The sound of the bullet hitting the concrete floor was absurdly small. A tiny metallic tink that shouldn't have been audible over the ringing in Hughie's ears, over the blood that was pounding in his skull like a fist against a door. But he heard it. He heard it like a gunshot. Like a starting pistol. Like the first sound of a world that had just tilted on its axis and would never, ever come back to center.
Jack's jacket was draped over the basin. The hole in the fabric was neat, a small dark circle right over where a heart would be if Jack had a normal heart, if he was a normal man, if any of this made any kind of fucking sense. The bullet lay on the ground now, glinting in the dim light, a little piece of lead that had done absolutely nothing except tear a jacket and remind everyone in the room that the rules had changed.
Jack glanced over his shoulder at Hughie. The kid was on his knees, his hands limp at his sides, his face a mask of blood and bruises and something that looked like his soul had been pulled out through his eyes. Pathetic. Broken. Exactly the way the original owner of this body had felt a month ago, curled up in his bed, watching his parents die over and over again in his memory.
"Well, Hughie," Jack said, and there was something almost friendly in his voice, something that might have been warmth if warmth could coexist with the blood still drying in his hair. "Your aim wasn't bad. Direct to the heart, huh? Can't fault the intent."
He turned back to the basin. The tap squealed when he twisted it, a rusty, tortured sound that matched the state of everything in this shithole. Water gushed out. He cupped it in both hands, splashed it on his face, and rubbed—scrubbing until his skin was clean.
He heard them before he saw them. The creak of the door. The heavy tread of boots on concrete. Frenchie's voice, light and casual, the voice of a man who thought the hard part was over.
"—and Cherie, she is a genius, I tell you. The explosion, it was perfect. Homelander, he flies off like a dog chasing a car. He doesn't even look back. He—"
The voice stopped.
The footsteps stopped.
The air in the warehouse changed.
Jack watched it happen in the mirror. Watched Frenchie freeze in the doorway, his body going rigid, his hand already moving toward the rifle slung across his back. Watched Butcher step up beside him, his face shifting from the easy, post-crisis calm of a man who had just dodged a bullet to something else entirely. Something colder. Something that had seen too much shit to be surprised by anything anymore, but was surprised anyway.
The smell hit them. That was the first thing. The thick, copper-sweet stench of blood that hung in the air like smoke.The smell of a slaughterhouse. The smell of a man who had been reduced to pieces and left to rot.
Frenchie muttered something under his breath. French. Fast. The kind of words you said when you were trying not to be sick.
They moved forward, slow and careful, their rifles up, their eyes scanning the room. They saw Hughie first—saw him on his knees, his eyes empty, his whole body trembling with a shock that had nothing to do with the punches he'd taken.
Then they saw the rest.
Frenchie's rifle came up. His hands were steady—they were always steady, the hands of a man who had killed more people than he could count, who had seen more death than most soldiers saw in a lifetime, who had learned to keep his hands steady when his heart was screaming—but there was something in his face now that hadn't been there before. Something that looked like the beginning of fear.
"Putain de merde," he breathed. The words were barely audible. They didn't need to be. The scene spoke for itself.
(Means - Fucking Shit)
Translucent's body was spread across the floor like a discarded doll. The headless corpse lay in a pool of blood that was still spreading, still seeping, still finding new cracks in the concrete to fill. The head itself—what was left of it—was scattered in pieces across a radius of ten feet. Chunks of skull. Fragments of that strange, silvery skin. Brain matter that glistened wetly under the lights, gray and red and something that might have been bone or might have been teeth or might have been the last remains of a face that had once smiled for a million cameras.
Frenchie's rifle was aimed at Jack's back. The barrel was steady, the sight lined up perfectly with the space between Jack's shoulder blades. Frenchie had killed men from twice this distance. He had killed men from half this distance. He had killed men in ways that made this look clean. But his finger was trembling on the trigger. Just a little. Just enough to notice.
Butcher's rifle was up too. But he wasn't looking at the body. He was looking at the man by the basin. The man with the wet face and the messy hair.The man who was standing in front of a cracked mirror, drying his hands on a paper towel, acting for all the world like he hadn't just murdered one of the Seven and scattered his brains across the floor like confetti.
"Who the fuck are you?"
Butcher's voice was low. Flat. The kind of voice that didn't ask questions so much as demand answers. It was the voice of a man who had spent his whole life being the most dangerous person in any room and had just realized, for the first time, that he might be wrong.
Jack finished drying his hands. He folded the paper towel neatly, placed it on the edge of the basin, and looked at himself in the mirror one last time. Perfectly clean. The face looking back at him was handsome enough to make women stare, young enough to make men jealous, and calm enough to make anyone with half a brain cell start running in the opposite direction.
He turned.
The movement was slow.The movement of a man who had nothing to prove and nothing to fear. His eyes moved from Frenchie to Butcher, taking them in, measuring them, filing them away. Frenchie with his steady hands and his trembling finger, his quick mind already calculating angles and exits and the thousand ways this could go wrong. Butcher with his hard face and his harder eyes, the eye that worked and the eye that didn't, the scarred tissue that spoke of a past that had tried to kill him and failed.
Jack recognized them. Of course he recognized them. The same faces he'd seen on a screen in another life,in a time that felt like a dream now. Butcher with his leather jacket and his permanent scowl and his endless, bottomless rage. Frenchie with his sad eyes and his gentle hands and the blood that would never, ever wash off. They were more real and human in person.The screen had turned them into characters, and had let him watch their suffering from a safe distance. There was no safe distance now. There was only this room, this moment, and the weight of what he had just done hanging between them like a blade.
"Well," Jack said. His voice was light."I'm your dad."
He took a step, the sole of his boot squelching against the floor, and then another. Each step was deliberate, the rhythm of a man who knew nobody in the room could stop him.
"I'm your fucking dad," he repeated, louder this time, letting the words echo off the corrugated walls. He paced a slow circle around the corpse, his gaze never leaving Butcher's face. "I'm your goddamn father, and I did what you cunts have been too fucking spineless to do for days. Every single one of you stood around jerking each other off, talking about plans, about timing. I just walked in and fucking did it."
Butcher tilted his head toward the headless body, his jaw tight enough to crack teeth. "Why?" The word came out low, grated, like stones grinding together.
Jack stopped mid-stride. He leaned his shoulder against a rusted pillar, letting out a long, slow sigh that seemed to drain the tension from his frame. "You want the story, Billy? You want the bedtime fucking story?" He gestured loosely at the corpse with one hand. "This piece of shit and his master, the great Homelander—they killed my parents. In a park, like they were putting down a stray dog. I was behind a dumpster, watching them laugh about it. So now I'm giving it back. Every last fucking drop. And you—" He pushed off the pillar, his eyes sliding across Butcher, then Frenchie, then Hughie, who was pressed against a crate like he was trying to merge with it. "You all are going to help me do it. Because I need some men to do some dirty work. Men who know how to move, how to hide, how to hit and disappear. Men who hate the same people I hate. Men who have nothing left to lose. And you all fit that criteria, Billy.You fit it perfectly."
Butcher's expression didn't change. He just looked at Jack for a long moment, then slowly shifted his gaze to Frenchie. It was a look they'd perfected over years—no words, just a flicker of the eyes, a fractional nod. Frenchie understood in less than a second. His hand was already moving, the submachine gun coming up, the trigger already squeezed before the barrel was fully aligned.
The roar of gunfire filled the warehouse, a deafening metallic chatter that sent Hughie's hands flying to his ears. Brass casings clinked and spun across the floor like spilled coins.
Butcher didn't wait. He turned,walked towards Hughie and grabbed him by the collar, already yanking him toward the door. "Hughie! Fucking move, lad! Unless you want your insides painted on these walls!"
Hughie's eyes were wide as dinner plates, his mouth hanging open as the bullets ripped through the air. His brain had frozen, stuck on the image of the headless body, the casual way Jack had smiled.But the sound of the gun—the primal, bone-shaking crack-crack-crack—kicked something loose in his hindbrain. Instinct took over. He scrambled to his feet, nearly slipping in the blood, and stumbled toward Butcher, his hand latching onto the older man's coat like a lifeline. After everything—the supes, the terror, the constant fucking near-death—his body had learned one thing: when Butcher said run, you fucking ran.
But the bullets never touched them.
Jack didn't dodge. He didn't even flinch. He simply walked into the stream of gunfire, his arms slightly spread, like a man welcoming a summer rain. The rounds hit his chest, his arms, his face—and flattened. They fell away from him like spent confetti, tinkling onto the concrete with pathetic little pings that were almost musical, almost beautiful, almost something you could dance to. One ricocheted off his cheekbone and didn't leave a scratch. Not a mark.Not even a reddening of the skin.
Frenchie's eyes went wide. He was still squeezing the trigger, the gun jerking in his grip, but his face had already shifted from aggression to the dawning horror of a man who'd just realized he was throwing pebbles at a tank.
Jack reached him in three long strides. His hand closed around the barrel of the submachine gun, and with a casual twist, he tore it from Frenchie's grasp as if it were made of tinfoil. He tossed it aside, then his fist slammed into Frenchie's face.
The sound was a wet crack—bone and cartilage giving way. Frenchie's head snapped back, blood spraying from his nose in a fine mist, and he crumpled to the floor in a heap, limbs splayed like a broken puppet.
Jack didn't spare him a second glance. He turned toward the door, where Butcher had already shoved Hughie through the gap, the kid's terrified face disappearing into the darkness beyond. Butcher stood in the doorway now, his body a barrier, his hand still on the frame.
"You," Butcher said, his voice a low growl. "You fucking bastard. Want to be a daddy so bad? Let me fucking help you with that dream." He stepped forward, closing the distance, and threw a punch.
His fist was fast.The blow was aimed at Jack's jaw, a tight, vicious hook that would have shattered bone on a normal man.
Jack caught it.
His hand closed around Butcher's fist with an easy, almost lazy grip. The bones in Butcher's hand ground together, and he gritted his teeth against the pain. He swung with his other hand, a wild haymaker aimed at Jack's temple.
Jack caught that one too.
For a moment they stood there, Butcher's fists imprisoned in Jack's palms, their faces inches apart. Butcher's breath was ragged, sweat beading on his forehead, while Jack's was as calm as if he were standing in line for a fucking coffee.
Jack smiled again—that same sarcastic smile. Then he shoved Butcher backward, releasing his fists just enough to let him stumble. Butcher recovered quickly, swinging again, aiming a kick at Jack's knee. Jack absorbed it without moving, then retaliated with a punch of his own that Butcher barely managed to deflect with his forearm. The impact sent a shockwave up Butcher's arm, numbing it to the shoulder.
They exchanged blows—Butcher using every dirty trick he'd learned in a lifetime of fighting men stronger than him: headbutts, elbows, a thumb aimed at an eye socket. But Jack was faster, stronger, and worse than that, he was calm. Every move Butcher made, Jack had already read it a half-second before. He wasn't fighting with technique; he was fighting with senses that saw the micro-tension in a muscle, the shift of weight, the flicker of intent. It was like watching a man try to punch a mirror.
Jack's next punch caught Butcher square in the face. Butcher's head snapped back, a spray of blood and saliva arcing from his mouth, and his legs folded beneath him. He hit the ground hard, his skull cracking against the concrete, and for a moment the world swam in a haze of white light and ringing ears.
Then Jack was on top of him. One knee pinned Butcher's chest, driving the air from his lungs. Jack's fist drew back, blood—Butcher's blood—dripping from his knuckles onto Butcher's cheek.
"You know," Jack said, his voice conversational again, almost friendly, as if he were discussing the weather. He paused, letting the fist hang in the air, letting Butcher see it, feel the weight of it. "I could handle him alone. The great cunt in the cape. I don't need you lot. I don't need anyone. I could walk into Vought Tower tomorrow and tear it down with my bare hands."
He lowered his fist, letting it rest on his own thigh, and leaned in closer.
"But I'm giving you a chance, Billy. A chance to join me. Because I know something you don't."
He reached down and patted Butcher's cheek with his free hand—a soft, condescending slap that was worse than any punch. "Your beautiful wife. Becca. She's still alive."
The words hung in the air. Butcher's entire body went rigid beneath Jack's knee, his breath catching in his throat. For a second, the rage in his eyes flickered into something else—something raw and desperate that he'd been burying for years.
Jack watched the change with a look of mild amusement, tilting his head like a dog listening to a distant whistle.
"So tell me,Billy." He drew his fist back again, knuckles white, the veins in his forearm standing out like cables. "Do you join me? Or do you want to see what hell looks like up close?"
....