"The one who lied first"
After John pinned Butcher against the wall outside the convenience store and beat him half-conscious, Hughie forcibly shoved him into an ambulance.
For an entire week, Butcher had not set foot outside the three-square-meter private hospital room.
Worried about Butcher's safety, Hughie followed his earlier instructions and tracked down Mother's Milk, who was working at a juvenile detention center.
It took a great deal of persuasion before Mother's Milk finally agreed to visit Butcher, that bastard who liked to play with people's minds.
When Mother's Milk pushed open the door, the hospital's distinctive, choking smell of disinfectant hit him, mixed with the cloying sweetness of cheap air freshener.
There was also an unmistakable trace of cigarette smoke and hard liquor.
The stubborn bastard had deliberately cracked the window just wide enough to fit a cigarette butt through. The outdoor air-conditioning unit was already covered in a thick layer of white ash and cigarette butts.
The bottom drawer of the bedside cabinet was still half-open, revealing half a bottle of bourbon. The drunk had just poured half a cup into one of the hospital's disposable paper cups, its sides still stained with coffee that had not been properly wiped away.
"The nurse left ten minutes ago."
Mother's Milk closed the door behind him and tossed the plastic bag he was carrying onto the hospital bed. Inside were two packs of cigarettes and a sandwich.
"Fuck, the nurses here check on you harder than Vought security. She asked if you'd taken your meds on time.
I told her you were in so much pain you'd fallen asleep. She watched through the glass for half a minute before leaving."
Butcher did not answer. He did not even look up.
He had pushed the hospital bed into a corner, its white sheet crumpled like a wad of wastepaper someone had trampled.
The little folding table normally used for meal trays had been raised as high as it would go, and photocopies of Becca's file covered its surface.
Butcher had handled the papers so often that their edges had turned black, and Becca's smiling face in the photograph was already somewhat blurred.
Butcher had firmly weighed down one corner of the file with a stainless-steel insulated cup full of cooled boiled water.
He himself sat on a hard plastic chair, his spine as straight as a steel reinforcing bar driven into concrete.
The nurse had come to change his dressings three times, and he had sworn her out of the room each time.
As for Butcher's face now-
Well, it was a little... hard to look at.
The bridge of his nose was visibly crooked, broken by a punch from John, and the cut on his lip, deep enough to expose bone, had taken seven stitches.
The black sutures lay starkly across his pale lips, pulling painfully whenever he moved.
The bruising around his left eye had gradually faded from its original purplish black into an ugly yellow-green, like a piece of cured meat that had been beaten repeatedly and then left in the sun for half a day.
The only thing that could be considered intact was his right eye, which he could barely open.
Besides Becca's file, other things lay scattered across the little table.
They were the three-dimensional architectural cutaway drawings he had brought over a few days earlier.
(Since the original The Boys never mentioned the specific name of the place where Becca was held under house arrest, I'm using Mangrove here instead.)
Mother's Milk had stayed up three nights running to dig the architectural blueprints for the Mangrove settlement out of a dusty old server in Vought's infrastructure department.
As for the duty roster for Vought's internal security system, Hughie had bought it from a former security department clerk who had been fired. It had cost him three months of saved pocket money and two cases of cold beer.
During the transaction, Hughie had been so nervous that his palms were drenched in sweat, and he had nearly dropped a case of beer.
Frenchie had hacked into Vought's logistics system to dig up the supply dispatch records, burning through three encrypted USB drives in the process and nearly getting his location pinned down by Vought's counter-tracking system.
Among all the records, one item stood out.
Children's nutritional vitamins.
Mangrove was a secret property surrounded by walls over ten meters high, intensive surveillance, and armed security. It was guarded so tightly that not even a fly could get in.
There should not have been any children there at all.
So, clearly, that place was hiding some conspiracy that could not bear the light of day.
Butcher spread those scraps of paper across the white tabletop and pieced the clues together.
Then he arrived at an answer that nearly stopped his heart:
Becca was still alive. She was at Red River, with a child.
Butcher reached out, removed the insulated cup weighing down the file, and fished the crowbar that had been with him for half his life out from under the bed.
When they entered the hospital, Hughie had wrapped this pillar of spiritual support in his trench coat and strapped it against his back. Security had not found it, and afterward it had remained tucked between the bed frame and the mattress.
He remembered what that bastard who looked exactly like Homelander had whispered into his ear while pinning him hard against the convenience store's cold wall.
At the time, he had thought it was some new trick from Vought or some second-rate organization.
But now the files, blueprints, duty roster, and supply lists-all the evidence lay before him.
Much as he hated to admit it,
every word and every clue here confirmed that the bastard had been telling the truth.
After thinking it over for a long time, driven by his obsession with seeing Becca again, Butcher finally decided to compromise.
Over those past few days, Butcher had also talked Frenchie around, and he had soon joined up.
The help Frenchie brought was undoubtedly immense.
After going over everything repeatedly, the Boys Squad soon obtained a map of every surveillance camera around Red River's perimeter through various special channels.
With this, they could hack the cameras before the operation and stop information from the site being uploaded to Vought's system terminals in real time.
As for who would carry out the operation...
"Hughie, you can call that son of a bitch's twin over."
"I'll make the deal, but he has to get Becca out for me first."
Butcher contacted John using the burner number Hughie had left earlier and arranged to meet him in the abandoned parking lot behind the hospital.
The place was secluded, had no surveillance cameras, and rarely saw visitors.
At two in the morning, the only sound in the parking lot was the wind moaning across the sheet metal of abandoned cars.
Most of the streetlights were broken. The remaining one buzzed atop its pole, its light flickering and stretching their shadows long.
John had actually arrived quite early.
He leaned against the door of a rusty old truck. A newly purchased black mask covered his entire face, and with his sweatshirt's hood up, he was almost completely concealed in the darkness.
Just then, Butcher and Hughie approached from the parking lot entrance.
The swelling on Butcher's face had not completely subsided, and the yellow-green bruising around his left eye looked particularly hideous in the dim light.
He stopped three paces from John and wasted no words, pulling Red River's security duty roster from his trench coat's inner pocket and getting straight to the point.
"Mangrove has three defensive layers."
"The outer layer is regular patrols from Vought's security department. Twelve-man squads, changing shifts every four hours.
There's a blind window of seven minutes and twelve seconds during the shift change. Hughie did the math. The margin of error should be no more than ten seconds."
"The middle layer is a supe-only access control system. It requires an iris scan and a level-five access card.
The inner layer is the settlement's physical lockdown: fingerprint locks and blast doors thirty centimeters thick. The walls are reinforced concrete. They can even take an RPG."
"And there's-"
"Stop."
John pulled one hand out of his pocket and took the duty roster from Butcher, then straightened away from the truck door and walked up to him.
"Twelve-man squads, iris scans, blast doors-"
John tilted his head slightly. The blue eyes behind his mask's eyeholes looked especially calm in the dim light.
"You think those weaklings can stop me? Or do you think that paper-thin blast door can take a few hits from me?"
"Same deal as before. I'll give you Becca and the kid, but you have to fulfill my condition."
"Two weeks. No, one week. I want to see Becca within a week."
Butcher gritted his teeth and glared fiercely at John.
"Otherwise, even if I die, you won't get so much as a hair off me, you bastard."
Then Butcher took another document out of his trench coat's inner pocket.
It was a handwritten list by Hughie, detailing the technical steps required for Compound V:
Chromatographic analysis parameters, pathways for reverse-engineering its molecular structure, and comparative models of known components and the unknown underlying chains.
After each item, Hughie had noted their current intelligence gaps and the file numbers they needed to obtain from inside Vought.
"Vought's core database is locked down too deep. External infiltration alone won't get us anywhere near Compound V's original formula."
Butcher handed over the list.
"I need Frenchie to set up a chromatograph for comparisons. We need time."
He paused, then looked into John's eyes again.
"You get Becca out. My people and I get the compound's formula.
Once it's done, the formula is yours, and Becca is mine."
John finally reached out and accepted the list. He casually flipped through two pages, and as he checked it, he willed something into motion. The next second, a three-dimensional information panel appeared before his eyes.
Current world distortion: 21%
Hmm, already up to twenty-one?
Looks like Compound V carries a very substantial weight in this world. I must be on the right track.
A week has already passed, and the progress has finally gone up. Good. One step closer to saving Jonathan.
With that thought, John raised his head and narrowed his eyes, scrutinizing Butcher's dark gaze before him.
In his previous life, this very bastard had ended his life with a crowbar.
And in this life, he held what Butcher cared about most in his hands, and Butcher humbly worked for him.
He did not care about Butcher's hatred of him, or even other people's malicious speculation about him.
What was there to fear from mortals?
Just as when you walked down the street, would you care about an ant at the roadside attacking you?
It was just that this feeling was unexpectedly satisfying...
John cheerfully folded the list, slipped it into his leather jacket's inner pocket, and said casually:
"Deal."
By the time the two returned to the hospital, dawn was approaching.
"Frenchie?"
Butcher had barely pushed open the door when he saw Frenchie sitting on his hospital bed, twirling a gleaming pair of pliers. An enormous black toolbox sat by his feet.
Mother's Milk was smoking by the window. When he saw them enter, he tossed the cigarette butt outside and closed the window behind him.
"The nurse just came by."
Mother's Milk jerked his chin toward the untouched meal tray on the bedside cabinet.
"Asked why you weren't eating. I told her your brain was full of shit, you were emotionally unstable, and you swore at everyone you saw. She was too scared to come in, so she left the tray at the door and ran."
"Fuck."
Butcher rolled his eyes and gave them both the internationally friendly middle finger.
Frenchie snorted, jumped off the bed, and opened the black toolbox.
Inside, various parts and instruments were neatly arranged. On top sat a secondhand chromatograph that had been dismantled into pieces, with even the screws sorted by size into little plastic bags.
"Look, mon ami, I brought the instrument in as parts, packed in a medical equipment case. Security didn't even look."
Frenchie pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot; clearly, he too had stayed up all night.
"I'll assemble it in the bathroom in a bit. Good ventilation, and nobody will disturb us."
"All the sons of bitches are here."
With a smack, Butcher tossed the list of R&D server access permissions Hughie had obtained from inside Vought onto the toolbox.
Frenchie glanced at the list, took a freshly diluted sample of Compound V from the toolbox's foam padding, and swirled it in the faint light coming through the window.
"This little thing is actually worth 1.8 million US dollars."
The pale blue liquid swirled at the bottom of the test tube, giving off an eerie fluorescence like ghost fire in the dim light.
He returned the test tube to the foam padding and pulled his goggles down onto the bridge of his nose.
Through the lenses, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Butcher.
"So, Butcher, you trust that bastard who looks like Homelander just like that?"
"Hughie told me he pinned you against a wall last week and nearly beat you to death.
I've seen your CT scans. Three ribs on your left side are cracked. The doctor told you to stay in bed for at least a month.
And you turn around and work with him? Is your brain full of shit, or did he smash it with that punch?"
Butcher fell silent for a while.
"I don't trust him."
Butcher's voice was still hoarse, but he bit down hard on every word, as though dragging them one by one through the gaps in his teeth.
"Trust him? I don't even fucking trust myself."
He took a cigarette from Mother's Milk and lit it. Smoke rings drifted from his split lips, carrying a faint smell of blood.
"But that couldn't have been faked... A-Train willingly got on his knees for Hughie. That hypocrite took a beating from Hughie without making a sound.
What's even more fucking ridiculous is that he's collecting dirt on Vought. And what we're doing now-which part of any of that looks like siding with Vought to you?"
Butcher still remembered that John had given Hughie only one condition for their deal: obtain Compound V and analyze the ingredients in its formula.
"If he wanted us dead, the three of us would already be buried in the same hole.
If he worked for Vought, he wouldn't have told me about Mangrove or put the news that Becca was still alive in front of me.
I don't know who he is. I don't know why he has Homelander's face, and I don't know what he really wants."
"But he definitely doesn't work for Vought. That's enough."
He paused, looked at Frenchie, and spoke each word distinctly.
Frenchie had no answer to that.
He pulled his goggles back down, covering his eyes.
Then he picked up the case containing the chromatograph parts and turned into the bathroom. Mother's Milk followed him in, pulling the door shut behind them.
The bathroom door stood ajar. The crisp sounds of a screwdriver turning screws came from inside, along with their lowered voices.
"You really think he hasn't gone crazy?"
It was Frenchie's voice, accompanied by the clinking of metal.
"Making a deal with a guy who looks exactly like Homelander, and staking Becca's life on him, too. How is that any different from feeding a sheep straight into a wolf's jaws?"
"He hasn't gone crazy."
Mother's Milk's voice was soft, almost drowned out by the running water.
"He just doesn't have a choice. It's been eight years. This is the first time he's been this close to Becca. If it were you, you'd gamble too."
"Gamble? He's fucking gambling with his life!"
Frenchie's voice rose a little, then immediately dropped again.
"What if that bastard's playing us? What if he kills Becca? What if he's an undercover agent sent by Vought? Then we'll all be dead, with no one even left to collect our bodies."
The bathroom went quiet for a while, with only the sound of the screwdriver turning.
"Then we die with him."
Mother's Milk's voice was calm.
"We've been fighting alongside him for so many years. When haven't we gambled with our lives? The stakes are just a little higher this time, that's all."
"Fuck."
Frenchie swore, and then came the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. It was probably the main unit of the chromatograph being set down.
"When this is over, I'm going on vacation to the Caribbean Sea. Find some shitty island with no supes, no Vought, and no Butcher, and drink rum for three months."
Mother's Milk chuckled.
"All right. Once we get Becca out, I'll go with you."
The hospital room was quiet.
There was only the clatter of parts from the bathroom and the occasional beeping of a nurse call system from far down the corridor.
Hughie sat on the empty hospital bed, gazing at the gradually brightening sky outside the window. There was no telling what he was thinking.
Butcher leaned against the wall and took another drag of his cigarette.
He looked at Becca's photo spread out on the overbed table, at her radiant smile in the picture.
Through the curling smoke, for the first time, a faint, almost invisible trace of tenderness appeared in his frighteningly bright right eye.
Less than a week left.
He'd waited eight years.
These last few days wouldn't make a difference.