"The you I can't forget"
(Make sure you read the next chapter! It'll be really good!)
When John twisted off the lock and pushed open the apartment door.
Inside, Becca already had a kitchen knife clenched in her hand, pointing toward the doorway, its blade facing outward and its handle gleaming with the sweat from her palm.
Her other hand gripped the bedroom doorknob behind her, her knuckles white.
She had locked Ryan inside the bedroom. Faint, tightly suppressed breathing came from behind the door.
Danger was coming...
Becca had thought about a great many things in those few minutes.
Was Vought going back on its promise and taking Ryan away?
Or had some other force learned about this and come to carry out a kidnapping?
But Becca believed the former was more likely.
After all, this place had been "operating" smoothly for six years. It was hidden away and heavily guarded by people Vought had assigned here, making it almost impossible to breach.
But all those deductions were mercilessly overturned the instant Becca saw the face in the doorway.
That familiar yet unfamiliar face.
Blond hair, blue eyes, a clean jawline.
Becca's first reaction upon seeing John wasn't fear. Instead, she fell into a daze.
Eight years ago, in the office on the top floor of Vought Tower, she had gone to deliver an endorsement contract to Homelander as Madelyn's assistant.
She still remembered that Homelander had just finished a press conference that day.
He still wore his blue uniform, his Stars and Stripes cape draped over the back of a chair as he lounged on a leather sofa with his legs crossed.
He asked her name.
She said her name was Becca, and that they had actually met before.
Then he stood and walked up to her, so close that she could even smell the lingering heat of flashbulbs on his cape.
Overcome by desire, she had chosen to betray her vows and indulge herself, and it had been the longest afternoon of her life.
(You read that right. Becca was actually the one who initiated it, and Homelander was the type who never turned anyone down.
And so Captain Cuckold was born. Things like this were actually quite normal in the free United States of America.)
Afterward, Madelyn gave her hush money, transferred her from administration to logistics, and told her this had never happened.
She hadn't told Butcher about it either, because she knew that, with his temperament, he would absolutely go after Homelander and fight him to the death.
Against Homelander, an ordinary man like Butcher could only die.
So she had swallowed it all, locking it deep in her heart alongside every secret about Vought, keeping it locked away for eight whole years.
But after all these years, that face on the television screen was clearly pushing forty.
His hairline had receded, creases had begun forming at the corners of his eyes, and laugh lines appeared when he smiled.
Yet this "Homelander" before her could be no older than twenty. He was even younger than the man who had stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows of that top-floor office back then.
There was no blue uniform or Stars and Stripes cape, only a worn leather jacket with plenty of holes in it.
Six years.
She had been locked up here for six years, cut off from the world.
All her news of the outside world came from the Vought Security Department's weekly briefings and Madelyn's occasional phone calls, offered like scraps of charity.
Over those years, damned Vought must have come up with something new. Was it a new formula, or a new serum?
Had they even developed a compound that could reverse aging in supes?
But whatever the case, Vought had broken the agreement first. Even Homelander couldn't take him from her.
"Stay back!"
The blade trembled slightly under the fluorescent lights, casting a cold white patch of reflected light onto John's chest.
"Vought actually sent you... Are you here to take Ryan away?"
"Whatever new formula Vought gave you, whatever you are, if you dare take another step, I'll..."
She didn't finish.
She knew herself how hollow that threat sounded. All she had was a kitchen knife with two chips in its edge, while the man opposite her wore Homelander's face.
But she didn't retreat. Her knees shook beneath her skirt, and her fingers turned white around the knife.
She stood before Ryan's bedroom door like that, making herself the final line of defense.
John looked at the somewhat hysterical woman before him with a complicated expression.
Becca could be called the source of every conflict.
He had clearly been the passive party, yet Butcher had assumed that his wife had been forced and then murdered by Vought.
From then on, Butcher had haunted him like a ghost, bringing undeserved disaster upon him.
Then came Ryan, followed by the escalating conflict, and finally their struggle to the death.
It all boiled down to one word: absurd.
So John wanted nothing more to do with the trouble surrounding this mother and son.
Nothing could be better than dumping these headaches onto Butcher and making him sick in the process.
All he needed to do now was fulfill their deal and get Becca and Ryan out, and it would be over.
At that thought, John stayed where he was and spread his hands.
"Calm down. I mean you no harm."
But Becca clearly couldn't calm down and launched into another round of questions.
"Madelyn promised me. She promised she wouldn't touch Ryan. I've spent six whole years here!
In all six years, I've never caused them any trouble. Ryan is healthy and smart. He's never even been to school.
But I teach him every day. He's more sensible than any child his age."
"I will never compromise!"
"None of that matters. Technically speaking, I'm not the Homelander you think I am. Butcher sent me."
John looked at Becca with an odd expression. He was already growing impatient.
He increasingly felt that the bullshit surrounding this mother and son was both plentiful and outrageously melodramatic.
Becca guarded Ryan so fiercely, wishing she could keep him tied to her side forever, only to die at her own son's hands before long.
"What?"
At the sound of the name "Butcher," Becca's pupils abruptly trembled.
"How do you know that name... Vought investigated him. How long have you been investigating him? Did you find him? What did you do to him?"
Her blade rose another inch.
Motherfucker...
John couldn't be bothered wasting any more time on this neurotic woman.
Her fear, her suspicions, her endless questions-what the hell did any of that have to do with him?
He was here for the people Butcher wanted, for his bargaining chips, not to play some fucking therapist.
"My name is John Kent. I made a deal with Butcher. I get you out, and he does something for me. It has nothing to do with you or your son."
John looked at her, his tone leaving no room for negotiation.
"You've been locked up here for six years. It's still dark outside, and there's less than ten minutes left in the gap between patrol shifts.
You can keep standing here like an idiot with that knife and wait for the Vought Security Department to burst in and take your son.
Or you can take him and come with me now.
You can ask Butcher about the details yourself once you're out. I don't have time to explain, and you don't have time to hesitate."
Becca stared at him, her fingers rubbing repeatedly against her apron. She had no way back.
She had thought that as long as she behaved and stayed put, Ryan would be safe.
But now someone with Homelander's face stood before her, telling her that the blast door had been cut open, the patrol had been taken down, and security could storm in at any moment.
If Vought's people came, their first move might not be to kill her, but to take Ryan away.
The one thing she could never accept was Ryan becoming a "tool" for Vought to make money.
So she could only gamble.
She set the kitchen knife on the coffee table and turned the bedroom doorknob with a still-trembling hand.
Behind the door, Ryan clutched half a blue crayon and stared blankly at the young blond man standing in the doorway.
Then he looked down at the Homelander logo on the chest of his hoodie-
That smiling face he had seen on television ever since he was little.
The person before him clearly had the same blond hair and the same blue eyes.
But he wasn't smiling. He simply stood there looking at him, many things Ryan couldn't understand flashing through his eyes in an instant.
Disappointment, anger, frustration, dejection...
John had thought he would feel much calmer than before when he saw his "son" again, but he had been wrong.
In his previous life, he had loved this child without reservation, taught him to fly, taken him out for burgers, and let cameras from around the world film them together as father and son.
The boy had accidentally killed his own mother, and John hadn't blamed him, yet he had still insisted on taking the moral high ground to condemn John and lay the blame at his feet.
He still remembered.
Among the final fragments of memory that had flashed through his mind before his death in his previous life was the sight of Ryan descending from the sky and joining forces with Butcher to trap him in the White Room until he died.
At the final battle, John's heart had already died the moment he saw Ryan appear.
He couldn't understand. Why?
Why had genuine affection earned him a fatal stab in the back?
And now this child stood before him, clutching a crayon, touching the logo on his chest in confusion, and asking Becca his name.
The memories kept overlapping, and disappointment piled ever higher in his mind.
In this life, the Kents had taught John how to regard others as equals, but when he tried to look at this child that way, he found he simply couldn't.
Whatever happened, he would never again choose to be the father from his previous life, who only wanted to make up for the gaps in his child's upbringing.
He wasn't worthy.
At that thought, John pressed all those emotions deep into his heart, crouched down, and met Ryan's eyes.
"I'm here to take you out of here. Your mom is coming with you. Hold her hand tight."
Five-year-old Ryan didn't understand why John's gaze had been so complicated just now, as though he had known him for a long time, yet also wished he had never known him at all.
That sense of distance was especially strong.
But he didn't ask, because his mother's hand was still gripping his very tightly.
By the time Becca led Ryan out of the bedroom, John had already melted every infrared sensor in the hallway.
Still-smoking scorch marks stretched along the walls all the way to the stairs, and the air was filled with the acrid mingled smell of burned plastic and metal.
"So how are we getting out?"
Becca's voice had regained its composure.
John didn't answer. He walked to the end of the hallway and shouldered open the fire door leading to ground level.
The cold predawn wind immediately rushed in, carrying the scent of pine resin and the raw smell of damp earth.
Outside lay a clearing enclosed by the logging site's wire fence. Several abandoned forklifts stood among the weeds, and moonlight shone pale on the rusted sheet-metal roofs.
[Current World Distortion Level: 25%]
He walked to the center of the clearing, stopped, and turned to look at Becca and Ryan.
"Come here."
Becca hesitated for a moment, then led Ryan over to him.
John crouched down, wrapped one arm around Becca's waist, and casually pulled Ryan against his chest with the other.
The next second, an invisible gravitational field rippled out from John's body, enveloping both of them.
"Whoosh-"
Without giving either of them time to prepare, John took off straight from where he stood.
"Aaah..."
Becca screamed with her eyes shut, both hands instinctively clutching the sleeves of John's leather jacket.
Ryan didn't scream. His eyes stayed open as he watched the Mangrove settlement beneath them rapidly shrink in the moonlight-
The sheet-metal roof he had lived beneath for six years without ever leaving, the wire fences he had counted from the windowsill every day...
They grew farther and farther away, smaller and smaller, until the overlapping treetops swallowed them completely.
A few minutes later, the battered Chevrolet's headlights appeared at the end of the logging trail, flickering between the trees.
John landed less than ten meters from the car, his boots making faint scraping sounds against the gravel.
The next second, Becca got down from John, sank to her knees, and bent over, dry-heaving.
Ryan stood beside her, his face a little pale, but he was still looking back at the pitch-black woods behind them.
It seemed he really had escaped that place.
By then, Butcher, who had been waiting there for a long time, had gotten out of the driver's seat. The car door stood wide open, and the engine was still running.
Hughie and the others had tactfully slipped off to the other side long ago, leaving him plenty of space to be alone with them.
Butcher simply stood before the headlights, his shadow stretched long, reaching all the way to the other end of the gravel road.
He saw Becca standing outside the car door. Her hair was shorter than he remembered, there were a few more fine lines at the corners of her eyes, and her apron still had ketchup on it.
She held the hand of a boy who looked five or six, with very pale blond hair and a small face much like his mother's.
The boy tilted his head as he looked at him, his eyes free of fear, carrying only that undisguised curiosity unique to children.
John was the first to walk up to Butcher.
"I got them out for you. How's the formula coming?"
Butcher took the list Hughie had written by hand from his coat's inner pocket and handed it over.
"Frenchie's analyzing it now. Chromatography, centrifuging, sample comparisons-it's all moving forward.
"Good."
John said nothing more, leaving Butcher his time.
After he left, only Butcher, Becca, and Ryan remained.
Butcher instantly shifted into a different state, his lips trembling as he looked at Becca.
He had kept his composure in front of everyone at the CIA and Vought throughout his life, but now he couldn't force out a single word.
He looked down at his hands, wiped them over and over on his jeans, then set the crowbar on the dashboard, took half a step forward, and stopped again.
It had been six years. The woman who had haunted his soul and dreams had truly appeared, and he was a little afraid, not daring to confirm it, terrified it was only a dream brought on by too much bootleg liquor.
Becca's reaction was hardly any better than Butcher's.
For most of her life, she had been a woman under house arrest in the same apartment, living a life utterly different from the world outside.
And now that door had opened, someone had told her she could leave, and she finally stood before the man who had spent most of his life searching for her.
His hair had gone a little grayer, the wrinkles on his face had deepened, and a yellow-green bruise that hadn't quite faded still marked his left eye socket.
He had grown old, but she still recognized him.
"So... are you hungry?"
"Yeah, let's get something to eat first."