fifteen

. . . 2022 . . .

Brooke is instructed to stay in the forest while the men go inside. She really wanted to argue. Truly, the venom sat on the tip of her tongue, coating her teeth, but it stayed there. She did not want to go inside Herogasm. It sounded like her own personal hell.

Hughie left her with his phone. Phone. These were phones now. It still baffled her to think about that. He said call Butcher if she needed something. Told her how to and everything, which she forgot, because there were too many buttons and too many processes to each of those buttons, but truly, why would she need Butcher? Brooke wouldn't. If anything, she was expecting calls from them.

What she did pay attention to, though, was access to the internet. It was invented in the fateful year that she was demoted from girlfriend to closet sidepiece, so she didn't get a lot of time with it, especially when the next year she was locked in a Russian lab and then in a freezer.

It was a lot to handle, having access to, well, everything.

It was a lot to take in.

She tried to search herself first. Mistake. Lots of sex videos that she didn't understand how came to be because she had been dead to the public. She was just curious if people liked her still. Not an important thing to look up but, well, she's curious, okay? Not a crime or a sin.

Next, she searched Soldier Boy. That was a different story. He had news articles in the form of blue links and television reports in pint sized formats. Apparently, the world caught wind of the fact that he was alive and a threat.

Brooke liked being a secret anomaly. It was different back then being secret because they were restraining her. Now? She was unrestrained and free. It was everything she dreamt of.

Her final search was the one she dreaded the most. It filled her stomach with lead and her mouth with acrid bile typing in her name.

Anastasiya Petrov.

One page of results. That was it. And even then, they were unintelligible, the blue links in Russian, the details in Russian, everything in Russian.

Two words catch her eye though. Two words she heard the scientists say in relation to her daughter the few times that Brooke was lucid to hear them speak of her.

Patient Zero.

Brooke lifts her head, trying to pay attention to her surroundings but also so desperately zoned into the fact that she's finding something. She doesn't need these people. Ben doesn't, either. They can leave without leaving a trail of bodies, they can go find her, they–

A boom so loud that it shakes the hill she stands on suddenly bursts the house open. Blood and gore spills out of it. The smell of charring wood and burnt skin and hair wafts into the air to the hill that she stands on. Brooke instinctively scrunches her nose, staring in horror at the mess. People are wailing, half burnt and destroyed heroes trying to crawl away from the mess, limbs strewn about in the grass, and in the center of it–

Ben. Confused, angry Ben.

Butcher and Hughie are talking to him, their mouths moving furiously. She wishes she could hear. Butcher makes a gesture up at Brooke, and she straightens up, ready to dash down there and slap him across the face, but Ben's already stepping into his space to do it–

A man with a fucking American Flag cape floats down from the sky. Slowly, his head tilted up a little like he's playing Jesus.

Brooke stifles a laugh to herself, dipping back behind the tree she's stood next to.

She will only involve herself if she must. That was the plan. Ben told her before they left that she was an Amplifier. It wasn't safe for her to be down at Herogasm, surrounded by C-Class heroes amping them up to horny, sex-driven-with-no-release powerful heroes while they did their thing.

Turns out, guessing from Butcher's furious gesture to her and Ben's anger at him, she might have been amplifying him anyways. That was not her fault.

However.

Brooke was not going to piss them off anymore and go down there. This was not her battle. Her battle was in the palm of her hand, on a miniature screen, hidden behind links in Russian.

Their battle was picking up, though.

She heard the remains of walls crumbling, the sounds of men tossing each other around and fists colliding with bone.

She would not look.

She stared down at the phone screen. Opened up the text message icon. She remembered this one because she was snooping through his texts with Annie, who she really desperately wanted to get on a better footing with. It was totally an invasion of his privacy. But what did he expect, leaving her with his phone? Her to not snoop? He was lucky she hadn't figured out where his photos were.

She backed out of those messages. Scrolled to Butcher's number, so sweetly saved under, Butch. And she typed out, Do you need help.

And then she blinked a few times.

Types again, i can't tell if you're fighting or not so if you are pplease don't answer.

Brooke dares a glance around the tree at the battle, and Butcher's got his knockoff laser eyes burning at–

The American Flag's laser eyes. What the fuck. Those are her new thing. Is it just a new Supe upgrade? Was she not special at all?

"I'm a little fucking busy, darling!" Butcher yells, nearly unintelligible over all the commotion but she hears it. She goes to text again to apologize, and then realizes that is probably a horrible idea.

There's a typo though, in her last message, that she missed.

She types quickly, hoping that it doesn't bother him too badly. I meant please.

Butcher and the American Flag break their staring contest by Ben interjecting himself. Butcher steps back, pulling his phone from his pocket for two seconds and glancing at it.

The smile he shoots up at Brooke is hardly a smile. But it's definitely grim. Definitely disappointed.

Brooke shoves the phone away, keeping the internet page with the links open. It's a long shot, but when they're done fighting, she can ask if anyone knows Russian. For now, she will not worry herself sick over it. For now, she has to worry herself sick over Ben surviving the fight against a man who is so surprisingly powerful that it's flooring her.

Movement in the grass catches her eye. Not the dead moving, she adjusted to the wailing and the crawling quickly, but actual human bodies.

Hughie's girlfriend, who she connected the dots to be Annie, and M.M., who she hadn't seen in ages, were walking around, helping the wounded. Well, the ones who seemed salvageable. It wasn't heartless to acknowledge that some just weren't. Explosions were nasty things, surviving was a miracle in itself.

Brooke debates it for a second.

She is already, allegedly, amplifying Ben. It's out of her control.

But she doesn't know for certain how amplifying other heroes works. If she went down there and talked to M.M. and Annie, would that effect the American Flag guy?

It wouldn't hurt to try it. It couldn't. Hughie said he would talk to Annie about finding Anastasiya and, from his texts that she extensively read, he hadn't yet had the chance. Brooke would do it now. The three men inside were doing damage on the guy inside. Surely amping them up wouldn't hurt at all.

Brooke ducks out of her spot behind the tree and starts down the hill.

M.M. spots her first, his head shaking.

"Nuh uh," he says, standing from his kneel next to someone with a gash through their arm. "We are not getting involved with your shit."

Brooke actually scoffs in his face. "I am not part of their shit." She made a broad gesture to the house, and then to herself. "Do you see me in there, fighting that bald eagle motherfucker?"

Annie straightens now too. Wiping her hands on her jeans, she looks over Brooke, studying her. Brooke doesn't blame her; she's studying Annie, too. "What do you want, Rose Quartz?"

It's so hard to actually say the words out loud.

They are so heavy in her mouth.

"I have a daughter," Brooke says, choking on them, not able to shrink them down to size and make them more palatable. "Had a daughter, back– You know. Um, she would be about 40 now? I think?"

M.M. pinches his nose in his fingers, shaking his head. "Fuck."

That's everyone's reaction, isn't it? To learn how awful human beings truly can be. It's easy to forget when superheroes are usually taking that award.

"So what do you want us to do?" Annie's face has softened, but she looks so exhausted, so tired. Brooke can't even blame her; she's so tired, too.

Brooke needs to keep the image that she is stronger than she is, though. That this has not been eating her alive since the moment she gave birth and that little girl was pried from her hands. "I made Butcher promise that if Ben killed Homelander... that he would find her. That was one of my conditions. But–"

"But he's fucking Butcher," M.M. says, his jaw tight. "And you're worried."

Brooke doesn't say anything to that. A new fear settles in her chest that if they don't help then Butcher will flake, that Anastasiya will be gone forever.

"Hughie said he would ask you, Annie, if you could–" Annie inhales audibly, her eyes closing. Brooke continues, hating herself for asking when they've all got so much on their plates. "I've found internet, fuck, I don't fucking know. I've found internet. With her name. But it's in fucking Russian and I don't know Russian, so I'm at a standstill. I promise I'm trying to make it to where no one needs to get involved in my shit." She casts a glance over at M.M.. "But there's not much that I can do on my own."

Annie puts her hands up in surrender. She takes a few steps back, kneeling down to someone else injured. "I'll think about it. Alright? Let me think about it."

Brooke nods. It's better than she could have asked for. When she turns around to head back, the men are exiting the house, covered in blood and scars and mess.

"Oy," Butcher says, his voice sounding a bit strained but still mouthy enough for Brooke to want to deck him, "we've got to have a chat, darling."

Brooke snarls. "Says who?"

"Says the man who just connected some wee little dots who've been bugging him, that's who."

Brooke rolls her eyes. She bypasses him, bypasses a naked Hughie with a little smile because she will not touch him when his dick's out, and goes to hug Ben. Ben, who wraps his arms around her in a heartbeat.

"No, no," Butcher is still walking but he's glancing over his shoulder to glower at her, "no running into his arms yet. We are going to have a conversation."

"So speak."

"Homelander was created in a lab," Butcher says, his eyes zeroed in on her. He's scrutinizing her like something is her fault even though she did nothing but stand behind a tree and talk to Annie. "Some sort of test tube baby from the bollocks of some schmuck. And your egg."

Brooke lifts her head from Ben's shoulder, turns it slowly. She tilts it to the side, disbelief coating every inch of her face. "What on god's green earth are you running your mouth about?"

"He's got your pretty little fire eyes," he shoots back, "burns people's eyesockets out. It's always nagged at me when you say that, never could figure out why, but it just... clicked."

Brooke starts shaking her head. Can't stop. She won't accept that the lab did this to her. Somehow, after all the evils that were done, this feels like the worst. Taking her baby girl was one thing, but using her to make a fucking maniac that, from what they've been saying, wants to dominate the world and make everyone fear him–

"What are you saying?" Ben's voice sounds so far away, his hand on her hip so warm, his fingers pressing her ribcage.

Butcher smiles that horrifying, murderous grin of his. "I'm saying that I bet our little gemstone can fly and she doesn't know it, because that little son of hers can, too."