"Somebody That I Used To Know"
Manually added doge face.
Hughie Campbell had not slept more than three hours at a stretch for an entire month.
It was not that he did not want to sleep.
It was that whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the horrifying image of his girlfriend Robin being smashed into a cloud of blood by A-Train.
And each time he dreamed of it, it was far clearer than the last.
She stood right in the middle of the road, gripping his hand tightly, but in the very next second, her organs exploded into a bloody mist in the shock wave of that speed.
Not even her fucking head was left.
He could even clearly remember the sensation of her fingers going cold in his palm.
In a single instant, life and death had separated them.
He did not know how he had gotten home afterward. He only remembered curling up on the floor in a daze for the entire night.
He put Robin's earrings on his nightstand, setting them there every night and looking at them every morning.
After looking at them, he would wash his face, then sit on the edge of the bed and cry.
Once his head cleared, the helpless Hughie decided to do something.
And after that... his life had become a string of disjointed fragments.
The funeral, Translucent, an explosion, a corpse blasted into pulp.
And after the explosion, he had crouched by the roadside and vomited for fifteen minutes.
Butcher, that goddamn cold-blooded bastard, said everyone's first kill was like that.
But he knew killing was not the problem.
He had done all of this for Robin, but everything he did took him further and further away from Robin's death.
And closer and closer to another version of himself he did not recognize at all.
He... seemed to have passed the point of no return.
Twenty-four hours earlier, when John had stepped out of the rift, his feet had landed on the concrete of some back alley in New York.
Mm... a foul stench of weed mixed with fermented food scraps.
John pinched his nose in disgust as the spacetime rift closed behind him.
Looks like I've crash-landed in some old neighborhood...
Before coming, John had done some rough preparation.
The two most important things upon entering the world of The Boys were:
Money and intelligence.
Why did money come first?
In his previous life, John would never have needed to worry about money. After all, it had only been a number to him.
Ashley had handled all his food, clothing, housing, and transportation. If he wanted to buy anything, Vought International would foot the bill.
But this life was different.
The Kents could even be described as dirt-poor. Their farm was rented, and even that battered pickup had been bought on credit.
What was more, Old Joe had laid down strict ground rules for him: no doing anything illegal or breaking the rules.
You had presumably seen the result: the mighty Homelander had actually stooped to working as a bartender.
The second was intelligence.
Because the timeline selected for world travel was unstable, John could only use the information available to infer how events were currently unfolding.
All right.
John went through his pockets in the alley. They held only a few coins he had brought from the farm in Kansas.
Probably only enough for a bottle of water, not even a night at a cheap motel.
At that thought, John pursed his lips, put the coins back in his pocket, and leaned against the convenience store's outer wall in the shadows.
Before long, three thugs staggered out of a bar's back door, reeking of booze.
If they could afford booze, surely they had money on them?
At the sight of those fat lambs, John clasped his hands behind his back and flashed his trademark fake smile again.
An hour later.
John bought a change of T-shirts, jeans, and a dark hoodie at a twenty-four-hour discount clothing store.
Then, to conceal his identity, he made a point of buying a solid black mask.
Matte finish, five dollars-the cheapest model on the shelf.
Yes, John had no intention of showing his face at this stage.
After all, Vought's surveillance was everywhere.
If someone who looked like a younger version of "Homelander" was discovered, it could very well draw pursuit from Vought and suspicion from the original.
Next came gathering intelligence.
John had spent forty years in this world in his previous life.
But in his mind, those forty years had already been covered by a thick layer of things unrelated to Vought during his eighteen years in Kansas.
Specific dates, street numbers, who had said what on which day-those details had blurred after life on the farm.
For now, he only remembered the broad outline:
After Translucent died, things within The Seven began to descend into chaos, and A-Train's private Compound V abuse grew increasingly severe.
The Deep had made a backup of the black box at some point.
But John was not certain exactly when, or on what date.
He needed to cross-check against information on the streets.
So John stood outside an electronics store for about ten minutes, listening to the morning news on the television by the register.
The news covered a few unimportant local stories, but the ticker at the bottom mentioned Vought.
"Vought International spokesperson declines to comment on Translucent's disappearance."
Apparently, Translucent was still in the "missing" stage, which meant his death had not yet been made public.
Vought's PR department was still weighing whether to bury the matter or package it as a death in the line of duty.
That window was very narrow.
There were at most two weeks between Translucent's death and Vought's announcement.
With that in mind, John left the convenience store and headed down the block.
At three in the morning, the bar had just closed, and several low-level employees in Vought security uniforms were smoking by the back door, complaining about overtime as they smoked.
After a night of scouting, John had long since set his sights on this group.
"Translucent really is fucking dead. I had to work through the night altering surveillance records."
"Drop it. The higher-ups said not to mention it."
"Hey, I heard A-Train's been acting a little off lately. Someone saw him kicking his own car door over and over in the parking lot yesterday."
"Drop it. Walls have ears. A-Train's a petty motherfucker...
Finish your smoke and get back to work. Tomorrow we've still got media training to arrange for that new girl, Starlight."
"I've been working three fucking days straight. What the hell does Translucent dying have to do with me...
But hey, do you think Homelander knows? He doesn't seem to care at all."
"Homelander doesn't give a shit. All he cares about is his screen time."
"Fuck, keep it down. You know how many bugs that old witch Ashley put in the hallways."
"Shut up. Finish smoking and get back."
John listened without expression, casually tossing a Coke can he had pinched flat as paper into the trash can, shearing its rim level.
Enough. Put those fragments together, and the point in the timeline became clear.
Translucent was dead, Starlight had just joined the team, and by the look of things, that bastard Butcher should be putting his crew together.
With that in mind, John put on his mask. It was time to look for that crew's exact location.
For that, he would have to rely on the information panel.
The memory-retracing data stored in the panel could help him locate key anchors:
The timestamp of The Deep's black box backup and the approximate dates of A-Train's drug use.
Since the data came from retracing memories, it could only extrapolate from what John knew, but there was clearly some information he did not know.
Hughie Campbell's exact address, for instance.
He only knew the general area. To pinpoint the street number, he would need the panel's anchor-object scanning function.
As it happened, the panel could track the corresponding coordinates in the current timeline using secondary anchor objects he had marked during memory retracing.
Soon, as John recalled Hughie's appearance, the information panel lit up like a navigation system.
Then it used the retracing data to pinpoint Hughie Campbell's address, roughly locating it in an old apartment building in Brooklyn.
New York's streets were still chilly before dawn in this season. Pedestrians were scarce, with only garbage trucks occasionally rolling over the road.
As he walked, John went over old scores in his head.
During his eighteen years in Kansas, he had reviewed his defeat by The Boys Squad countless times.
The conclusion actually had no direct connection to emotional bonds or grudges. He had lost on interests.
Human emotions were very complicated, and likewise, their needs were often the internal driving force behind certain decisions.
Even in that son of a bitch Butcher's team alone, everyone had their own objective.
They were not simply after revenge. Revenge was Butcher's driving force alone; everyone else had their own ledger.
Hughie wanted an answer for his dead girlfriend Robin, and Mother's Milk wanted to dig out the truth...
Butcher had bound each of their personal goals to the larger goal of opposing Vought, making them put their lives on the line for themselves even as they did so for him.
Only aligned interests produced aligned action.
And what the fuck had John had in his previous life?
The Seven had nominally been his team, but in reality, every one of them had been working their own angle.
The Deep obeyed him out of fear.
But fear could make people bow, not lay down their lives. The Deep had backed up the black box so he could betray him one day.
A-Train obeyed on the surface while secretly taking V to run faster.
Maeve had been waiting for a chance to turn against him from day one, and Translucent was an idiot who had not even known how he was going to die.
Not a single member of The Seven had interests aligned with his. All of them had merely bowed their heads temporarily before fear.
But fear was not loyalty. Fear was a spring: the harder it was compressed, the harder it snapped back.
To obtain the power of the world...
Although John still had not figured out which anchor object carried the greatest weight in this world.
He could start building up his people first.
So he was looking for people whose interests aligned with his.
If they did not, he could use his advantage of foreknowledge to create shared interests.
The Deep needed a sense of security, and he could provide a more reliable safety net than Vought.
A-Train wanted a steady supply of Compound V, which he could provide. Butcher wanted Becca, and he had her address too.
Everyone had their price.
There were also those far outside Vought's system, forgotten in the shadows: street-level superhumans with sufficient abilities who had never been commercially packaged.
Or test subjects Vought had drained dry and tossed into Red River to await death.
These people were Vought's scraps, but they could also become sharp knives in his hands.
The apartment doorbell rang.
Hughie looked through the peephole. One of the hallway lights was broken, and a tall man in a dark hoodie stood in the dim yellow light.
His hood was pulled low, and he wore a solid black mask.
Not the masquerade kind. It was matte, obviously the cheapest sort on the shelf.
The man had covered everything above the bridge of his nose, leaving only his mouth and chin exposed.
Hughie swallowed nervously.
This late... who would come looking for me here?
Could Butcher have sent him?
Hughie studied the masked man.
His shoulders were completely relaxed, his hands hanging naturally at his sides, his weight distributed evenly between his feet.
He did not look like someone seeking revenge, nor like an insurance salesman.
"Phew... I'm just a nobody..."
Hughie reassured himself, then carefully opened the door a crack, leaving the chain on.
"Uh... who are you?"
"You can call me John."
The man outside took his hands out of his pockets. Empty. No weapons in sight.
His voice came from beneath the mask. Though muffled, its underlying tone was still discernible-
Young. Very young. Possibly not even twenty.
At least Hughie had no twenty-year-old enemies, nor had he seen any asshole superhumans under twenty active on the big screen.
"So, do I know you?"
"You don't know me, but you know William Butcher."
"Are you from Vought?"
"If Vought had sent me, you would've been dead the second you saw me at your door.
You could figure that out with the soles of your feet. Vought's people don't knock."
"Uh... yeah, I guess that's true. So what do you want with me?"
When Hughie heard the name "Butcher," he slipped part of the chain free.
He remembered Butcher saying that if he heard a stranger mention his name, he should hold off on shutting the door. They might be an ally.
But Butcher had never told him an ally would turn up at his door on their own, wearing a cheap mask bought at a convenience store.
"Come in."
Hughie unhooked the chain and took half a step back, his hand sneaking into the shoe cabinet drawer, toward a crowbar Butcher had left there.
He didn't pick it up, but his fingers touched its ice-cold handle.
With his keen powers of observation, John naturally noticed Hughie's little movement.
But he ignored it. With that scrawny little frame of Hughie's, which looked like a stiff breeze could knock it over?
He fought like a pansy. Not a threat in the slightest.
Stepping into the apartment, John gave the living room a quick once-over.
IKEA furniture, a photograph on the TV stand.
The girl in the photograph smiled, showing two pointed canine teeth, with the Brooklyn Bridge behind her in the bright sunshine.
The coffee cup beside it had been sitting there for who knew how long, a ring of brown residue crusted around its inner wall.
John's gaze lingered on the photograph for less than half a second before moving away.
"You were the one who killed Translucent, right?"
John turned around, looked Hughie in the eye, and dropped the question without warning.
"Mm... huh? No, I didn't. How could I?"
Hughie had already been wondering who John was, and now he was even more startled.
Whoever this man was, he definitely wasn't a friend of Butcher's!
Because only he, Butcher, and Frenchie knew that secret, unless that son of a bitch Translucent was still alive.
"You were the one who shoved C4 up his rectum, right?"
Hughie's face instantly went a shade paler, and his hand instinctively reached toward the shoe cabinet.
I'm screwed... I think I just let a wolf in...
Butcher, get the fuck over here and save me!
"How the fuck do you know-"
"I looked into it."
John offered only a statement.
"A-Train ran into and killed a girl named Robin. You were her boyfriend. Then Butcher found you and brought you onto his team.
"Your first target was Translucent. By now, he should already be a pile of ground meat..."
"What... what exactly do you want? I'm warning you, Butcher will be back soon. He's with the, what was it-right, the FBI."
"The FBI?"
Behind his mask, John put on a fake smile that was polite without being any less awkward.
"So the FBI told you to kill people?"
Even funnier. What was that son of a bitch Butcher thinking, recruiting an idiot?
So this was the team of idiots that took me out?
John couldn't smile anymore.
"Who the hell are you? A spy for Vought? Or are you digging up dirt on Vought too?"
Hughie's fingers stopped on the shoe cabinet's drawer handle.
"If that's how you want to understand it, you can think of it that way."
John waved a hand.
Hughie fell silent for a few seconds, scrutinizing the masked man before him, his guard raised as high as it could go.
"How am I supposed to trust you?"
John walked slowly up to Hughie, stopping within arm's reach.
"Let's make a deal, shall we?
"A-Train will show up tomorrow at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street in Lower Manhattan.
"He'll come alone. And right there, in front of you, in front of Butcher, in front of anyone you want to bring, he'll admit with his own mouth that he ran into and killed Robin."
"That's impossible!"
At the mention of the enemy he had once idolized, but now wanted nothing more than to kill, Hughie reacted.
He stared fixedly at John as though his PTSD had been triggered.
"That bastard A-Train is in the Seven. With his goddamn hypocritical nature, how would he, how could he!"
"That son-of-a-bitch animal!"
"You don't trust me, but you can trust my sincerity.
"Because by now, he should be afraid of me. Perhaps even more than he's afraid of Homelander."
John took a sticky note out of his pocket and set it on the shoe cabinet. Two addresses were written on it.
"See you tomorrow."
He pulled open the door. Outside, traffic streamed along the New York streets, and the noise surged in, filling the entire living room.
Slam!
The door shut.
Hughie simply stood frozen in the living room, staring at the sticky note on the shoe cabinet.
After thinking it over for a long while without making up his mind, Hughie picked up the phone and dialed Butcher's number.
It rang five times. No one answered.
He dialed again. Still no answer.
"Fuck, goddamn Butcher! What fucking bar are you screwing around in this time? Call me back!"