#(ben)

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 😭

Please let me know what you think.🥰 

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Part 2

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