Chapter 3 — The Boy Who Pressed the Button
Hughie pressed.
The world made a sound like a soda can screaming.
Then everything that could be inside a man was suddenly having a very public argument with the air.
It wasn't cinematic. Cinematic implies distance. This was close-up and wrong, a hot slap of copper and biology that the brain tries to file under accident because there isn't a drawer for you killed someone on purpose. Foam and sprinkler water exploded into red confetti. The mesh rang. Hughie's knees forgot him. He folded to a sit like a puppet thoughtfully returned to the floor.
"Jesus," he said, but it came out as breath instead of prayer.
Butcher was already moving in that brisk way of men who've lost the luxury of hesitation. He hit the breaker to kill the cage current, shouldered the door, and let it swing open on a hinge that now had nothing to contain. He did not look surprised. He did not look pleased. He looked… practiced.
"Don't stand up," he told Hughie, voice level. "You'll fall over."
Frenchie took a handkerchief from somewhere inside a jacket that probably had a past life as curtains and pressed it into Hughie's palm. "Breathe through your mouth, petit lapin. The nose is not your friend."
The air tried to be a crime scene and a hospital all at once. The transformer hum under it all kept the room from floating away.
Up in the rafters, where the dust hadn't gotten the memo, Cian just… stayed still. He'd thought he might freeze it for the kid—steal a few seconds, change the angles, shield him with a ripple of time. He didn't. Some lines can't be intercepted without breaking bigger ones. Hughie needed the weight of this if he was going to be anything other than ballast in Butcher's wake.
Still, mercy's a craft. Cian flicked a finger and the substation's ventilation remembered its job—moving the iron tang ceiling-ward, thinning the immediate. He nudged a string of cameras into deeper naps. He smoothed the room's EM profile until Vought's most overeager hounds would read it as nothing to see, boss.
"Right," Butcher said, wiping his hands on a rag that would never be anything else again. "We tidy. We pack. We go."
"Tidy?" Hughie blinked at him, face chalk over rust. "What is—how—what do you mean tidy?"
"I mean: bleach," Butcher said, voice not unkind. "I mean: bags. I mean: the part after bravery when you either become useful or useless."
Hughie nodded because it was the only verb he could reach.
Frenchie was already unspooling thick contractor bags from a roll. "Help me, mon frère. Corners tight. Think of wrapping presents for people you hate."
They worked. It felt obscene and necessary. Butcher moved with the economy of a man who had done this before where the cameras didn't go. Frenchie cracked jokes that were more rhythm than humor, keeping the room inside a tempo that said now and now and now until after existed. Hughie held and fetched and gagged and then breathed again and kept holding.
Cian, the rumor in the ironwork, took care of what they could not see. He skimmed the substation's feeble security DVR and taught it to have a small allergy to the last thirty minutes. Not deletion; deletion makes holes. He stitched over the moment with previous ordinary minutes—the hum of no one here but rats and transformers. He kissed the neighborhood grid one more time, a low bass purr that convinced sniffers their curiosity was tacky.
Above, altitude shifted—just a taste of god on the air, that antiseptic blue. Cian felt Homelander's attention like a sunbeam that hadn't decided what to burn yet.
Not today, brother, he thought, and fed the local relay another thimble of lie. The sensors yawned.
"Up," Butcher said softly, crouching in front of Hughie. "Look at me, son."
Hughie obeyed, eyes too wide in a face that didn't quite fit him anymore.
"You did what had to be done," Butcher said. No triumph. No sermon. "He would have killed you. He would have rung Vought. He'd have put all of us on a wall. You pulled your weight."
"I killed him," Hughie said, and the words landed like furniture dropped down stairs.
"Yeah," Butcher said. "And we'll keep moving so it wasn't for nothing."
Frenchie pressed a plastic bottle into Hughie's hand. "Swish, not drink. Your mouth is full of chemical poetry."
Hughie swished. Spat. Swallowed a different kind of bile. "I need— I need to sit."
"You are sitting, petit," Frenchie said gently. "Miracle."
Butcher checked his phone—burner, cracked, last of its line. A text from Mother's Milk, short and useful: WHATEVER YOU'RE DOING, STOP DOING IT followed by coordinates and the kind of profanity that makes you feel loved. Butcher smiled like a photograph of a smile.
"Frenchie. Final sweep. Hughie, we're a minute from needing your legs again." He said it like we included Hughie on purpose. It did.
They finished the unfinishable. The cage was a geometry problem with one fewer variable now. The bags were not heavy but felt like gravity had opinions. Frenchie duct-taped seams like an artist with an unkind medium.
Cian dropped lightly onto the catwalk and stared through the grated floor at a boy trying on a different person. He thought of Robin in a borrowed T-shirt yelling quietly into a pillow because you can't scream in a safehouse. He thought of the lamplighter's last breath and how power always tries to justify itself with fire. He thought of Homelander somewhere up there, practicing a smile that has to last all day.
He could have told Hughie—she's alive, it's not all as bad as it felt out there. He didn't. Not yet. Hope is a scalpel; you use it wrong, you bleed out.
The loading-bay door clanked again. Butcher froze, hand going to the pistol at his back.
A head popped under the gap like a groundhog that owed someone money. "Bonjour, mes anges. We are leaving now, yes?" Mother's Milk said as he shouldered in. He stopped mid-crawl, face tightening at the smell. "Ah. So that's what that text was."
"Long story, short ending," Butcher said. "We're past the hard bit. On to the stupid bit."
MM took in Hughie's thousand-yard stare and softened around the edges. "You okay, kid?"
"No," Hughie said, which was the right answer.
"Good," MM said. "Only monsters are fine after this."
They moved. Butcher led, MM and Frenchie flanking, Hughie between them carrying a bag that wasn't heavy enough to be what it had been. The substation door yawned at them. The alley was a wedge of heat and sound and ordinary. A bus rumbled past as if the world was stunningly committed to its schedule.
Cian ran the route ahead two seconds at a time, skimming intersections, patting down the city for knives. He plucked a red light into synchronized obedience, made a traffic cop look left instead of right, let a cyclist decide to check his phone at exactly the wrong moment to be useful to Vought. Small sins. He'd tithe later.
They reached Frenchie's van because of course Frenchie had a van, and of course it was the kind of van that didn't belong to any particular trade but could plausibly be all of them. The back opened. The bags went in. Hughie went in after them and sat on milk crates like a penitent in a confessional with very bad acoustics.
"Buckle up," Frenchie said cheerfully from the driver's seat, and the van pulled into a world that had started pretending again.
On the roofline, Cian let time go back to being rude without supervision. He checked the sky. Homelander had cut a lazy new line toward Midtown, attention snagged by a helicopter he could wave at if he felt like being adored. Good. Be adored. Be busy.
Cian's phone buzzed. NEST: ROBIN AWAKE. CALMER. WANTS NEWS. He typed nothing back and hated himself appropriately.
He had one stop left before the day could be declared survivable.
The subway thundered under his feet like a promise. He stepped into its wake and let the city's current carry him up and over and across to a block where billboards sell hope more than soap. He landed on a narrow balcony outside a rehearsal space and looked through glass at a young woman standing in front of a mirror, her gold suit half-zipped, her mouth practicing the courage to fit in and the courage to quit at the same time.
Annie January pulled the zipper the rest of the way up, nodded at her reflection like a deal, and picked up her phone. No messages from God. A few from her mother. She squared her shoulders, turned, and walked into the corridor like it wasn't going to try to chew her.
Cian pressed two fingers to the window, like taking her pulse through glass. "Stay real," he told the air. "We're short on that."
He felt the city tighten again—threads tugging toward the van, toward a man in a brown coat steering chaos like a boat, toward a corporate tower sharpening its teeth. He rolled his neck, let the Speed Force hum low and friendly in his bones, and went to go keep a world-sized lie from swallowing three idiots he'd accidentally started rooting for.
The van rattled like it was laughing at them.
Frenchie threaded traffic with the serenity of a man who believed in lane lines as folklore. Mother's Milk sat shotgun, scrolling three burner phones at once—police scanner, hospital admissions, Vought chatter—braiding the noise into something useful. In the back, Butcher stared straight ahead and chewed on a thought like it was gristle.
Hughie sat on a milk crate between two contractor bags and discovered that silence could be loud enough to bruise.
"You did what you had to," Butcher said at the metal floor.
"Please stop saying that," Hughie whispered.
"Alright," Butcher said. And he did.
MM turned, voice a floor you couldn't fall through. "Rule one: no phones that belong to you. Rule two: don't be a tourist. If you don't know the room, you don't put your hands in drawers. Rule three: if Butcher tells you to run, you run."
"What if he's wrong?" Hughie asked.
"Rule four," MM said. "We tell him he's wrong after we're alive."
Frenchie honked cheerfully at a taxi that deserved it. "Rule five: if Frenchie cooks, you say it is delicious."
"Is it?" Hughie asked, too honest to stop himself.
Frenchie considered. "Fifty-fifty."
---
Two floors above an auto body shop that had never met a safety inspector, Frenchie's workshop waited with open arms and poor life choices. Tools on pegboard. Wires like ivy. A mattress in the corner trying not to look ashamed of itself. The air smelled like solvents and fresh beginnings.
They backed the van up to the freight elevator that worked when it felt seen. It felt seen today. MM and Butcher hauled the bags inside with the ritual briskness of men who had decided not to think nouns at them. Hughie followed, empty-handed and full of hands he didn't know where to put.
In the loft, Frenchie pointed to a row of blue drums. "Acid. She is a judgmental lady. We introduce her slowly."
Butcher clapped Hughie on the shoulder. "Not your job. Your job is shower. Soap. New clothes from the mercy pile."
Hughie opened his mouth to argue and found a lump where words should be. He nodded instead. He moved toward the bathroom like a sleepwalker. The shower hissed on and tried its best to outsing the day.
MM rolled his neck and looked at Butcher. "We escalated."
Butcher gave him the face you make when you know you're already on the slide. "We didn't start it."
"We never do," MM said. "But we keep ending it."
Frenchie cracked the lid on a drum. The acid fumed and said bonjour in a voice that ate vowels. "Drop or pour?" he asked.
"Drop," Butcher said. "We don't baptize."
Cian kept to the rafters because myths don't leave footprints. He watched the small, ugly work of consequence unfold. Frenchie's hands were gentle even now, infuriatingly humane in their way. MM moved like a metronome set to get it done. Butcher's jaw lived in the past; his eyes in the next problem.
Cian gave the room a favor: a soft fan of air across the ceiling, drawing the worst of the stink up and out so the memory would live mostly in their heads, where it belonged.
The shower stopped. Hughie emerged in a T-shirt three sizes too big and sweatpants that had known better days. He looked like a late-stage college student and a man who had chosen something irreversible.
Frenchie handed him tea in a cracked mug. "Mint. It lies to your stomach for you."
"Thanks," Hughie said, and meant it with a desperation that embarrassed him.
Butcher's phone buzzed. He glanced: RAYNOR: YOU'RE OUT OF LIFELINES followed by a droplet of bureaucratic venom. He put the phone facedown and smiled with the kind of teeth you get from therapy you didn't attend. "Right. We lay low. We regroup. We—"
"—don't post," MM added, deadpan.
"—don't post," Butcher agreed, aggrieved. "We also don't trust anyone in a suit."
Frenchie's eyes flicked up, sly. "Not even me?"
"You don't own a suit," Butcher said.
"I might," Frenchie lied.
---
High above the island, the sky put on its PR smile.
Ashley Barrett's war room looked like a sponsor reel mated with a panic attack: live feeds, trending bars, a whiteboard that read T TRANSPARENCY even though no one meant it. She ran a marker across a bullet point twice and looked like she'd just been given a kitten she hated.
"So where is he?" she asked.
Stan Edgar didn't look at her. He didn't look at anyone. He looked at the space in the room that people leave for men like him to look at. "Translucent is out of contact."
"That's not a status," Ashley said. "That's a vibe."
Homelander leaned in the doorway, arms folded, eyes bright with that childlike interest he saved for ants and moral dilemmas. "He's probably naked in a duct," he said. "It's what passes for intimacy with him."
"We have a ping," a tech called. "Then we don't. Then we do. Then nothing."
"Like the last time," Edgar murmured.
Homelander's smile thinned. "What last time?"
Edgar clicked a remote. The screen gave them a familiar smear: a streak that wasn't weather, wasn't optics, wasn't a joke. "Our boogeyman," he said mildly. "Rumors of a storm."
Ashley's marker squeaked to a stop. "We don't say boogeyman at staff," she said.
Edgar didn't answer her. He watched Homelander watch the clip and admired his own restraint. "We have every confidence," he said. "In you."
"Of course you do," Homelander said, and kept smiling until it hurt.
When he left the room, he left a quiet behind that tasted like nickels.
---
Back in the loft, the worst of the work was done. The drums were sealed. The air had mostly forgotten. Hughie sat on a stool with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. When he lifted his head, his eyes had learned something permanent.
MM set a plate of something Frenchie swore was food next to him. "Eat three bites," MM said. "Not five. Three."
Hughie ate one. Then two. Then three. He put the fork down and kept it down.
Butcher leaned against a workbench. "You did good, son."
"Don't," Hughie said, too soft to be rude, too honest to be polite.
"Alright," Butcher said again, and meant it again. He respected a man's limits when he could see them.
Cian checked his phone for the text he'd been avoiding. NEST: SHE'S ASKING AGAIN. He typed one word: SOON. He erased it. He typed SAFE. He sent it. It wasn't enough and it was all he could give.
He slipped out through a window that had decided it was a door and let the afternoon lay its weight on him. He ran.
He ran the way wind forgets to be careful: along graffiti that remembered better artists, across a rooftop garden where basil turned its head to watch him blur by, through steam that broke into applause when he touched it. He cut north, then east, then down into a neighborhood where Triad men smoked the kind of cigarettes you only buy in bulk and a metal door guarded a secret no one had named correctly yet.
He stopped across the street from a warehouse that wanted to be unread. He read it. He felt the hum inside: heavy, wrong, human. Hearts. One that beat like hers, like a fist that had learned patience; like silence with teeth.
"Hello," he said, and the word didn't go anywhere. "There you are."
Kimiko didn't hear him because she slept like a person who had given up on sleep meaning anything. But the electricity noticed him. It puddled toward his shoes like a dog that forgave too easily. He reached down and let it sniff his hand.
"Soon," he told the door. That cruel little promise again. He was addicted to it. He hated that. He walked away before he could make it worse.
---
Grace Mallory's safehouse was a house in the least possible way. Robin sat on the couch with a blanket she had accepted under protest and a glass of water she had forgotten to drink.
"Is he okay?" she asked.
"He's alive," Grace said, which was true and insufficient.
Robin stared at the TV with the sound off. A news crawl lied politely. "I want to tell him."
"I know."
"Why can't I?"
Grace's jaw worked once like a machine that needed oil. "Because they're watching him. Because they're waiting. Because if you breathe the wrong direction, they'll smell the draft."
Robin nodded in the way people do when they don't agree and will do the right thing anyway. "He's going to hate me."
"He's going to hate a story," Grace said. "You'll fix it. Later."
Robin wrapped the blanket tighter. "You sound like you believe in later."
Grace stared at the door as if the future were polite enough to knock. "I believe in stubborn," she said. "Later is made of it."
Her phone vibrated. No name. Just a lightning bolt and a period.
SAFE, it read.
Grace's mouth conceded a millimeter. "Good," she said to no one.
---
Dusk tilted. The island's lights tensed for night.
Hughie perched on the workshop's fire escape, breathing air that hadn't been invited inside. The city below looked like it always did—busy, bored, gorgeous, cruel. He pulled the NDA check from his pocket and unfolded it because masochism sometimes disguises itself as curiosity.
It was a number his brain couldn't say out loud without blushing. It smelled like hush. He held it over the alley and imagined letting the wind have it. He didn't. He folded it neatly and put it back. The future needed props.
Butcher settled beside him with the sigh of a man sitting on history. "You going to be sick?"
"Maybe later," Hughie said.
"Good man," Butcher said. "Save it for their shoes."
They sat. The quiet wasn't friendly, but it wasn't an enemy anymore.
"You think I'm a good person?" Hughie asked without looking.
Butcher grunted. "I think you're our person. We'll fix the rest on the way."
"That's not… comforting."
"Nothing worth hearing is," Butcher said.
Hughie managed a noise that might grow into a laugh if watered.
Inside, Frenchie taught MM a card trick and lost every time with dignity. A TV glowed in the corner with the sound off, the closed captions chasing their tails. A Vought chyron practiced regret.
On some other rooftop, Cian watched it all like a chess game someone else thought they were winning. He pinched the bridge of his nose and let the hum in his bones settle from fight to wait. The speed wanted to keep moving. He didn't let it. Discipline is just disobedience with a schedule.
His phone vibrated. A number that didn't exist. Coffee? it asked.
He smiled. Victoria Neuman had good taste in openings.
Eventually, he wrote back. Bring receipts.
He put the phone away and looked south, where a big, blue, smiling problem painted himself into the sky for people who loved lies that looked like hope. He blew him a kiss of static he'd never feel.
"Stay myth," he said quietly. "I'll handle the plumbing."
Somewhere behind a warehouse door, a girl with a broken lullaby in her throat turned in her sleep. Somewhere on a couch, a woman re-learned patience. Somewhere on a fire escape, a boy practiced living with himself.
The city clicked to the next notch. The storm kept its distance. For now.
—End of Chapter 3.