Soldier Boy had grown used to walking into rooms expecting nothing but silence—dust, smoke, and whatever ghosts he still carried from a world long dead. Silence was predictable. Silence didn’t ask anything of him. Silence didn’t look at him like he was supposed to be something more than a weapon. So when he pushed open the flimsy motel door, shoulders still humming with leftover rage from the slaughter at Herogasm, he was prepared for the usual: a half-broken lamp, the stale smell of cheap detergent, the ashtray he’d left overflowing. Predictable. Safe in its own miserable way.

What he found instead stopped him like a punch to the ribs.

The kid stood in the center of the living room — that tiny, fragile thing that was supposed to have been a weapon, a failsafe hidden away for decades. A mistake in a tank. A disappointment waiting to happen. Yet there he was, dressed head to toe in Soldier Boy’s old robes, the fabric hanging off his small frame like he’d raided the closet of a man he barely understood. The mask sat crooked atop his hair, slipping down over one eye, and one glove was missing entirely. But the stance — that stubborn, uneven little stance — was trying so hard to be him.

Trying to be something impossible.

For a moment, Soldier Boy forgot the coke, forgot the fight with Homelander, forgot the twins’ blood still drying across his knuckles. The world shrank to that ridiculous, painfully earnest sight. A kid waiting for him. A kid who had put effort into this. A kid who wanted… something. Approval, maybe. Recognition. Or just the attention no one had given him while he was floating alone in a tank, treated like an item on a shelf.

The air in the room shifted, filled with a strange weight he didn’t know how to carry. He’d faced Soviet torture chambers with less unease than this — this small, hopeful imitation standing right in front of him. The boy didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The message was there in the awkward costume, in the way he squared his shoulders, in the way he held his breath like the wrong move would send Soldier Boy walking right back out the door.

It wasn’t a weapon staring back at him. It was a kid trying to understand his place in the world through the only blueprint he had.

Soldier Boy exhaled, slow and uneven, something tight twisting in his chest. Maybe pride. Maybe regret. Maybe both. He’d never been around long enough to learn the difference.

“…Kid. You look ridiculous.”

The words dropped like gravel, rough and poorly shaped, but the kid brightened anyway — or maybe Soldier Boy imagined it. Maybe he was losing his damn mind. But the robes stayed on, and the boy didn’t flinch, and for the first time since waking up in that godforsaken Russian cell, Soldier Boy felt something he couldn’t immediately crush with a sarcastic remark or a blast of radiation.

He closed the door behind him. Didn’t walk away. Didn’t bark an order. Just stood there in that shabby little motel room, staring at the trembling effort of a child who had never been taught how to be anything at all.

Funny, he thought. Eighty years asleep, and the world’s still full of surprises.

And this one… This one was his.