of you as the whole room watches.
You both just, stare for a minute. Not only to think of what you wanted to say, but also to take in the features buried in memories. The good, the bad. The sight of him still makes your heart ache after all this time, his own thrumming with guilt.
He calls your name softly, and you shake your head.
"No, you don't get to do that. I don't care how much time has passed."
"I know," He starts. "I know. Just...where the hell have you been?"
Your eyebrows furrow. "Why do you need to know?"
"You just fucking disappeared. Vanished off the face of the fucking Earth with no goddamn warning. The team wondered for the longest time—"
"The team?" You click your teeth. "Or do you mean Vought? What, your precious fucking Clara wondered where her favorite punching bag went?"
"Ask Robbie, the whole team was concerned." He bites back, and you laugh in disbelief.
"Oooo shit's goin down." Sage mumbles to M.M. from the sidelines.
You step directly in front of him, and he shifts in his stance with slight uncertainty. "Ben I was ready to follow you anywhere. New, uncharted territory—I was willing to face it all because at least I had you."
He clenches his jaw.
"But it wasn't enough. You're right, I did fade into obscurity like you wanted me to." You throw his previous words back at him, and he swallows in shame, recognizing them immediately.
You continue, your voice starting to tremble the smallest bit. "I had nothing left." Your eyes shine with anger. "You choose that fucking psycho and your precious fame, my parents disdained me and I was too fucked up to fit into society anymore—"
"No supe fits into society—"
You scoff with faint tears building in your eyes, "But I never fucking asked for this! I was just a damn nurse, I only wanted to look after you. Because I loved you, because I cared. That vindictive bitch set me up. She didn't strap that asshole down, gave him everything he needed to jab me with that poison."
Everyone watches with different levels of interest—Robbie and Goldie with sadness for their friend.
"She fucking hated me; tortured me, laughed at me. I begged her to just kill me so many goddamn times, death had to be better than everything she was putting me through. But she'd just, mock me. Tell me I needed to adapt or die." You pause, looking down for a moment as you lower your voice when you say "And believe me, I've tried."
A stray tear makes it's way down your face at the admission, but you wipe it away with the back of your hand before it reaches your chin.
Kimiko can't fight the way her eyes water, even Butcher seeming a tad sympathetic for the new player in this game.
Before he could even ask, a thud lands a few feet away, and they watch as Homelander scans the room. The tension spikes, everyone suddenly nervous, and you eye the blonde man carefully, on guard.
"Well well, isn't this a fun little party?" He drawls, eyeing everyone with abhorrence, except you and Ben. He eyes you both with curiosity, before looking around the room once more.
When he tries diving to the frightened woman to the side, you shield her with a flat force field, and his eyes dart to you angrily. You simply stare him down. "All the people here, and you go for the human?" You deadpan, he bristles.
He gets ready to laser you and Ben snaps at him. "Don't you fucking touch her."
Homelander's eye twitches, a slow deranged smile slowly creeping onto his face. "Fine. Where's the V1?"
Soldier Boy clenches his jaw, but doesn't say a word.
"Alright. Don't tell me, it's okay. I'm asking the wrong guy anyway." He says, his tone a bit off. He sets his sights on Robbie, and you tense up in preparation.
"Where is it?" He asks, growing frustrated at his lack of response. He snaps, "Where the fuck is the V? I'll kill every single one of you until I find it god dammit!"
He doesn't make it two steps forward before you make your move.
You raise your hands and teleport everyone into a singular protective elongated dome to the side of the room, the sheer purple cover glowing in defense. You square up to the threat with a slight head tilt.
"You can try."
He snarls, diving to you in anger. But with a single punch to his face, you send him flying into the wall behind him. The room crackles with your energy, your hands and hair glowing softly—a bright vivid purple illuminating the compound.
Everyone watches in anticipation, Ben in worry. He never really did see you in action, never stopped long enough to ask what you could do, besides teleport. Guilt flares in his chest at the realization.
They watch as you zap to him, landing another hard punch, and again, and again, the last blow sending him back across the other side of the room.
You zap to the middle of the space between you as he dusts himself off, beyond livid. "You fucking bitch."
"Tsk, I've heard that one before. Try harder."
With a glare he lasers you with his heat vision, to his demise.
It hits you square in the chest, and Ben punches the forcefield in worried fury, but Robbie says "She's got it, trust me."
Overtime your abilities have only grown.
You're extremely durable—stronger than most, including fellow supes, you also excel in hand to hand combat because of it. You can teleport, as well as teleport others without having to touch them, and create protective shields/force fields similar to Goldie.
The irony of your greatest ability was in the words Clara would use to belittle and taunt you at your lowest. Adapt or die.
When you took yourself to space—to the moon—in your sadness after parting from Ben, and were completely fine, you realized you had the power of adaptability.
Guess your body literally took the words to heart.
A change in environment, any ability, power or force you're up against—you're able to counter it, adapt to it. The records of what they did to you were wiped by your hand a few decades ago, a stealth mission into Harmony to erase any trace of you for good from nosy minds.
So there was no explaining why your body developed to this for sure, why you manifested all this power. You destroyed them in a panicked episode before you could analyze them.
You just know the world should be grateful you're not an evil psychopath like the one's who tortured you. And the one you're fighting now, apparently. It doesn't take a genius to see something is clearly off with him, the eyes don't lie.
But they do shoot lasers sometimes, to which you counter. You hardly feel the burn on your chest, only seconds before you're lifting your hand and turning the red beams to blue from where it hits you, going back towards his eyes.
You're freezing the heat blasts (the lasers) slowly but surely.
His eyebrows furrow, confused. And he winces in pain. He tries to stop producing them, but because of your essential pull, he can't. Panic floods his system as the blue keeps bleeding into the red, getting closer and closer to his retinas.
The crew watches with baited breath and fascination; Butcher and Sage smirking deviously, the others watching in shock and awe.
"What the fuck." Ben mutters softly, and Robbie nods beside him.
"Yeahh, you do not wanna mess with that girl. Saw first hand how destructive she could get back in '99."
Ben wants to ask more but he focuses on the sight in front of him.
Homelander is on his knees, straining against his own eyes. He starts yelling and shouting in discomfort and anger, trying his best to do something but unable to overpower you. It's mere inches away from reaching his eyes when suddenly something from the side blasts you into the wall, catching you off guard.
The force field around the group stays in tact, and they watch as Homelander blinks hard, immediately flying off and away through the hole in the roof. Coward.
You groan slightly as you get up, dusting concrete chunks and powder off yourself, getting up to face a man in a white super suit with obnoxious padding.
Oh Father sizes you up, shooting a smile your way so fake you almost think it's plastic.
"Can't have you hurting our lord and savior now, can I?"
You squint in annoyance. "The fuck are you talking about."
Instead of opening his mouth to answer he just starts shouting his sonic scream at you, and you zap yourself away before it reaches. Unfortunately he simply turns his head in your direction too fast for you to teleport away again. The sound overloads your senses, you wince and cover your ears as the force field begins to flicker slightly.
Ben is beyond antsy, needing to do something to help you. But once more, Robbie assures him. "She's got it Ben, just watch."
You take a deep breath, planting your feet firmly on the ground before you start to glow. Your hair, your hands, your eyes, they shine the brightest as you capture the sound waves with your energy. And with a flick of the wrist, you shift it, so that he ends up absorbing his own scream.
Which causes him to burst instantly, chunks of him flying everywhere but you shield yourself too before any of it can hit you.
You're breathing heavily as you start to calm, the light emitting from you dimming slowly. Ben calls your name softly, and you give yourself another few seconds to try and stop your trembling before lifting the force field from around the group.
Their faces range from shocked to ecstatic to worried—Ben, Robbie and Goldie being the latter.
Fast steps lead him to you in seconds and you hold a shaking hand up. "I'm fine."
Ben still takes it into his own, holding it as he looks you over. He's getting flashbacks to that day, when he found you shaking and writhing in agony on the floor after the dosage. You know that's what he's thinking, you can see it in his eyes.
"I'm sorry." He breathes, his voice full of genuine sorrow.
"I know." You counter quietly. Not cruel just, honest.
And you know you'll have to talk, about a lot of things, but for a simple moment you both relish in the feel of familiarity and old comfort—with your hand still held gently in his.
ben masterlist ᝰ. main masterlist ⟢ series masterlist
⋆˚࿔ end notes; soooo...what do we thiiiiink...🤠👉🏽👈🏽 personally this is my new favorite thing i've written <33 I had so much fun getting lost in it, though my qualms with how VR essentially took over season five still stand...lol. it's just fun to daydream yk :]
more thoughts of a mean!reader who play the big three (Homelander, Soldier Boy, and Bombsight ) like a damn fiddle.
+ Bombsight smut, and allusions to Soldier Boy smut
You , who were only recruited by Sage because "There needs to be a pretty face in the Seven."
You, who acts as exactly that, a pretty face and nothing more. You don't make any statements while everything happens, and eventually, it builds a lore about you. People like having someone to put their fantasies in, so you become that person.
You, who met Sage back in your uni days. Your powers were nothing worthy of being on the Seven, so why would Sage choose you? You have no idea.
You, who were chosen because Sage clearly remembers the day you slapped your boyfriend for saying something stupid (Accusing you of cheating, which you 100% were) and gaslit him so hard he came back within the hour with flowers and begging for your forgiveness.
You, who were chosen because Sage also recalls how at all times you always had three or more men on your roster because "if you have three, it assure you can never catch feelings for one"
You, who eventually get bored, just for the fun of it turn your sights to Homelander because you couldn't help just how easy he would be.
Homelander who never took any real notice of you other than the fact you were a pretty face, but Sage brought you on, so you had to have something. It made him suspicious of you.
Homelander, who began to understand your appeal when theories began to circle around you. He watched as people spun their own tales about you based off a few clips. One of you holding a baby, another of you back in your college days helping a girl, and the final one of you being surrounded by dogs from a pound.
Homelander, who began to pay more attention to you once you approached him. He was desired by many, but they didn't know him, you did. You were always there, so you knew him, if only a little.
Homelander, who started speaking more honestly with you around. You ignored everyone else in the Seven besides him and it's weak he knows, but he basks in that knowledge that you only pay attention to him.
Homelander, who thinks the best of you because you never mess up. (There's nothing to mess up) You never undermine him. You boost his public image whenever you appear beside him, so he stays beside you often. (Try as he might, he still needs validation)
Homelander, who preens at the little compliments you give him. Feels a shiver travel down his spine when you whisper a small "I'm proud of you."
Homelander, who grows confused when you start to pull away. Suddenly you're paying more attention to your phone than to him.
Homelander, who tries to act unaffected by the look you've just given him after trying to talk to you.
You, who a week back picked up what Sage put down. There were coordinates. Ever curious, you go, and you find someone delicious.
You who finds Bombsight and figure out who's better than him to add to your super roster.
Bombsight, who is adamant he's the one in control in this little tango between the two of you.
Bombsight, who says you're not getting a relationship out of him. All you say is "I'll change your mind."
Bombsight is sure you won't, until you both start doing things people would do in a relationship. You call him every night. You fall asleep on the phone with him. You call him baby, love, and all the other sweet names that come with being in a relationship.
Bombsight, who is beginning to enjoy the perks of having a relationship without ever being in one, and he is sure he's got you.
Bombsight knows he has you when you start telling him things like "I've never opened up to anyone like this before" and "I feel like I've known you forever."
You who's got Bombsight right where you want him, so you turn your attention back to Homelander. You've only gotten caught twice in your entire career of playing men. Once, it was a rookie mistake; he got hold of your phone. Second time? You didn't lay the groundwork well enough to be able to gaslight him into thinking you were never cheating.
You, who, at this point, have gotten so used to cheating, you don't even think it's taboo. It's a normal, and expected even, that you're bound to cheat. Your heart rate doesn't speed up because you know your little weirdo (Homelander) can hear it.
You who make sure none of your males ever align unless they're best friends who know how to keep their mouths shut and don't want to lose their friendship.
You who never keeps your phone out in the open for anyone to grab or take, and your cute pink iPad hidden somewhere no one would care to look.
You who makes sure all tangible proof can be misconstrued.
Homelander, who is starting to have withdrawals from your lack of affection. He's getting more snappy. Having more fantasies of lasering someone from the press in half.
Homelander, who, in his desperation and lack of you, lets his father, Soldier Boy, out of cryo, doesn't know he's just given you your third bitch on the roster.
You, who jumps for joy when you see Soldier Boy, and YOU KNOW it's free eats, because he screams that he's easy as hell.
Homelander, who would never assume you'd do anything with anyone else because you told him that if you ever caught him with someone else, you'd be quick to leave the Seven. Safe to say he dropped Firecracker pretty fast.
Homelander, who still gets worried when Soldier Boy goes sniffing around you, and you entertain it. But no! You'd never cheat on him, how could you when you said you'd leave him and everything else if you ever found out. He doesn't want you to leave.
Soldier Boy, who yearns to take you from his weird ass son when you tell him that he's forced you into this faux relationship, and your life and family are on the line.
Soldier Boy, who kisses you any time he can. Behind a door, in your room, in the room of the Seven when he knows Homelander is gone.
Soldier Boy, who relaxes because you give him everything he could ever want. You shower him in compliments that he doesn't think deep enough, because if he did, he'd realize they're all backhanded. But he's too busy coming to you for all the things Clara and Crimson Countess ever did for him.
Soldier Boy, who knows you chose him because you always tell him so. Over and over you whisper that it's him. That you think he's the one, that you've never been more sure about anyone other than him.
Soldier Boy, who think's stupid at first but then grows to crave your words.
Soldier Boy, who doesn't even realize you begin to just barely giving him anything, and yet he can't understand why he gets this rush of you giving him something he's not supposed to have. Maybe it's because his son is obsessed with you and had you first.
Soldier Boy, who says you want to leave it all and go off with him somewhere. He lets the idea warm him.
You, who can't help but smile at it all.
Bombsight, who still answers your call because he loves what you tell him. You call him, telling him you missed his voice. You text him, calling him your handsome boy.
You, who had mastered the art of ★Love Bombing★ and have made sure to integrate yourself into Bombsight's routine.
You, who makes sure you're the first person he wakes up to, and the last voice he goes to sleep hearing, and always making sure to sprinkle in a good dose of telling him "Baby, I just think you're the one." All the while in the next room, Soldier Boy is fucking his hand because you left him all hot and bothered, not even five minutes before you called Bombsight.
Bombsight, who thinks you might be perfect for him with your little phrases that delight him when you tell him, "We're so alike it's scary because I feel the exact same way!"
Bombsight, who starts thinking about giving you the V1 to keep you around forever. You're already a supe; some V1 just makes sure you stay forever.
Bombsight, who starts imagining a life with you when you start using "us" and "our" consistently so much so he would think it abnormal for it to be any other way.
Bombsight, who takes everything you give him and keeps it close to his heart. You told him, "I'd never leave you," after he told you about Golden Geisha.
Bombsight, who mourned in your arms Goldie and you let him without ever telling him anything and he knows you'll stay.
You, who has to suppress a smile every time you see any of your hoes.
You, who starts to hang around more with Soldier Boy, but you never do anything with him. Never letting it go beyond kissing and heavy petting.
Homelander, who is starting to get insecure with how much time you spend with Soldier Boy, so he starts changing anything and everything about himself for any small comment you make. You told him you liked his blonde hair, and that warm feeling tingled down his spine. You then told him that his roots are showing. He's damn near in the hair salon every day, making sure his roots are never visible.
Soldier Boy, who starts to get annoyed when he has to deal with seeing more and more public outings of you and Homelander.
Soldier Boy, who hates seeing Homelander having his hand on some part of you at all times.
Soldier Boy, who has to hold himself back whenever Homelander presses a kiss to your temple and you make those pleading eyes to Soldier Boy to save you. He just hasn't figured out a way to do so yet.
Soldier Boy, that casually mentions kids as a way to distract you from his weird-ass son. He tells you he wants three kids, you agree, and say you'd want them to be raised in the country. He couldn't agree more.
Soldier Boy, who tells you he wants all boys, but you warm him up to the idea of having a couple of girls, and from then on can't stop thinking about having little girls who look just like you.
You, who all the while keeps Homelander with the facade that you're a virgin and he thrives off of that, seeing as the damn fool thinks he's god now, and now you fit perfectly in his little story.
You, who knows it won't be long till Soldier Boy breaks, and his only 'relationship' is gone. And you, for one, can't wait to see that day happen.
Homelander, who agrees to wait, never knowing his father has only just earned the right to eat you out and nothing more.
Soldier Boy, who is training himself to get off from just eating you out, because it's all you're giving him. But he can't bring himself to care all that much because no one else is getting you this way.
Bombsight, who laughs at both of them because he knows he's the one for you. (He's not) Why? Because he's the one that gets to fuck you.
Robbie is good at hiding. He's always been good at the sort of thing. So when he starts wanting you in more ways than one, he's also pretty good at hiding that.
Robbie can't have a relationship with you, but maybe something a little more than what you both have now —A situationship is what they call it nowadays no?
Maybe it wouldn't hurt. Shit, every time he sees you, cooking for him, waking up across the room from him, in his clothes, using his products to shower, his cock twitches and thickens in his pants. He can only just barely hide his need for you. Just barely, with teasing and making small comments that if you ever needed to, you can always sleep with him.
You took his offer. He was dead asleep when he felt you hugging him. Well after that, it wasn't long till Robbie was snapping his hips up into you with ferocity trying to hide the fact that he's bee lonely for so long.
And your sweet words in such a short time are getting him to rethink everything.
Sweet woman.
He's looking up at you as he sinks his cock into your soaked cunt as your straddling him. His mouth is agape as he looking at you as you give him shaky moans and needy whimpers from your pouty, swollen lips. Swollen because he's kissed you too hard. But you never seem to mind, every time he kisses you he feels your walls twitch around his cock.
He wants better lighting, he needs better lighting to see what he's sure is an ethereal sight of you above him.
Robbie thinks this is lust. This is just pure pure lustful sex, but fuck! You're just so good for him.
He's special to you. You can trust him. You've given yourself to him. Maybe he's an awful guy for taking advantage of you like this, but after all your sweet words of making him feel like he's the only one for you. Robbie just can't help himself.
Even now, he can't help himself because you're close enough that he can make out your starry eyes looking down on him all sweet and he knows that he's not gonna be able to let you go like he should.
"Please Robbie!" It's all you can manage to say. It sounds so good to him. Sounds so good the way his name sound rolls off your tongue and Robbie has to remind himself to not grip you too hard lest you break.
You told him you don't do this and yet you're on top of his whining that you wanna cum, and Robbie is thoroughly enjoying every single bit of it. Pleasure that only he can give you. “Yeah? Go ahead. Fuck, don’t let me stop you, pretty girl.” And the sight that follows, well, he can live in the moment for eternity. Your eyes squeeze shut before you’re creaming around his cock, his hands moving up your sides before cupping your face and pulling you into a sloppy, wet, bruising kiss.
Theres a bliss that blooms in Robbie whenever he feels your heartbeat race around him. It flushes every part of him when he can feel and hear your heartbeat, desperately trying to keep up. Even more so as he's kissing you, filling you up with his load while you moan and breathe your sighs across his lips in a tone he's sure his next wet dream will be about.
Robbie his holding on to you as he comes down from his orgasm and still lost in his hormone-drunken haze when he suddenly flips you and has you under him all the while he presses soft slow kisses over your face. He bathes in the sweet sounds of your whimpers at the over stimulation. He pulls back, looking down at you, and you have this dreamy look on his face that punches him in the gut when he recalls that he told you he can't ever be with you.
You give him a sweet smile and his cock twitches awake inside of your tight walls once more.
Maybe it doesn't sound like all that bad of an idea.
Soldier Boy, who tells you about the supe killing virus.
You, who starts to panic, because no one ever said your life would really be in danger. Males, you can handle. A virus? You're not so sure.
Soldier Boy, who comforts you by saying that both of you need to find Bombsight because he has the V1 and that it's the cure.
You, who gives a smile and a small laugh before agreeing. Your dumbass man, who says he's gonna work with Homelander to find it and then give it to you.
You, who knows you're gonna get in about a week, tops.
Bombsight, who can't get a clear reading on you. One moment you text him back within ten minutes, other times you don't respond after 10. But he knows you're online because you post on your social media. Small pictures every now and then.
Bombsight, who calls you out about not responding to him, but somehow always ends up taking the blame for you. "You said you didn't want a relationship, and I thought I was coming on too strong. I was giving you space."
Bombsight, who kicks himself over the fact that it is what he said, and it was stupid to say.
Bombsight, who panics when you start alluding to breaking up. He tells you that you told him you'd never leave him. So how could you!?
You, who only said, "But we're not together in a relationship, remember?" It took a week for him to come back begging for you.
Bombsight, who comes back with the V1, says he wants to spend eternity with you. He's on one knee, opening the box and giving it to you like it's a wedding ring.
You, who only look down at him as he looks up to you with such pleading eyes, it takes everything in you to not burst out laughing at him.
Bombsight, who stays still. You've given him heaven, and now you're giving him limbo.
You, who finally accepts and Bombsight gives you the V1.
Sage, who couldn't be happier with your work because it's only a matter of time before you grow bored and leave, or let them all know about one another.
You, who acts the pious one ever, tells Bombsight to go save Goldie, all the while Soldier Boy calls you to come get the V1 he'll take from Robbie before Homelander ever gets his hands on it.
Homelander, who will still take the V1, but before he does, he'll have his best workers make another one by reverse engineering the one he'll take and then give that second dose to you.
Homelander, who proposes to you, and you say yes, and so he's secured his virgin wife.
"Look, all we're after is the V1. You hand that over, we go home happy." MM spoke and Robbie looked over to him.
He looked back over to Goldie. Robbie is fast, but not fast enough to stop the bullet. "I can't."
"Robbie." Goldie called out and Robbie sighed.
"I can't because I don't have it. Haven't had it for weeks." He looked over to Goldie. "You said you weren't gonna change your mind. It took time for me to accept that, and I did."
"What the fuck do you mean you don't have it?" Butcher pressed the gun into her head.
Robbie is long over Goldie, but it doesn't mean he doesn't care about her. He wants her to have a good life. That's all. "Stop!"
"Where is the V?" Butcher asked once more.
"I already administered it to someone else." No point in hiding it. He just needs to save Goldie and then go back to you. That's it, that's all.
"Who?" Hughie stepped forward. It's not Homelander. That's a win, right?
Sage spoke your name, and Robbie's head snapped towards her. How would she know that? "She works fast. For weeks, you said? Soldier Boy must've told her, and what? You cracked within a week when she told you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"What are you talking about?"
Both MM and Robbie spoke. Sage only shrugged. "What? Back up for the back up. If this didn't work, then she would."
Was Robbie played? No. You wouldn't. Not after everything. You wouldn't.
"And that I did." You appeared behind Sage. MM jumped back, and Sage froze as your arms wrapped around her. Your head rested atop hers. "To be fair, I had no idea about the V1 until Soldier Boy told me about y'all's virus."
You smiled over to Robbie, offering him a smile. So then he wasn't played? Things just lined up. Yeah, that's what happened. That's what he decides happens. Before he can say anything more he's charged by Ben.
"Where's the V1 Robbie?" Ben hissed in his ear, and Robbie threw him off.
"Gone." Robbie knew you had to put on an act for Soldier Boy and Homelander, but he was different. He was your boy. You hadn't even bothered to tell Ben that you already had the V1.
Ben looked over to Goldie, who only looked at you.
You looked over to MM and muttered, "This is always my favorite part."
Robbie scoffed and walked over to you, calling your name. He held out his hand. You stood still. Ben called your name, asking what fuck this was.
You stood there trying to hold in your laughter, but looking at both of them, gosh, you just couldn't. You began laughing. "I'm sorry." Was all you could manage between small little laughs. Suddenly, life was filled with sunshine and rainbows. You lived for this shit. The look of realization they've both been cheated, or even better, when they don't care, and they still want you.
Now to find out which is which. Your primary concern was Soldier Boy, seeing as he could fry the V out of you. Bombsight was a hard hitter, and Homelander, you're sure is to be due any minute.
Your plan was simple: you could keep Robbie as a side piece; you had laid the groundwork for him for over a year. He was solid. Ben wasn't. You need Ben back in that box so that one day, when you get tired of all of this, you unfreeze him and, in anger, he fries the V out of you. Simple. Homelander, well, he had to go.
So your laughing turned into crying. Tears of joy, but not that they would know that.
"Hey! Hey, hey, hey!" Robbie ran up to you, wiping your tears whilst everyone watched, and Ben stood there trying to understand what the fuck was happening. How the fuck did you know Robbie? How did Robbie know you!? And why the fuck is he wiping your tears like he knows you!?
"I'm scared." You muttered wiping your tears.
"Of what?"
"Homelander." You looked behind Robbie and to Ben, whose brows were still furrowed in utter confusion.
"Why?" Robbie's hand tilted your gaze back to him.
Ben made a face.
"He said he wanted me to ascend with him. Something about being the virgin or something. He-"
"What the fuck?" Robbie looked down. Virgin where? He's been making love to you for the past year. You weren't a virgin then. Robbie knew you had to play it for the cameras, but to know you had to go this far. His heart ached seeing you cry. His poor girl.
"What the hell are you talking about?" Ben walked over to you, and you stepped away from Robbie. Was this another act? But why? For what? You wouldn't do this to him. Not after everything you've said. You wanted kids with him. So then what the fuck was this?
"He wants some kind of marriage and kids. I don't know!" Your lips trembled as you forced more tears out. Maybe they were real tears because holy fuck when Homelander told you about that, that was the fucking scariest shit you've ever heard in your entire life!
Robbie cupped your face, and Ben had just about had enough of this. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"And why the fuck would she-" You cut Soldier Boy off before things could turn on you.
"Because I thought I could handle it! I was wrong. I'm sorry, I just-"
Robbie shushed you before kissing your forehead. "It won't come to that. I swear it."
And with that, he flew off. Your eyes looked back at Ben. "Ben-"
"What the fuck was that!?"
You walked over to him, and before he could start cussing, you kissed him. You felt him tense before relaxing. You pulled back. "Ben, listen to me." He did. "I've been in the Seven for a while. I didn't even know who you were, but I knew I needed someone, anyone, who could protect me. That's all Bombsight is to me." Your hands cradled his face. "I love you, Ben. No one else. I meant every word I said. I do want children with you. I still want to leave, but I can't do that if Homelander is after us. I want our children to grow without any fear." You pulled his hand against your chest, your heart beat was fast. You always got a thrill out of these things. "Please, Ben."
He gave a sigh, and you pushed down a smile. He looked up towards the hole made by Bombsight and shook his head. He gave you one final kiss before running out.
You watched him with a smile and then "Pfft!" You turned around with a small laugh. "How was I?"
"Oscar worthy." Sage smiled and clapped.
"Right? Fuck I almost fumbled when I laughed." You shook your head. "Y'know, I wondered what it was you wanted with me, but I'm assuming it was this?"
"I knew you wouldn't be able to help yourself."
You only smiled and shrugged.
"Oi!"
You turned and caught the flask thrown at you. You smiled, giving a small cheer before drinking. You walked back over to him, handing him the flask. "I have you to thank." You bent down, looking at Goldie. "Had you not dumped Bombsight, this would've taken a whole lot longer." You smiled, going to put a hand on her lap. "So thank you for not choosing Robbie."
She created a force field, knocking you back. You rolled your eyes, standing up, dusting yourself off.
"You don't deserve him." She hissed out and only shrugged.
"Debatable. He's just a man, you know? All men are dogs, that includes golden retrievers like him." You pursed your lips, giving her a slow nod before laughing. You turned around, motioning to go. "I secured front row seats. I'd hate to see it go to waste."
You, who in the end got everything you wanted.
Homelander, who looked up to you, was heartbroken and angry when it was revealed that Soldier Boy had access to you in a way that you always denied him, and that Bombsight had been fucking you for a year, and you looked him in the face and lied like it was second nature.
Your face was the last thing he saw before Butcher ripped him in half.
Soldier Boy, who gasped for air as Bombsight choked him out, all the while you smiled as you waved goodbye.
Your face was the last thing he saw before he was put back into that damn box.
Bombsight, who still didn't get that you couldn't give two shits about him.
In the end, your face was constantly shoved down his throat as you went back and took over the Seven, reforming it, seeing as you had no prior offenses.
Still though. You laid down the groundwork for Bombsight exceptionally well, so even after everything, he still can't help but want you. And after all, you have all of eternity with him.
Nav.
m.list
Guess who's my favorite out of the three 🤭
How I imagine the boys seeing how reader was playing SB and BS🥱
Also if the smut scene doesn’t make sense, it’s cuz I stole it from another draft and I was too lazy to write another one 🙂↔️
Summary: Eighty-five years after Soldier Boy left you behind, he finds you frozen, kept as leverage, and drags you back into a world you never got to live. Far from Vought’s spotlight, you and Ben try to stitch a marriage back together from ash.
(sequel to "the softest thing")
Pairing: Soldier Boy x Reader
Warnings: Language, angst
Word Count: 10178
DISCLAIMER: Everything is purely fiction. I do not intend to attack or hurt anyone. The story is, of course, entirely made up and meant for entertainment purposes.
The file hit his lap. Ben looked down with the kind of flat, exhausted annoyance he had been wearing since he woke up in that obscene room high over the city. Homelander’s room. Homelander stood across from him bright-eyed.
“Think about it again”, he had said. Then the file.
Ben almost told him to go fuck himself twice. His fingers were already closing around the folder to throw it. Then he saw the label. A name. Not yours when you were his wife. Not Mrs. anything. Not the name on the marriage license, or the bills, or the little card at the dry cleaner back when there had still been ordinary days. Your name. The one from before him.
Ben went still. The suite got very quiet.
Ben looked down at the folder again. SUBJECT STATUS: CRYOGENIC CONTAINMENT STABLE
For one second his brain refused to understand the words in the right order. Then it did.
His thumb slipped under the edge and opened the file.
The first page was a photograph. Black-and-white. Studio-lit. Clinical in a way that made his stomach turn. You were in your twenties in it.
He knew that before the file told him, because he knew your face. Not the lined, careful face you might have worn if life had kept happening to you. Not the older version time should have made. This was you as you had been when he left you. Soft mouth, watchful eyes, hair set neatly back from your face, trying so hard in the picture to look composed that it hurt to see.
Twenty-seven. Frozen there. Eighty-five years gone and not a day on your face.
Ben stopped breathing. Below the photograph, line after line of text blurred and sharpened and blurred again.
Initial retrieval.
Unauthorized domestic association with asset.
Emotional leverage viability high.
Compound V survivability unexpectedly successful.
Long-term storage authorized.
Pressure contingency.
Pressure contingency.
Pressure contingency.
His hand tightened on the page hard enough to crease it.
Across the room, Homelander lifted his glass and watched him with open interest. “She´s alive”.
Ben did not look up. The suite had narrowed to the file in his hands and the sound of blood rushing hot and violent in his ears.
There were more pages. Medical charts. Temperature logs. Monitoring summaries. A diagram of some buried facility with sectors blacked out in thick ink. One page clipped in later than the rest with a new date stamped at the top and a note:
Subject remains non-public. Retention advised. Utility value may increase if Soldier Boy becomes noncompliant.
Ben stared at that line until the letters stopped being letters and became something else. Something with teeth.
He had thought leaving you had been the worst thing he ever did to you.
Not because he had not done worse things to other people. He had. Plenty. Enough to wake sweating with names he never let himself say out loud.
But leaving you, walking out of that little kitchen for good, letting Vought sand down whatever was left of Ben until Soldier Boy fit cleanly over the top, had always sat in him like rust. Hidden. Eating through from the inside.
And all that time… All that goddamn time…
They had had you.
Kept.
Stored.
“I figured that might get your attention”.
Ben lifted his head then. Slowly. He had looked dangerous before. Hungover, heavy-eyed, broad across the shoulders even in borrowed clothes. Now he looked like something much older and uglier than danger.
Homelander’s expression flickered, just a little, delighted and cautious at once.
“She was always there”, he said lightly, as if discussing an old account finally brought current. “Cute trick, really. Vought keeps all sorts of contingencies. You of all people should appreciate preparedness”.
Ben rose from the couch.
“So”, Homelander said. “Now that you understand the leverage, are you ready to be useful?”.
“You knew”.
Homelander tilted his head. “I know lots of things”.
“You knew”, Ben said again.
The file hung at his side, crushed under his fingers now, your photograph bent where his grip had warped the paper.
Homelander gave a small shrug. “I knew enough”.
That was all it took. Ben crossed the room. He caught Homelander by the throat and hit him through the edge of the bar. Marble split. Bottles exploded and glass sprayed the room.
Homelander laughed. Even half-crushed under Soldier Boy’s hand, he laughed.
“Ah”, he choked out, eyes bright and mad, “there he is”.
Ben hit him again. This time the sound was wetter. Angrier. A lamp went over. A slab of black stone cracked down the middle.
Homelander’s smile came back bloodied.
“She’s alive”, he rasped. “That’s the important part”.
Ben’s fingers tightened at his throat. For one terrible second, he really might have killed him. Then Homelander, even pinned and bruised and half-grinning through blood, said the one thing that cut clean through the red:
“You kill me, you lose her”.
Ben froze. Homelander smiled wider despite the hand at his neck.
Ben looked at him and saw, all at once, every Vought man he had ever hated. The executives with polished shoes. The handlers. The doctors. The ones who turned human beings into concepts and concepts into assets and assets into pressure. Homelander was just the latest model, shinier, but made from the same rotten blueprint.
Very slowly, Ben let him go.
Homelander staggered back, still smiling because he could not help himself. Because getting under skin was the only intimacy he understood.
Ben wiped his bleeding palm on his shirt and looked down at the file again. Your picture stared back up at him. Twenty-seven.
A whole life stolen and held in a drawer.
His chest went tight in a way no fight had ever managed. Not even Russia. Not the furnace. Not the years in a tube under a foreign sky while his own name turned into a mascot and then a joke and then a warning.
You.
He thought of the side yard between your houses. Your mittened fingers tucked into his elbow. Your voice, soft and bossy at sixteen: Hold still. The little kitchen table where you had cleaned blood off his face while his father’s voice still rang in his ears, calling him a fucking disappointment. The way you had looked at him when nobody else looked at him like there was anything worth saving.
He had left you.
That was his sin.
But this… This was something else.
They had taken what he left behind and turned it into inventory.
Homelander straightened. “Get Butcher for me”, he said, as if the room were not half-destroyed around them. “And I show you where she its”.
-
The air bit cold enough to sting the back of your throat just breathing it. Frost filmed the pipes overhead. Ben stood in the middle of the bunker, bloody from wrist to collar. Some of it was his. Most of it wasn’t. Bodies lay where they had fallen. One by the far control panel, neck bent wrong over a spill of shattered glass. Two by the blast door, rifles kicked out of reach. One half-slumped against the wall. Another near the alarm box, hand frozen inches from the switch he never got to hit in time.
Ben had not made much noise doing it. That was what frightened him now, standing there with the little remote in his hand and your tank in front of him.
Not the killing itself. He had done too much of that for it to feel new.
Not even the speed of it.
It was how easy it had been. How clean. How Soldier Boy it had felt.
The remote was small in his palm. One red button under a flip-cover guard. Ridiculous, really, that after eighty-five years, after Russia and fire and Butcher and Homelander and all the rot in between, the distance between him and you had come down to one ugly little button.
He stared at it. Did not move. In front of him, behind a curved wall of glass gone pearly with cold, you stood upright in the tank. Frozen. Perfectly still. Twenty-seven.
That was the first thing that had wrecked him when Homelander shoved the file at him in the tower. Not the reports. Not the coordinates. Not even the word cryogenic typed in neat black letters above your name.
Your age. Twenty-seven.
He had been old enough to rot and be reborn and rot again. The world had gone through wars and presidents and hairstyles and goddamn moons and computers in people’s pockets.
He had been buried under Russian steel while his own legend got sold by men who had never once had to dirty their own hands.
And you were still twenty-seven.
Still wearing the same face he remembered from the last years before he left.
Softer in rest than in life, maybe, because whatever fear or sorrow Vought had dragged through you hadn’t made it through the ice.
Your hair was pinned back from your face by frost and suspension gel and machinery he did not understand. Your lashes lay dark against your skin. Your mouth looked pale and closed and familiar enough to stop his heart. You looked exactly like all those years ago.
And the second he saw you, all the time between then and now collapsed so violently it left him dizzy.
The little house. The kitchen table. Rain on the windows. Your pink satin nightgown. Your face wet with tears while he stood in the doorway and let Soldier Boy win.
He had imagined finding you a hundred different ways on the drive out here. Older. Dead. Bones in a box. A grave with some false name.
He had not imagined this.
You looked like you could open your eyes any second and ask why he was home so late.
Ben’s fingers tightened around the remote until the casing creaked.
He was afraid. Afraid of pressing a button. B
ecause once he did, it became real. Once he did, there would be no more distance between the idea of you and your body in front of him.
You might wake and not know him. You might wake and know him too well. You might look at him and see only the man who left. Worse—you might not wake right.
Vought had held you for eighty-five years like inventory. Shot you full of V and put you under glass. Used your name as leverage in files. He had no reason to trust anything about what came next.
“Jesus Christ”. He stepped closer to the tank.
Up close, he could see where frost feathered over the seams of the metal braces holding the glass in place.
Tubes snaked from the back of the chamber into your arms, your spine, the base of your skull. Machines had been kissing you longer than he had.
The thought made something black roll over in him.
He lifted his free hand and pressed his palm to the glass. The cold bit instantly through blood and skin.
Behind the fogged surface, your face stayed calm. Untouched by any of it. Soft in that old familiar way that used to wreck him even when he was a boy with split knuckles and too much pride.
You had always looked gentler than the world deserved.
He bowed his head once, just enough that his forehead nearly hit the glass. Blood from his hand smeared across the frost in a rust-dark streak. For a second, all he could see was another kind of red. Lipstick on a collar. Then your tears. Your wedding band glinting while you tried not to cry in front of him.
All the little moments he had buried under war and whiskey and Vought work and rage because digging them up would mean admitting what he had done with his own hands.
His thumb found the edge of the safety cover on the remote and flipped it open. Ben’s heartbeat kicked hard. Then something inside him, something older than Soldier Boy and uglier than pride and maybe closer to Ben than he had been in years, made the decision for him. He pressed the button.
For one horrible second, nothing happened. Then the chamber gave a low hydraulic thud. Lights changed from green to amber. Somewhere under the floor, machinery woke in layers—pumps, vents, hissing valves releasing pressure in precise bursts.
Frost shivered loose from the tank seams and fell in powdery sheets. The hum deepened into a mechanical roar.
Ben took one step back, then stopped himself and stood his ground.
Amber turned to white. Warm fluid began draining in spirals around your body, slipping down the inside of the glass in pale pink streaks where blood had mixed into the solution somewhere in the tubing.
Numbers on the monitor started changing faster now. You did not move.
Ben’s throat tightened until breathing hurt. “Come on”, he muttered.
The glass clouded, then cleared in patches. Your skin changed color by degrees, from the waxy stillness of preserved flesh to something nearer living. Frost melted from your lashes. One lock of hair slipped loose against your temple. The line of your mouth softened as the cold released it. Still nothing.
Ben stepped closer again without realizing he had. The chamber hissed. A latch somewhere deep in the mechanism disengaged with a heavy clunk. Then your fingers twitched. So small he might have imagined it in another life. Not now. Ben stopped breathing altogether.
A second later your hand jerked again, this time harder, tendons pulling under your skin. Your chest gave a shallow, ragged hitch as if your body had forgotten the shape of breath and was trying to relearn it by force.
The front seal cracked with a metallic snap. Ben was moving before the door had fully opened. It swung out in a gust of freezing vapor, and you pitched forward with the dead weight of someone waking into gravity after a century.
Tubes tore free. Glassy fluid spilled over the lip of the tank onto the floor. Your knees buckled instantly.
Ben caught you.
Your body convulsed against him. Then you coughed. Ben looked down and saw the tube shifting at the back of your throat. “Shit”.
He dropped to one knee in the spill of coolant and freezing fluid, one arm locked behind your shoulders to keep you upright. The other hand hovered for a second over the tubing, his fingers slick with blood and condensation.
You gagged again, harder this time. “Easy”, he said, though his own voice was shot through with something dangerously close to panic. “Easy, sweetheart, I got it”.
He had no idea if he did.
He slid two fingers carefully to the base of the tube, trying to ignore how unnatural it looked disappearing past your lips, trying to ignore the old terror that came whenever your body was involved and his hands had to do something delicate.
His touch, for once, was painstakingly light. Your throat worked around the plastic. Another cough tore through you. Ben pulled. The moment it cleared your mouth you folded forward with a choking gasp. Your forehead knocked weakly against his collarbone. Cold fluid soaked through the front of his shirt where you leaned against him. You kept coughing. Your whole body shook with it.
“Breathe”, he said, low and rough. “Come on. There you go”.
There were wires everywhere. Thin sensor leads plastered to your skin. Adhesive pads at your icollarbone, your ribs, your temples. A cluster of ports and lines trailed from your back and arms and disappeared into the ruined chamber behind you.
The monitor to the side was beeping too fast now, numbers climbing. Ben glanced at it once. He didn’t know what most of it meant. But he knew the sound of a heart trying to decide whether it belonged in a living body again. Fast. Wrong. Then skipping. Then racing.
His jaw tightened. “C’mon”, he muttered, more fiercely now. “Don’t do this”.
He reached for the first wire at your chest and peeled it back with maddening care. Then another. Then another. The adhesive came loose with soft wet sounds against your skin. His fingers shook once when one of the leads snagged in your hair and you flinched faintly even half-conscious.
“Sorry”, he said instantly. The word left his mouth before he could stop it.
He stared at your face after saying it, as if even now some part of him expected you to open your eyes just to tell him it was too late for apologies. But your eyes stayed shut. Your mouth was parted, drawing in broken little breaths that. Every now and then another cough shuddered through you, weaker than the one before.
Ben stripped the last wire from your throat and shoulder, then found more at your wrists. At the inside of your elbows. At the base of your neck. Whoever had put you in there had instrumented every inch of you like they were trying to measure a miracle and own it.
He tore the leads free one by one. The monitor screamed once before the rhythm smoothed. Still too quick and shallow. But steadier.
Ben went still long enough to listen. And there was your heartbeat. Fast. Frightened… Human.
He frowned and looked toward the monitor again. That made no sense. They had pumped you full of V. He knew that from the file, from the notes. He had come down here half-prepared to find something else in the tank. Some glowing-eyed Vought experiment wearing your face. Some twisted answer to a question nobody should have asked.
But your heart didn’t sound like his. Didn’t sound like Homelander’s, his own or any of the monsters and mascots he had spent too much of his life around. It sounded breakable. Human.
Your breathing hitched again and your eyelids fluttered.
Ben’s pulse hammered. He had faced gunfire with less dread. He could fight. Kill. Blow through steel doors. March into a bunker alone and paint the walls with guards and not blink. But waiting for your eyes to open… that nearly undid him.
Because now there was nothing between you. Now it was just you waking up. And him. The man who left. The husband who broke your heart before strangers finished the job. The one who had not come back in time. Not in 1970. Not in 1980. Not in any of the years after that.
The one who had let himself become Soldier Boy so completely that the company had thought the only way to control him was to freeze the last soft part of his old life and keep it in storage.
Ben sat back on his heels in the freezing slush and watched your face with the kind of terrible focus that made everything else disappear. A dozen possibilities chased each other through his head, none of them good.
You might wake confused. You might wake screaming. You might wake and remember only the worst of him. You might wake and hate him on sight.
You had every right.
That last thought lodged in him hardest.
Did you still hate him? Worse—had the hatred had eighty-five years to sharpen somewhere inside whatever dreaming half-life Vought had trapped you in?
Or had the ice kept you right at the moment of your ruin, your grief as fresh as blood under skin?
Ben rubbed a hand once over his mouth and came away with red still drying there from someone else. He looked down at it with sudden disgust and wiped it on the concrete.
Your heartbeat jumped again. His attention snapped back to you instantly.
“Hey”, he said. “Stay with me”.
Your fingers closed weakly around two of his without any strength in them at all. The contact hit him so hard it almost made him bow forward.
There you were. Cold. Half-conscious. Newly dragged from eighty-five years of dark. And still, by some reflex too old for either of you to kill, your hand had reached.
Ben swallowed hard enough it hurt. “I know”, he said softly, though you had not spoken. “I know”.
He didn’t know what he meant by it. That he knew you were frightened? That he knew he shouldn’t be the one you woke up to? That he knew exactly what kind of man he had been the last time you saw him properly and how impossible it was to ask for anything gentler from this moment?
Maybe all of it.
Your breathing steadied a little more. Still shaky. Still too quick. But less torn-up on the way in. Less like drowning.
The lights buzzed overhead. Down the corridor, a distant alarm warbled and cut out, maybe killed by the same broken circuits that had left this section half running on backup. Cold fog curled low around the empty chamber. Corpses stared at the ceiling in silence. And in the middle of all of it, Soldier Boy knelt on a concrete floor holding your hand like it was the only thing in the world he couldn’t afford to break.
Your lashes trembled again. This time your eyes opened halfway. Blurred. Unfocused. They moved over the room in fragments—white light, concrete, the silver of the blankets around you, the dark shape of him kneeling in front of you.
Your brow drew faintly, confusion coming first. Then discomfort. Then the weak animal fear of waking somewhere wrong.
Ben saw the exact second your gaze snagged on his face and tried to make sense of it.
He was older. The face was still Ben’s. The damage wasn’t.
Recognition came slowly and painfully in pieces. Your lips parted. No sound at first.
Ben’s chest went tight. “Don’t push it”, he said, instinctively rough, then caught himself and lowered his voice. “You don’t gotta—”.
Your mouth worked again. This time a thread of breath shaped itself into a word so faint he almost thought he imagined it. “Ben…?”.
There was no hate in your voice. Not yet. Not understanding either. Just stunned, impossible recognition.
His eyes closed for one beat. When he opened them again, something naked had slipped through the cracks in his face before he could stop it. “Yeah”, he said. “It’s me”.
Your gaze held on him, still struggling to focus, still dragged under by cold and waking and the sheer wrongness of the room. He could see your mind trying to fit him somewhere it understood and failing.
The last Ben you knew should have been twenty-something and standing in a little house with his shadow too long on the wall. Not this.
Your fingers tightened weakly around his. Then your gaze dropped to the blood on him. To the bodies beyond. Back to the tank. Confusion turned to fear in a quick, bright flare.
Ben felt it like a knife. “No”, he said at once, too fast. “No, easy. You’re okay”.
That was a lie, and both of them knew it.
But he could not bear the look in your eyes when it landed on the room.
He shifted closer, slowly enough to give you time to recoil if you wanted to. You tensed anyway. Only a little. Only instinct. Still enough. Ben stopped right there. His throat worked once. “I know”. The words were almost to himself.
He loosened his hand under yours, giving you the room to let go if that was what you wanted. His other hand stayed braced on the concrete beside your hip.
“You were in there”, he said quietly, glancing toward the tank. “They had you under. Long time”. His mouth tightened. “I got you out”.
Your eyes flicked to the tank again, then back to him. Your voice, when it came, was no more than a scrape. “How…?”.
Ben let out a breath through his nose.
How did one answer that? How did one bridge war and Vought and Homelander and files and eighty-five years buried under concrete and ice?
He chose the only part that mattered first. “I found you”.
Your lashes fluttered. Confusion still clouded everything. “You left”, you whispered. The words were so weak they should not have had any force at all. They hit him like a bullet.
Ben went motionless.
Of course. Of course that was the first clear thing. Not the bunker. Not the blood. Not the impossible machinery.
Him leaving. The door. The kitchen table. The keys.
Your mind had come back through ice and nightmare and whatever half-life Vought had forced on you, and the first solid fact it reached for was the one that hurt most.
He looked at you and did not even try to defend himself. “Yeah”, he said.
Your face changed, not into anger exactly, because you were too weak yet for anything so hot. More like the old wound had opened before the rest of you had even finished waking.
Ben felt panic rise in him then. Helplessness. The kind he had always hated most.
Just then, your world tipped sideways.
One second you were looking at him and the next, everything in you simply gave out.
Your fingers slipped from his. Your eyes rolled shut.
Ben caught you before your head hit the concrete. “Hey”.
The word cracked out of him, sharp with fear.
He felt for your pulse before he even realized he was doing it, two fingers at the side of your throat, then lower when his hand shook too much to trust the first reading.
Your heartbeat was still there. Fast, too thin, but there. Your breathing came shallow and uneven against the front of his shirt. You were alive. Just unconscious.
Ben closed his eyes for half a second and let the relief hit him hard enough to make his teeth grit.
Then he wrapped the blankets tighter around you, slid one arm behind your back and the other beneath your knees, and lifted you with a care that would have looked unnatural on anybody who knew what his hands could do.
Your head fell against his chest. Damp hair brushed his throat.
He got out of the bunker before the next wave came.
More alarms. More men. Maybe Vought cleanup. Maybe Homelander changing his mind.
He didn’t stay to find out.
The car crooked in the gravel behind the bunker entrance, engine still idling.
He laid you in the back seat of the car he’d taken from the last guard first, then stopped, swore under his breath, and moved you again.
“No”, he mumbled.
Not back there. Not where he couldn’t hear every breath right beside him.
So he settled you in the front instead, reclined the seat as far as it would go, belted you in with maddening care, then pulled both emergency blankets up to your chin before slamming the door and getting behind the wheel.
He took back roads first, then frontage roads, then some dark stretch of highway lined with shut gas stations and chain restaurants glowing in the distance. He didn’t know where he was going until he saw a motel sign.
The place sat off a quiet road outside town, the sort of motel people used when they didn’t want questions or company.
Ben carried you in through the side entrance of room twelve with the key still warm from the clerk’s hand.
Inside, the room was dim and ugly and blessedly quiet.
He set you down on the bed and for a second he just stood over you.
Your face was pale against the motel pillow. Your lips still had that bluish cast around the edges that scared the hell out of him. Coolant and thawed frost and fluid had soaked through everything. Blood, other people’s, maybe some yours, marked the silver blanket and his ruined jacket wrapped around your shoulders.
You looked small.
Not fragile exactly. You had always hated that word. But small in a way the world had no business making you.
Ben turned on the bathroom light. Found washcloths, thin towels, a sealed little bar of soap. Ran the sink until water came hot enough to steam.
He went back out with a wet towel and sat on the edge of the bed.
Then he hesitated.
Not because he hadn’t seen your body. Christ, he had. A thousand times, in better years and worse. In satin and cotton and nothing at all. In the narrow bed of your first house with summer heat making the sheets stick, in dark mornings before he left for work, in the rare soft pauses where he had once believed wanting and keeping were the same thing.
That was exactly why it hit him so hard now.
Because all those memories came from a life before he broke the right to any of this.
Still, you were half-frozen and unconscious and shaking every now and then in little leftover aftershocks. He could not leave you soaked in chemicals and blood.
So he did what needed doing. Carefully.
He cleaned you with warm water and the washcloth, rinsing fluid and blood from your arms, your shoulders, your legs, your throat. Wiped the residue of adhesive from your skin where the sensors had been. Smoothed damp hair away from your face with fingers that dwarfed your temple and yet somehow barely touched.
Every now and then he stopped just to listen.
Heartbeat. Breathing. Human. Still there.
When you shivered hard enough to make your teeth knock together in your sleep, he stripped off the ruined top half of his suit without a second thought. Underneath, he had the long-sleeve undershirt Vought had built under the costume warm from his own skin. He pulled it over his head and for a second stood there in only his suit pants.
Then he dressed you in it.
That took longer than it should have. One limp arm at a time. Your head supported in the crook of his elbow while he eased the shirt down over you. The fabric swallowed you whole, hem falling to your thighs, sleeves past your wrists. His shirt on your body looked indecently intimate in a way that had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with history.
He hated how much that undid him.
By the time he got you under the blankets, you were warmer than before. Not warm enough. But no longer ice. Ben sat beside you and stayed there.
-
At 2:07, you woke with a gasp that hurt all the way down.
The room lurched into view in broken pieces.
A yellow lamp with a stained shade. Floral curtains pulled almost shut. A ceiling painted the color of old nicotine. The stale smell of motel soap, dust and somebody else’s cigarettes soaked into the carpet long before you ever got here.
Your body felt wrong in every possible direction and for one wild second, you did not know where you were.
Then you tried to move and everything came back badly.
The tank. The bunker. The blood.
Ben.
You pushed yourself up on instinct. Pain and dizziness hit at once. Your head swam. Your stomach turned over hard enough to make you press one hand against it. The blankets slid down your lap. Something warm and steady moved in the chair beside the bed.
“Don’t do that”.
His voice came low and immediate. Awake already. Waiting.
You turned your head.
Ben sat in the chair by the bed with his elbows on his knees. He had no shirt on. Only those green superhero suit pants still clung to him.
He looked tired enough to split. His hair was damp, pushed back from his face by impatient fingers. There was gray at his temples now, not the gray of age so much as damage that had decided to show itself there first. Faint scars cut across his chest and shoulder, old and pale. His eyes stayed fixed on you with the kind of concentration men used on bombs.
You realized then that what you were wearing was not yours.
A dark long-sleeve shirt swallowed your body whole. It smelled like soap and something underneath it that was unmistakably him. Not cologne. Not city. Not the chemical glitter that had clung to him in the last years before he left…. Just Ben.
Your throat went tight.
He saw your gaze drop to the shirt.
“You were freezing”, he said. The explanation came out rough, almost defensive, like he was bracing for accusation. “You had all that fluid shit on you”.
You tried to speak too quickly. Your voice came out scraped raw.
“What—”. You stopped to swallow.
Ben was already reaching for the bottle on the nightstand. You took a sip and looked around the room again, slower this time. Cheap dresser. One door with a heavy chain lock. A purse-sized Gideon Bible on the nightstand.
“This…”. Your voice failed. You tried again. “Where are we?”.
“Motel”, he said. His eyes did not leave your face. “Outside the city”.
That answered almost nothing.
You licked dry lips and looked at him more carefully. Really looked.
The last time you had seen him properly, he had still been young in a way that made sense. Dangerous maybe, yes. Mean, yes. Already turning into something… cruel. But still recognizably anchored to the world you knew.
This Ben was not that.
The face was the same underneath. The mouth. The brow. The shape of his jaw when he clenched it. But time—however it had touched him—had done it from the inside out. He looked like a man who had been lived through by too much. A man who had survived things badly.
Your eyes dropped to the green pants again. To the ridiculous costume piece in a room that might have existed nowhere in the world you remembered.
Cold crept into you from somewhere deeper than your skin.
“What year is it?”.
Ben went still. You saw the way his shoulders locked and the way his eyes changed. As if this had been the question he had been dreading most.
When he answered, he did not soften it.
“2026”.
You stared at him.
The number meant nothing for a beat. Then too much.
Your hand loosened around the bottle. “No”, you said.
Ben’s jaw tightened. “Yeah”.
“No”.
You shook your head once, then regretted it instantly when the room tipped again. The clock on the nightstand glowed red. 2:08. That horrible little digital brightness alone looked wrong enough to make your chest pull tight.
“That’s not…”. You swallowed. “That’s not funny”.
His face changed at that. Something like pain crossed it fast and was gone.
“I’m not joking”.
You looked at the lamp. The clock. The cut of the curtains. The shape of the phone on the nightstand, plastic and smooth and alien compared to what memory expected. The air itself felt different. Colder in some mechanical way, flatter, less alive than the rooms you remembered.
You pressed your hand harder to your stomach.
Eighty-five years.
The number opened under your feet like a trapdoor.
Your mind reached for smaller things instead. Safer things. The last details it could still trust.
Rain on the kitchen windows.
The tick of the clock above the stove.
His keys on the table.
The newspaper on the floor.
Your breath started coming too fast.
Ben heard it immediately. He pushed out of the chair before you could register the motion, then stopped himself halfway to the bed, hands open at his sides, as if remembering all at once that moving fast toward you was no longer neutral.
“Hey”, he said, lower now. “Breathe”.
You looked at him and wanted to ask ten things at once.
Where had he been.
What had they done to you.
Why were you still twenty-seven.
Why did he look the same and not the same.
Who had dressed you.
Why did the room smell like bleach and old heat.
Why, why, why.
Instead what came out was, “I was dead”.
“No”.
The answer was immediate. Too sharp. Almost angry.
Ben dragged a hand over his mouth and forced his voice back down. “No. They had you under. Frozen”. His mouth twisted around the word, hating it. “Long time”.
Your eyes burned. “Who?”.
“Vought”.
The name sat between you like acid.
You looked away. Of course. Of course it was them. Who else took people and turned them into property with a clean desk and a typed memo?
Your fingers curled into the blanket. “Why?”.
He laughed once through his nose. No humor in it. “For me”.
You turned back to him. He did not look away.
“They kept you as leverage”, he said. “Pressure. In case I ever stepped out of line”.
You looked down at your own hands. Pale against dark fabric. A stranger’s motel light on skin that had not aged. The shirt sleeve hanging over your knuckles, his shirt, because there had been no time or right or choice left in anything.
“For you”, you repeated.
Ben’s throat worked once. “Yeah”.
A hundred feelings moved through you at once, too tangled to separate—shock, fear, grief, humiliation so old it woke up instantly, and somewhere under all of it a raw little thread of anger that had somehow survived even the ice.
You laughed once, softly and without any joy in it. “That sounds about right”.
He flinched.
You had not meant to make him do that. Or maybe you had. You didn’t know. Your whole body felt like it belonged to someone else.
Silence settled.
Ben stayed standing where he was, not near enough to crowd you, not far enough to pretend he wasn’t waiting for every breath.
You looked at the motel door with the chain lock, then the window, then back at him. The movement was instinctive. Measuring exits. Safety. The habit felt new and old at the same time.
Ben noticed. “This place is clean”, he said. “I checked”.
You almost smiled at the phrasing. Almost. It died before it got there.
“Did you kill them?”.
Ben went very still.
You already knew the answer. You had seen the blood on him in the bunker. The bodies. The way he carried violence now like a second skin. Still, some part of you needed to hear whether he would lie.
He didn’t.
“Yes”.
You closed your eyes.
When you opened them, he was still watching you with that unbearable focus.
“They were keeping you in a tank”, he said, voice roughening. “I wasn’t gonna ask nicely”.
No. He wouldn’t have.
That answer should have frightened you more than it did.
Maybe because there was no room left for new kinds of fear yet. Only the old one, sitting between your ribs with his name on it.
You shifted under the blankets and the motion pulled a small, involuntary wince out of you. Ben caught it instantly.
“What hurts?”.
You blinked at him. The question came so fast it sounded as though he had been waiting to ask it for hours.
“Nothing”, you said automatically.
His expression said he didn’t believe you for a second.
“Everything?”, he tried instead, and there was something almost grimly dry in the adjustment, something old-Ben enough to catch you off guard.
A tired, disbelieving breath escaped you.
“Pretty much”.
That did something to his face. Softened wasn’t the word. Wounded maybe. Or maybe just made him look like a man listening to damage he could neither fix nor fight.
He sat back down in the chair slowly. He leaned forward, forearms on his thighs, giving you less height to have to look up at. That seemed deliberate too. You watched him for a while.
“You were waiting for me to wake up”.
Ben looked at the floor for a second before answering. “Yeah”.
“How long?”.
He flicked a glance at the clock. “Couple hours”.
The absurdity of that hit you strangely. The world had moved nearly a century. Vought had stolen your life. You had woken in a motel wearing your estranged husband’s undershirt while he sat shirtless in superhero pants beside the bed like a sentry.
And still some small, intimate truth survived in the middle of all that ruin: he had waited.
You didn’t know what to do with that. Neither did he, by the look of him.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, lower than before, “You can go back to sleep”.
You almost laughed.
“Ben”, you whispered. “I woke up in 2026”.
His mouth flattened. “Yeah”.
“I don’t think I’m sleeping”.
No answer at first.
Then, almost under his breath, “Fair enough”.
Around three, Ben started talking, because the silence had become its own kind of cruelty.
He gave you the shortest version he knew how to give, which still wasn’t short, because his life after you had been one long chain of violence, bad choices, and men using one another like weapons.
He told you about Countess first. Not gently. Ben had never known how to make ugly truths pretty.
He sat there half-turned in that ugly motel chair, forearms on his knees, looking at the carpet instead of you when he said, “Yeah. I loved her. In my way”.
The words hit low and hard. You kept your face still, but your fingers curled tighter in the blanket.
He must have heard the change in your breathing, because his jaw tightened. For a second you thought he might take it back, soften it, say something to save you from the shape of it.
He didn’t.
“She wasn’t you”, he said after a beat, rougher now. “Never was”.
That should not have helped.
It did and didn’t, both at once.
Then came the rest. His team. The betrayal. Countess turning on him with the others. The Russians taking him. Decades in a lab, drugged and buried and cut open and studied. He told it flatly, like if he stripped the feeling out of it first, maybe neither of you would have to touch it.
You listened with your arms around yourself. Every now and then you asked a question, and every answer only seemed to make the world wider and colder.
Then Butcher. His guys. Homelander. Vought changing shape over the years without changing its soul. Companies swallowing countries. Supes becoming celebrities and products and idols and nightmares all at once. The world getting louder, faster, filthier, greedier. Men in suits still running everything, just with better technology and whiter teeth.
You sat there trying to imagine all of it and couldn’t.
Television everywhere.
Phones without cords.
Cars that barely made noise.
People living half their lives inside screens.
And then, for some ungodly reason, Ben spent far too long explaining porn.
At first you thought you had misheard him.
Then you realized, with growing horror, that no, he was seriously trying to explain the scale of modern depravity through the existence of instant filth on demand, as if that were somehow one of the key pillars of civilization you needed updated on.
“Ben”, you said at last, appalled, while he sat there shirtless in his green suit pants talking in the calmest voice imaginable about how “there’s whole websites for every weird thing a person can think of”.
“What?”, he said, actually looking offended. “It’s relevant”.
“It is not relevant”.
“It tells you a lot about the culture”.
“It tells me people need church”.
That shut him up for half a second.
Then one corner of his mouth twitched.
You saw it and hated that part of you still recognized that almost-smile.
“This is funny to you?”, you asked.
“A little”.
“Benjamin”.
That made the smile vanish properly, because you only used his full name when you were genuinely scandalized, and apparently even after eighty-five years that still worked on him.
You straightened under the blankets as much as your weak body would allow and gave him, in your raw half-frozen voice in a cheap motel room in 2026, a tired, sincere lesson about morality, modesty, Christian decency and the collapse of civilization.
Ben sat there and took it.
Mostly because he looked too tired to fight.
Partly, maybe, because hearing you sound like yourself again, even lecturing him, did something to his face he could not hide fast enough.
When you were done, he rubbed a hand over his mouth and muttered, “You wake up after eighty-five years and your first real opinion is that everybody needs Jesus”.
“Yes”, you said. “Obviously”.
That got a breath of laughter out of him. Quiet. Brief. Gone almost immediately.
From here, Ben should have let it go there.
He should have taken the small, strange mercy of that moment. Your outrage, his almost-laugh, the fact that for half a second the room had felt less like a grave dug up and more like two people who once knew how to talk.
But Ben was still Ben.
Which meant the second the air got almost manageable, he ruined it.
He leaned back in the chair, scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and said, with the kind of false casualness that was never a good sign, “You should probably hear about Herogasm from me too”.
You blinked. “What”.
His eyes flicked to you, then away. “It’s… a thing”.
“A thing”, you repeated.
“Yeah”.
The way he said it made your stomach drop before you even understood why.
You stared at him. “Benjamin”.
That full name again. Sharper this time.
He shifted in the chair, suddenly looking like he knew he’d stepped wrong and had decided, in typical fashion, to keep walking anyway. “Look, I’m telling you now because if you find out some other way later, it’ll be worse”.
You sat up straighter despite the ache in your body. “Find out what”.
Ben exhaled through his nose.
“It’s this yearly—”. He made a vague motion with one hand. “Supes-only event. Vought pretends it doesn’t know about it. Everybody knows about it”.
You kept staring.
His mouth flattened. “Basically a giant degenerate free-for-all”.
Your mouth fell open.
For one full second, you could not even form words.
“A what?”.
That won you the smallest twitch at the corner of his mouth, which only made your horror worse.
“A giant degenerate free-for-all”, he repeated, less flippant this time, as if he knew very well how it sounded and had accepted that there was no better version.
You looked around wildly as though the motel room itself might confirm you had finally lost your mind. Then your eyes snapped back to him.
“And you”, you said, each word distinct with disbelief, “were involved”.
Ben had the nerve to look almost rueful.
“I kind of started it”.
You made a sound so scandalized it barely qualified as language.
Then you grabbed the nearest pillow and threw it at him.
Not hard. You were too weak for hard. But with all the outrage and heartbreak your body could muster at four in the morning in a motel in 2026.
The pillow hit him square in the face.
Ben caught it a beat too late and let it fall into his lap.
For one stunned second, he looked at you over the top of it like he couldn’t quite believe you’d done that.
Then, because he was exhausted and half-broken and still somehow capable of being amused at exactly the wrong moment, he let out a quiet huff of laughter.
You pointed at him from under the blankets, appalled. “Do not laugh”.
“I’m not laughing”.
“You are”.
“A little”.
“Ben”.
That cut it off again. He dropped the pillow to the floor and held up both hands in surrender, though there was still a trace of something almost warm in his face. “All right. All right”.
You stared at him in open horror.
“A yearly—”, you broke off, unable to even repeat it properly. “With other people”.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah”.
Your cheeks felt hot now, which was ridiculous after everything. After tanks and bunkers and eighty-five years and blood and Vought and the end of the world as you knew it. And yet this—this obscene, careless, public filth attached to the man you had married in a church while wearing white gloves and trembling because you loved him so much—this was somehow what undid the last of your composure.
“You are disgusting”, you whispered.
Ben took that one. Didn’t argue. Didn’t posture.
Just sat there in the chair, shirtless, looking more tired than offended.
“It was a long time ago”, he said after a beat.
“That is not helping”.
“I know”.
“And you thought I needed to know this now?”.
“Yes”.
“Why?”.
He looked at you then and whatever joking edge had been there faded.
“Because if you hear it from someone else, it’ll sound worse”.
You gave him a stricken, incredulous look. “How could it possibly sound worse.”
His mouth opened. Closed. To his credit, he did not try to answer that.
The silence that followed trembled with the remains of your outrage. Your heart was beating too fast again, but for a different reason now—less fear than a kind of mortified heartbreak, the shame of imagining too much and wishing you could imagine none of it.
Because beneath the scandal, beneath the appalled moral horror, there was something much simpler and more painful.
He was your husband.
He had been your only man. The only body you had ever made room for in your life. The only one you had ever known like that.
And now here he was, matter-of-factly admitting to entire arenas of dirt and excess and other people and acts so vulgar your mind kept swerving away from them before they fully formed.
Your eyes stung.
You looked down at the blanket before he could see it, but too late. One tear slipped free and landed dark on the fabric pooled over your knees.
Ben went still. All the humor dropped out of him at once.
“Ah, hell”, he said quietly.
You wiped at your face angrily.
“I didn’t mean—”.
“You never mean”, you said and your voice broke halfway through.
That shut him up.
You pressed the heel of your hand to your mouth, furious with yourself now. Furious that after everything he had already told you, this was what pushed tears out. Furious that your body still kept finding new ways to humiliate you in front of him.
But it wasn’t just Herogasm. It was Countess. It was the years. It was his body becoming public in every possible way while yours had been locked underground and forgotten. It was the obscene scale of all the lives he had lived without you. The filth of it only made the distance easier to picture.
Ben leaned forward in the chair, elbows on his knees again, hands hanging between them. He looked stricken in that angry, helpless way of his, like if there had been someone else in the room to hit, he’d have preferred that to watching you cry.
“I was trying to tell you straight”, he said.
You laughed once through the tears, a soft miserable sound. “And that worked out beautifully”.
His eyes shut for half a second.
“No”, he muttered. “Guess not”.
You kept your face turned down, breathing carefully, trying to stop the tears before they became more than a few. The blanket bunched under your fists.
After a moment, Ben said, lower now, “It didn’t mean anything”.
There were so many things wrong with that sentence you almost laughed again.
Instead you looked up at him with wet eyes and said, “That might be the saddest part”.
You sat there for a long time without speaking.
The tears had mostly stopped, but your face still felt tight with them. Your throat ached. The room had gone dimmer in a way that only happened toward morning, when the lamp seemed too yellow and the window too pale and everything looked exhausted with you.
Ben watched you from the chair.
He was bad at silence on a good day. Silence left too much room for things he didn’t want to sit with. Guilt. Shame. Memory. The sight of you in his shirt with your eyes red from crying because of him.
So, after a few minutes of the kind of quiet that made the whole room feel held underwater, he tried again.
Not with anything important. That was how you knew he was trying.
He started telling you stupid little things about the new world. Not the big terrible ones this time. The ridiculous ones. The things that seemed to offend him personally on principle.
He told you about self-checkout machines that made customers do the cashier’s job for free.
About electric scooters left all over sidewalks “like some kind of plague”.
About men in suits paying nine dollars for coffee and thanking the barista like they’d just been handed medicine.
About something called “influencers” and the look on your face at that word alone was so baffled that one corner of his mouth twitched before he could stop it.
“They just… influence what?”, you asked weakly.
“Everything, apparently”.
“That is not a job”.
“No”, he said. “It is not”.
Then he told you about juice cleanses and gender reveal explosions and people filming themselves crying on the internet for strangers, and for the first time all night a sound escaped you that wasn’t pain.
A small, startled chuckle. It slipped out while your cheeks were still damp.
The noise seemed to hit him almost as hard as your tears had. His face changed around it. Not into a smile exactly. Something quieter. More careful. As if hearing you sound like yourself, even in that tiny way, made him afraid to move too fast and lose it.
“There she is”, he murmured.
You wiped under one eye with the heel of your hand and gave him a tired look. “This world sounds ridiculous”.
“It is”.
“And immoral”.
“That too”.
“And badly dressed”.
That got a real laugh out of him. Low and brief and gone quickly, but real.
“Yeah”, he said. “You’re gonna hate half of it on sight”.
“Only half?”.
“Maybe seventy percent”.
You gave a weak, watery breath that was almost another laugh.
The room loosened by one thread.
Not fixed, but loosened.
Ben shifted forward a little in the chair, elbows on his knees. The lamplight caught the line of one scar down his shoulder. He looked, suddenly, less like a myth and more like a very tired man trying and failing not to scare the one person he most wanted near him.
His hand lifted. Slowly.
You saw what he meant to do before he did it. Just brush your arm, maybe, or smooth the blanket where it had bunched near your elbow. Your body flinched back anyway. Small. Quick. Pure reflex.
Ben froze and his hand stopped in midair. Then dropped.
The look that crossed his face was so nakedly guilty it made something twist in your chest.
He looked down at his own hand like it belonged to someone else.
Then, very quietly, “I’m in control now”.
You didn’t answer right away.
His voice roughened. “I am”.
Ben swallowed once and kept his eyes on the floor.
“I know that doesn’t mean much coming from me”, he said. “But it’s true”. A beat passed. “I spent years in Russia with every goddamn thing in me chained down and measured. Then more years after trying not to level a room every time I got pissed”. His mouth tightened. “I know my own strength now”.
You watched him.
He finally looked up.
“I would never hurt you by accident again”.
The sentence sat between you, heavy and imperfect. Not because you didn’t believe he meant it. Because “by accident” still left too many other kinds of hurt in the room.
Maybe he knew that. Maybe that was why he looked away first.
Your voice came soft. “That wasn’t the only problem, Ben”.
His jaw flexed. “I know”.
And there was too much history in those two words to press any farther right then.
So you didn’t. Instead you asked other things. Smaller things.
What music sounded like now. Why everyone’s clothes looked so cheap in the brochures he found in the motel drawer. Why women wore running shoes with dresses. What a microwave was. Why cars all looked rounded.
Ben answered as best he could.
Sometimes badly.
Sometimes with surprising patience.
Sometimes with that old dry streak of humor that had once caught you off guard in kitchens and backyards and school corridors before life had filed all its edges into weapons.
By the time the clock dragged toward six, your body had started losing the fight.
The adrenaline had burned off. The shock had settled deeper. Every muscle in you felt borrowed and sore. Your eyelids turned heavy between one blink and the next. The room kept going a little soft at the edges no matter how hard you tried to keep your thoughts lined up.
Ben saw it before you said anything.
“You’re done”, he said.
You frowned faintly. “I’m awake”.
“Barely”.
“I am”.
He gave you a look. Not mean. Not even amused, exactly. Just familiar in a way that hurt.
“You look like you’re about to fall over sitting still”.
You wanted to argue. Instead you yawned.
That made one side of his mouth twitch despite everything.
“Yeah”, he muttered. “Thought so”.
He stood then, slowly enough not to startle you, and crossed to the lamp.
“Don’t”, you said, more quickly than you meant to.
His hand paused over the switch.
You looked toward the window, where the first weak gray of dawn was beginning to thin the dark. “Not all the way”.
Ben glanced back at you and seemed to understand.
The lamp stayed on, just dimmed lower.
Then came the awkward part. The room had one bed.
You looked at the chair. At him. At the bed. Your tired brain could not quite make those pieces into a shape that felt sensible.
Ben solved it the way he solved most things: by making a decision and standing still inside it.
“I’m not sleeping in that chair”, he said.
The bluntness of it would have annoyed you in any other life.
Now you only looked at him through the fog of exhaustion.
“I wasn’t asking you to”.
He studied your face for a second, like he was checking whether that was true or just politeness shaped like surrender. Maybe it was both. You were too tired to sort it out.
He came to the bed carefully, pulling the blanket aside on the far edge and lying down over the comforter first, not under it, as if to prove he wasn’t assuming anything. The mattress dipped with his weight. Your body noticed immediately. Tensed a little. Then, because you had nothing left in you for another flinch, slowly let go.
He kept his distance. An honest distance. A strip of mattress between you. One arm folded under his head, the other lying still on top of the blanket where you could see it.
You didn’t complain.
Part of that was exhaustion. Part of it was that your thoughts had gone too loose and strange to fight anything except sleep by now.
And part of it—though you hated admitting it, even to yourself—was older than all of this. Older than Vought and tanks and neon motel signs and digital clocks. Old training in your bones. A wife did not make a scene over a bed. A wife did not tell her husband no just because the world had ended and remade itself around them. Not when she was raised in the years you were. Not when love and obedience and habit had been braided together so early you could no longer always tell where one stopped and the next began.
Ben must have sensed some of that in the silence, because after a long beat he said into the dim room, “If you want me out of the bed, say it”.
You turned your head on the pillow and looked at him.
The offer sounded almost painful coming from him. Like it had cost him.
You were too tired to unpack that too.
“I don’t”, you murmured.
It wasn’t the whole truth. It wasn’t a lie either.
He nodded once, eyes on the ceiling.
“All right”.
———————————
A/N: Didn’t plan on posting it this soon, but… well, here we go because Lou can’t wait. Like always. The next one will probably be up in a week.
Also, just so you know, I had this one finished before season 5 aired 🙃 I wrote it after that teaser of Ben in Homelander’s suite came out. Kinda funny considering all the church and Jesus stuff… well, you’ll see in the following chapters 😭
SUMMARY: There is no difference between a super human and a human, in the end we all need affection. It is what makes us weak. Bombsight accepts his fate. But Soldier Boy totally despises it.
PAIRING: Bombsight/Robbie x fem!reader. One sided Soldier Boy x fem!reader.
WORD COUNT: I don’t know, I should be working but I wrote this drabble instead.
GENRE: Angst, fluff (for Bombsight x reader of course).
WARNINGS: Language?
NOTE: This is set in the 50s, I need Vought Rising. English is not my main language. Barely revised. And Bombsight is everything Soldier Boy wants to be but can't because he is a cunt okay? Okay.
The announcement is on. The president recites his speech as if his life depends on it. But how couldn’t he after the greatest battle America's heroes just won?
Roars come from the crowd as the greatest supes get on stage to receive their honors. Men whistle and compliment Liberty and Private Angel, the two female companions of Payback. And when Torpedo, Bombsight and Soldier Boy appear, ladies swoon and scream so loud one could swear their panties dropped.
Soldier Boy, as the great leader of Payback he is, gives a short speech on stage, putting on a handsome smile, giving details of their last mission. Once again, we are safe from comunism and trusting up on our moral institutions, we must respect American values and the new big corporations are not definitely making any profit from it, hooray! People clap, and you follow.
Standing on the other side of the stage, you beam, with proud. Proud of your soldier - the real soldier - finally getting recognition. Robbie catches a glimpse of your loving eyes from the side. He smiles back and winks at you before standing straight, looking at the crowd. You feel a heat scattering your cheeks. Ah, yes it still feels like the day you met when you were just two kids foling around. Now, look where you are.
When the pictures, speeches and patronizing are done, the team leaves through the other side of the stage. The staff claps and celebrates backstage as the supes make their parade through the aisle. Robbie finally finds its way to you and you jump right there, hugging him and never, ever letting go, sparking that laugh of his you love so much.
"I'm so proud of you!" a grin so wide on your lips, arms around his neck, his hands rest on your sides so slightly. "You are a hero, honey!"
"Well, ain't a sweet surprise having you here, my love?" he adds with a playful voice, and then gives a gentle kiss to your cheek.
You chuckle. "I have something for you, c'me here."
You walk a few steps to the corner of the backstage, where people already dissipated, except for just a few. There's a beautiful bucket of flowers resting on a chair that you take and place in front of your fiancé with a teeth showing beam and shinny eyes. Robbie takes them happily.
"For you," you say, his eyes go soft.
"Doll, you didn’t have to..."
"But I wanted to. It's been a long time since I saw you."
Robbie leans to you and finally kisses your lips. You savour the moment, as much as you can with a pair of eyes you have felt even before you encountered Robbie. A hard pair of green eyes, looking at both of you from afar.
When you break the kiss for air, you fix the collar of Robbie's jacket. You touch his cheek and nose affectionaly, with a gentleness Soldier Boy could sense. And he observes throughly the way you speak so naturally with Bombsight. How he takes your hand and intertwines his fingers of his free hand with yours, playing with the ring he proposed you with, pulling your frame even closer.
Soldier Boy has watched you before. The receptionist at Vought. The first smile he sees every damn day he gets to that hideous building in the middle of the city. He's had all the ladies he's ever wanted, but you. You kindly always said no, and when he found out Bombsight was the reason, Soldier Boy fumed with rage.
How could he get a woman like you?
Bombsight wasn’t number one at Vought's experiments.
He wasn’t leading the audience.
He wasn’t the strongest.
He wasn’t the handsomest.
He wasn’t an imposing leader.
He wasn’t Soldier Boy.
That was what attracted you to Robbie. His idealism, his romantic side, his soft-spoken voice... None of those things is Soldier Boy.
Robbie never saw you as a game, or a new girl to get his hands on and then toss away. You were very aware of Soldier Boy's reputation with the ladies. And you, you weren’t interested in becoming one more of them. That's why you kindly declined his charm.
And he thought someday you'd just give in. He snorts to himself as you walk together his way.
Robbie, on the other side always wanted to be chosen. Corresponded. Taken care of. Loved.
And that's what Ben can't handle.
The stupidest of all feelings. The most basic of all the needs of a human being. But he's not human anymore. He is not just another man. He is the greatest supe in America, the most perfect model of masculinity, heroism and patriotism of the century.
He doesn’t have time for pettiness. And love - he confess to himself - is a trivial thing. He doesn’t need that.
You smile, kind and cute as always, when you pass his side, clinging to your man. Bombsight salutes to his leader, smile vanishing away. Soldier Boy nods his head as both pass by, and notices the idiot saves the soft side and true beams for you.
What a bunch of fucking malarkey.
Soldier Boy is anything, but a wimpy little boy who craves for a woman's soft touch.
He spends the rest of the day - and probably the rest of his life - convincing himself he is not one made for feelings.
Because just watching you from afar, sharing your perfect love with his teammate makes his blood boil, knowing he will never, ever be worthy of flowers or delicate hands fixing his suit, just like you do.
