Running From Himself 9 (Patreon)

Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn sweated under the hazy, late-summer sun. The air was thick with meat smell from a street cart cooking lamb, the exhaust fumes from a city bus groaning past, barely managing to cover the too-sweet scent of a pile of garbage baking on the hot pavement. 

Life moved at normal NYC rhythm: a woman stepping out of a bodega, adjusting the brim of her wide sun hat; two teenagers arguing over what they were watching on a phone, their voices carrying friendly insults; a single older man at an outdoor cafe table lazily turning newspaper pages.

FOOP—

A violent, localized gust tore down the street with a physical punch of air, a pressure wave that hit and vanished in an instant.

The woman's hat ripped from her head, and went cartwheeling a dozen feet into the air before clattering onto a parked car roof. Her eyes went wide as she cried out, her hands grabbing at now-messy hair, spinning around to see what hit her. 

Nothing. 

Just a lingering ripple in the air her eyes couldn't track.

The teenagers' argument stopped mid-sentence. The phone, held loosely, nearly fell from shaking fingers.

"Yo, what the fuck was that?"

"A-Train?!"

At the cafe, the man's newspaper exploded from his hands. Individual pages scattered across the sidewalk and went flying in the wind. He stood up, shouting a curse half in English and half in something else, looking up and down the street. He saw only usual traffic, moving at its usual, sluggish pace.

Before collective confusion could settle, it happened again. 

This time in the opposite direction.

KRRSHHH—

A few people were looking now, eyes going wider as they caught a flicker. A brief, horizontal distortion in the air, like a glitch in a video feed that lasted one impossible frame. There and then not.

The trash can on the corner tipped over, spilling contents in a chaotic wave of crumpled wrappers and empty bottles. A pigeon, taking flight at the exact wrong moment, was sent tumbling through air in a flurry of panicked feathers before righting itself and flapping away frantically.

"Did you see that? Right there!"

"It looked... I don't know what it looked like."

A Chinese tourist fumbled with his phone, managed to open his camera app, but filmed only empty, litter-strewn streets. "什么鬼啊?!"

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The slap of over-expensive running shoes on cracked asphalt was the only rhythm keeping time in this dead space. Back and forth at two hundred miles an hour. No more than that.

But definitely less.

A hundred yards of empty, fenced-in pavement somewhere in the forgotten ass-end of Brooklyn. He'd been going across regular streets for an hour before finding this place, but ending up on TikTok as the "Ghost of the Bronx" wasn't exactly helping with the whole 'keep your head down' strategy. Reggie kept running, arms pumping as he tried to ignore the burn in his lungs, the unfamiliar strain in his legs after he'd been at this for another hour on top of that.

Okay. Lungs are good. Heart rate is... high, but stable. No V-jitters, no chest pains. Just... slow. Slower.

A-Train in the show didn't really seem like much of a long distance runner, at least not when it came to pushing himself at max speed for extended periods. The guy was a sprinter, really, and that made sense for what he used his speed for. Thing was, it didn't make for a good speedster training routine and it definitely wasn't helping Reggie figure out his new limitations.

Didn't matter now, though. He was way too slow to worry about A-Train's old top speed anyway. The engine's got a leash on it now. He grit his teeth, legs feeling heavier with each step. This is some bullshit. I can't fight Homelander. I can't fight Maeve. I probably can't even fight Noir. Shit, I can maybe fight The Deep? And that's not saying much.

He slowed to a stop, hands on his knees, breathing harder than he wanted to admit. The thought landed with a dull thud in his chest: The Deep was already gone. Kicked off the team days ago after Starlight went on stage and torched his ass in front of the whole world.

It's all so fucking fast. Reggie shook his head as sweat dripped onto the asphalt, little dark spots that disappeared almost as fast as they hit the hot pavement. I thought I had months, maybe half a year… Like almost everything else he thought he knew about this show, It's been a single goddamn month.

“Not even two…” 

The words hissed out before he could stop them, voice rough from breathing hard. “Fuck me running!” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ignore how everything felt like it was moving too fast and too slow at the same time. "What's the point of knowing the what if I don't know the when?"

He took a deep breath, crouched down on the hot asphalt, and exploded forward again. Tried to focus on that feeling he'd had back in the Vought apartment, that clean hum of energy that felt different from everything else A-Train's body had ever done. For a split second, he saw it; tiny, almost invisible blue sparks flickering around his ankles, but they sputtered and died before they could catch hold of anything real.

A half-second later, he hit top speed, that same invisible wall he couldn't seem to break through no matter how hard he pushed. "C'mon, you son of a bitch," he grunted, slowing back down to a jog that still ate up ground faster than most cars on the highway. "Work with me."

He still had no idea what it was, this weird blue electricity that popped up sometimes when he ran. Far as he knew, A-Train didn't have any lightning powers or whatever the hell this was supposed to be. The whole thing felt familiar from somewhere, but Reggie just... he couldn't place it. 

Ignoring the slight ache in his scar, he jogged over at a casual fifty miles an hour and reached down into his backpack. A second later, he unscrewed the cap on a tall blue metal flask and raised it to his lips. Synthetic vanilla, scorched protein and something that smelled like a burning IV bag hit the air.

Thankfully, it tasted a lot better than it smelled, the texture of motor oil but colder, denser, and ice cold against his throat. Reggie took a long drink; a sickly-sweet blend of whole milk, Vought-brand Mega-Creatine, Hyper-MCT oil, vanilla almond butter, and enough sugar to kill a horse. A five-thousand-calorie bomb designed to fuel a body that burned through energy faster than he could process it.

A body that isn't even mine.

The thought hit him again, relentless and sharp. While he was hiding out at Nathan's, playing uncle, selling off A-Train's collection of dinosaur skulls and fighter jets, Flight 37 happened. He knew it was coming. Could have done something. Leaked the intel. Called in a bomb threat. Anything. But he was too busy navel-gazing, trying to figure out his own bullshit while a plane full of people fell out of the sky.

All those people. Because I was scared. Because I was worried about money and keeping my head down and...

The anger hit him then, hot and sharp and aimed right at his own chest. Not at the world, not at Vought, not even at Homelander. 

“Fuck!” He threw the flask to the side, heard it clatter and roll across the asphalt, and let out another roar, wordless pure frustration that echoed off the chain-link fence surrounding this forgotten piece of Brooklyn. 

Then he ran. 

Reggie pushed harder than before, ignoring the screaming in his muscles, pouring every ounce of guilt and rage into his legs as he tried to break through whatever wall was keeping him this slow-ass fucking loser.

The blue sparks returned, fraction brighter this time, a streak of energy trying to form around his feet, but they couldn't sustain whatever they were reaching for.

The soles of his thousand-dollar running shoes, definitely not designed for this kind of punishment, began to smoke. Rubber melted, hissing against the asphalt with that burnt-tire smell that made his nose wrinkle. The right shoe gave way first, sole tearing clean off in one piece. His sock-clad foot hit the pavement at over a hundred miles an hour.

The fabric vaporized instantly.

His legs went out from under him and sent him tumbling in a graceless and terrifying cartwheel of limbs that had nothing to do with superhero grace. “F-f-f-f-f-f” He bounced and skidded for twenty feet, rough asphalt tearing through his sweatpants, scraping skin from his arms, his back, his cheek.

Until, finally, he stopped.

He lay there in a tangled heap on the ground, coppery taste of blood in his mouth mixing with the lingering sweetness from his shake. The pain was sharp, real, and blessedly human. Reminded him that for all the speed and strength, this body could still break.

So what now? Hide? Let them keep running the table? He grit his teeth as his arms rose up, palms pressing against hot asphalt by his head. If these guys; The Boys; are willing to throw hands with nothing but balls and bad attitudes, what's my excuse?

He pushed himself up, ignoring the stinging scrapes that would probably heal faster than they had any right to. The problem wasn't his power level. The problem was logistics. He knew they existed, knew they were out there somewhere in New York, but that didn't exactly narrow it down much.

"How do I find The Boys?"

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

The warehouse smelled like ozone, stale coffee, and whatever the hell Frenchie had cooked up last night that made the air taste metallic. It was a massive improvement from the grimy hole they'd started in, back when that shitty Italian restaurant still had Translucent splattered across its walls. Hughie's Vought money (a very, very small sliver of the 2.5 million they'd thrown at him to shut up) had bought them new monitors, a proper server rack, climate control, and enough guns and explosives to arm a small, extremely pissed-off militia.

It looked professional. It felt like a tomb.

He watched Frenchie murmur something soft to the silent Asian woman; the one they'd pulled from that basement, the one who'd torn five different men clean off the bone like peeling an orange. Mesmer said she was a terrorist.... Which made sense, honestly. And Frenchie… Frenchie’s treating her like a stray dog he wants to keep. A stray dog that can punch through concrete walls. 

It didn’t bother him, of course. Why would it? It was fine, totally fine.

Kimiko. 

That was her name, according to what Mesmer had pulled from inside her head before...

Before Butcher cracked the other man's skull open.

He just killed him. 

And walked right back in with a wide smile on his face and specks of blood and brain on his hands a few days later. Just like that. Mesmer gave us everything we wanted and didn’t already know; Maeve's secret girlfriend, Homelander's mommy issues, the whole fucking playbook; and Butcher just... ended him.

Hughie shook his head, still unable to believe it. Said Mesmer was a liability. But he just seemed like a sad dad with a shitty haircut who made bad choices. And Starlight... she's good. She's actually trying to do good things. And A-Train… His teeth grit, a frown forming on his face as he tried to force the anger in his chest back down. W-well, he looked… he looked sorry when he apologized. None of it adds up. It's not black and white like Butcher says. It's just... grey. Messy, bloody grey. And I'm paying for the fucking paint.

He turned away from the scene, jaw clenched tight enough to make his teeth ache. Butcher was at a workbench, methodically cleaning a rifle with the same care most people used for washing dishes. MM was inventorying a crate of C4, checking each brick against a clipboard with mathematical precision. The quiet hum of routine felt wrong, felt evil, felt like they were no better than the Seven… just with different targets.

"This has to stop."

The words tumbled out before he could catch them, louder than he'd intended. His voice cracked on the last word, making him sound about twelve years old. Great. Really commanding presence there, Hughie. 

Butcher didn't look up, but the rhythmic clink-clank of his cleaning rod went quiet. MM straightened up slow, like a mountain deciding to pay attention, his eyes narrowing.

"What's that, son?" Butcher's voice came out in that low, dangerous drawl that made Hughie's stomach drop into his shoes as he faced the man.

"This. All of it. What we're doing. It's... it's not right. Killing Mesmer, he helped us! And going after all of them like they're all the same... I mean, some of them are, y'know, trying." God, I sound like an idiot. Like a kid arguing with his dad about bedtime. But Mesmer had kids. Had a daughter who probably thinks he just disappeared one day.

Frenchie's voice drifted over from the corner, soft but clear, not taking his eyes off Kimiko. "He has a point, mon ami. Ze girl... la fille... she is not like zem. She has a soul. You can see it, yes? She is not a monster. She is a victim, same as us."

MM crossed his arms, each bicep probably bigger around than Hughie's thigh. His voice rumbled out low and steady, controlled frustration wrapped in iron discipline. "The mission was Vought. The mission was Homelander. Now we're just... collecting strays and shooting the messengers. The lines are getting blurry, Butcher. We're getting sloppy. This ain't disciplined. This is personal."

Butcher set the rifle down with a deliberate, heavy thud that made Hughie's shoulders jump up around his ears. He turned, those dead shark eyes locking onto Hughie, but his words were for the whole room. The smile spreading across his face was all teeth and no warmth, the kind of expression that meant someone was about to get hurt.

"Blurry? Oh, I think the lines are crystal-fucking-clear. They're supes. We're not. Simple as." He gestured dismissively toward Frenchie, who was still sitting next to Kimiko like she might disappear if he looked away. "And she's not a victim, Frenchie, she's a weapon. A rabid dog someone else was holdin' the leash on. Don't go gettin' soft."

Butcher's gaze landed back on Hughie, the smile tightening until it looked more like a snarl. "Or is it just that your little supe girlfriend is starting to get in your head? Fillin' it with all that sunshine-and-rainbows bullshit about how they can be good?"

"It's not—she's not—this isn't about Annie!" His voice cracked right in the middle, making him sound about twelve years old. 

"What is it, then?” Butcher stepped forward, fists tight at his sides. You think just because Vought lubed your little mitts up with blood money, you can shove 'em right up my arsehole, that it?"

"Wh-what!? What the hell, Butcher? This isn't about the money!" The words tumbled out faster than he could think them through, desperation making his voice go high and squeaky. "This is about us! It's about doing the right thing! It's about what happened to Becca—"

The air in the warehouse froze. 

Like someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the room and replaced it with liquid nitrogen. Frenchie actually flinched, his whole body jerking away from the workbench. MM's face went hard as stone, jaw clenched tight enough to crack teeth.

Butcher took one slow step forward, his smile gone, replaced by something cold and dead and absolutely terrifying, something that belonged on serial killers and war criminals. So, right at home on Butcher, then.

"Don't.” The British supe-killer hissed. “You say her name again, Hughie, and I will knock your fuckin' teeth so far down your throat you'll be shittin' 'em for a week. Y’understand me?"

Hughie's phone rang. 

The cheerful, generic ringtone sliced through the suffocating tension and made everyone in the room jump. He fumbled it out of his pocket with hands that were shaking so hard he almost dropped it twice. 

The caller ID read 'Dad.'

"Hey, Dad." His voice came out as a strained whisper, barely audible over the blood pounding in his ears.

"Hey, son, I've... uh, I've got someone here for you." His father's voice sounded wrong. Tight, not scared, but definitely not normal.

"Huh?’ Hughie’s eyes narrowed, a sudden pit in his stomach he couldn’t describe. “Dad, what's wrong? You sound weird." 

There was a shuffling sound on the other end of the line, then a new voice. "Aaaye, Hughie, long time no talk."

No. No no no no no. 

"Wh-who's this?" But he already knew. His throat felt like it was closing up, like someone had wrapped a wire around his windpipe and was slowly tightening it.

"My bad... thought you would recognize my voice. We had a real heart-to-heart."

The warehouse disappeared. Butcher, MM, Frenchie, the argument, everything just faded away into white noise. There was only the voice. The voice that belonged to the man who had turned Robin into pink mist on a random Tuesday afternoon.

"A-Train?" The name came out as a choked whisper.

A soft chuckle on the other end. Relaxed, almost amused, with that easy swagger that made his skin crawl and his hands clench into fists.

"I go by Reggie now, actually."