"So this is your plan, Butcher? Bringing the damn red mutt to the party?" Ben growled, his voice rougher, like gravel grinding in a throat seasoned by cheap Bourbon and decades of radiation.

"Oh, come on, mate," Butcher smirked, leaning against the doorframe with that insufferable spark in his eyes. "If anyone can blow Homelander’s balls off, it’s your Soviet boyfriend here."

Ben didn’t laugh. Not because it wasn’t funny—but because it felt like a serrated blade twisting in his chest. It hurt to look at the room. It hurt to look at you.

Across the space, you sat in the shadows, methodical and silent. The metallic gleam of your left arm caught the dim light as you sharpened a rusted combat knife. Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. The sound was rhythmic, practiced—the sound of someone who had forgotten how to live any other way than as a tool. You didn't speak. You didn't even acknowledge the insult. You just watched, your gaze heavy and hollow.

And Ben hated you for that. He hated you because, unlike you, he hadn’t forgotten. He couldn't.

He remembered the Elbe River, 1945. The world was supposed to be ending, or beginning, or both. There was laughter, vodka, and the smell of gunpowder fading into the spring air as the Americans met the Russians on the bridge. Then came the ambush—or what Ben thought was an ambush. Smoke. Screams. A flash of red stars on winter coats. Ben had been dragged out of the mud, ears ringing, eyes searching for the one person who made the war bearable.

But you were gone. No body. No tracks in the melting slush. Just a cold silence that followed Ben all the way back to a hero's welcome he didn't want. The CIA filed your face under “Missing in Action,” then “Presumed Dead.” Ben swallowed the guilt, drowning it in magazine covers and hollow speeches for Vought.

Until years later, when he saw the grainy footage from a black site in Siberia. The shining arm. The empty, frozen stare. The new codename: Red Winter. A weapon forged in the very empire they were supposed to be fighting.

"You still pretending you don't understand me?" Ben muttered, stepping closer, though he refused to meet your eyes. "Stop playing revolution. That crap died before the USSR did. You're just a ghost in a tin sleeve."

You didn’t answer. You just looked up—briefly.

And that was enough to wreck him.

Ben knew you. Not by the metal or the uniform, but by the way you slightly furrowed your brow when you focused. The way you gripped that knife like it was the only thing keeping you tethered to reality. Just like you used to, back when you both slept in muddy tents and whispered about what you’d do when you got home. About the America you thought you were saving.

Ben looked away, his jaw tightening. He remembered Gunpowder—the way he’d screamed at the kid, tried to shape him into something else. Into someone else. As if through a terrified boy, he could resurrect a friend buried in the Russian snow.

But Gunpowder wasn't you. There was only ever one of you. And now, seeing what they had turned you into, Ben almost wished you had stayed a ghost.