Chapter 4: The Death of Robin Ward
POV: Ben
Three weeks into his new existence, Ben has learned that hunting monsters requires maintaining the lie that you're still human.
The routine writes itself in blood and careful deception: hunt by night, recover by day, and smile at Sarah over breakfast while she unconsciously catalogs the fresh bruises that heal too quickly. She knows something fundamental has changed about him, but love makes her willfully blind to details that would terrify a stranger.
The System chimes softly as Ben walks past the Vought merchandise store on 47th Street, morning coffee growing cold in his grip.
[COMPOUND V DETECTION: ACTIVE]
[ANOMALOUS SIGNATURE DETECTED]
[ESTIMATED ARRIVAL: 47 SECONDS]
[THREAT LEVEL: EXTREME]
Ben stops mid-stride, coffee sloshing over his knuckles as pedestrians flow around him like water around a stone. The signature isn't like the others he's learned to recognize—this one burns bright as a small sun, moving through the city at speeds that make mockery of traffic laws and human limitations.
"Level 65-70. Maybe higher. That's Seven territory."
Across the street, a young couple argues about Billy Joel concerts with the particular intensity that comes from being genuinely, desperately in love. The woman—petite, blonde, wearing a smile that suggests she's never encountered real evil—gestures animatedly while her boyfriend fumbles with his phone.
Ben's blood turns to ice water.
Robin Ward. Hughie Campbell. The inciting incident. Patient Zero for everything that follows.
"Thirty seconds. Maybe less. I have to—"
Ben opens his mouth to scream a warning, but the Timeline Preservation Protocol slams down like a steel trap. Words tangle in his throat, emerging as gibberish that makes nearby pedestrians step away from the crazy man having a breakdown on the sidewalk.
"Flaming bicycle purple!" Ben shouts, his voice cracking with desperation. "Look out! Fucking purple bicycle!"
Robin glances in his direction, eyebrows furrowed with the particular concern reserved for the obviously unstable. Her expression is kind even as she dismisses him—the reflexive empathy of someone who's never learned that kindness can be a luxury the world doesn't always allow.
"Hughie, that guy's—"
The world becomes red mist and scattered physics.
A-Train doesn't slow down. Doesn't even acknowledge that he's just reduced a human being to constituent particles and spilled dreams. The speedster's blur catches Robin Ward at full velocity, her body coming apart like she was made of wet tissue paper rather than bone and hope and the particular brightness that comes from believing in happy endings.
What's left of her paints the street in a Jackson Pollock nightmare of arterial spray and severed possibilities. Her hands—still clutching tickets to a concert she'll never attend—skitter across asphalt like pale spiders seeking shelter.
Hughie Campbell stands in the epicenter of biological catastrophe, covered in what used to be the person who made his world make sense. His mouth opens and closes without sound, brain refusing to process data that transforms love into abstract art painted in primary colors.
Ben moves before conscious thought catches up, crossing the street as bystanders begin to scream. Hughie hasn't moved, hasn't blinked, hasn't done anything except stare at Robin's severed hands with the expression of someone watching their universe collapse in real time.
"I did this. I could have saved her if I could speak, if the System would let me change anything that matters."
"Hey." Ben touches Hughie's shoulder with hands that killed a man three weeks ago. "Hey, look at me."
Hughie's eyes focus with the slow precision of someone surfacing from deep water. When he speaks, his voice carries the particular hollowness that comes from discovering that love doesn't make you bulletproof.
"She was just... we were just talking about Billy Joel."
"I know." Ben guides Hughie away from the expanding pool of crimson possibility. "Come on. We need to get you away from here."
"I can't leave her." Hughie's gaze drifts back to the wreckage that used to laugh at his jokes. "I can't just leave her there."
"She's gone." The words taste like broken glass. "Standing here won't bring her back."
Ben helps Hughie to the sidewalk, supporting most of his weight as the young man's legs forget how to function properly. Around them, the machinery of urban tragedy begins to engage—police sirens, EMT radios, the particular chaos that follows when superhuman indifference collides with human fragility.
"My sister died the same way." The lie builds itself while Ben watches Hughie's face for signs of cognitive processing. "Supe training exercise. Collateral damage. One minute she was there, the next..."
Hughie's attention sharpens fractionally. "Training exercise?"
"They called it an accident. Offered my family money to stay quiet." Ben's fabricated grief feels authentic enough to fool himself. "As if money could replace the person who taught me to tie my shoes."
"I'm using his trauma. Using the worst moment of his life to build connections that might keep him alive later. That's who I am now."
The shared pain creates a bridge between them—two ordinary humans crushed beneath the casual indifference of manufactured gods. Hughie grips Ben's arm with the desperate strength of someone drowning, and Ben lets him, knowing that this moment of connection will matter when The Boys come calling.
"What's your name?" Hughie's voice cracks on every syllable.
"Ben. Ben Donaven."
"Hughie Campbell." The introduction carries weight beyond mere politeness. "I work at the electronics store on 42nd. Used to work. I don't... I don't know what I do now."
Ben pulls out his phone, thumbs through contacts until he reaches his own number. "Call me if you need to talk. About the... aftermath. About what comes next."
"What does come next?" Hughie stares at Robin's hands, which have somehow migrated closer to the gutter. "How do you move on from something like this?"
"You don't. You weaponize it. You let it turn you into something that can hurt the monsters back."
"You don't move on," Ben says instead. "You move forward. There's a difference."
The Vought crisis team arrives with military precision, their response time suggesting they were already staged nearby. Ben watches them work with professional fascination—EMTs who know exactly which lies to tell grieving families, lawyers with NDAs printed on the kind of paper that suggests serious consequences for violation.
The cleanup crew moves with practiced efficiency, turning biological catastrophe into manageable incident reports. They've done this before—many times, judging by their synchronized movements. Vought has industrialized atrocity, turning superhuman violence into assembly-line efficiency.
A-Train materializes for damage control photographs, his costume pristine despite having just committed vehicular homicide at superhuman speeds. The speedster poses beside emergency vehicles, his smile calibrated for maximum sympathy and minimum legal liability.
Ben's shadow stirs beneath his skin—Juice Box's echo responding to proximity to another Supe. The hunger that lives in his chest whispers suggestions about enhanced speed and the particular satisfaction that would come from making A-Train pay for Robin's blood.
"Not yet. Level 3 versus Level 70 is suicide with extra steps. But someday..."
[COMPOUND V ANALYSIS COMPLETE]
[TARGET: A-TRAIN]
[ESTIMATED LEVEL: 68]
[WEAKNESS IDENTIFIED: CARDIAC STRAIN FROM COMPOUND V ABUSE]
[SECONDARY WEAKNESS: REQUIRES CONSTANT CALORIC INTAKE]
[RECOMMENDATION: AVOID DIRECT CONFRONTATION]
The System's analysis burns itself into Ben's memory like commandments written in blue fire. A-Train's heart is damaged goods—enhanced speed powered by chemistry that's slowly killing him from the inside. Ben files the information alongside a growing list of vulnerabilities, building a database of the precise ways to murder gods.
"Sir, we need to ask you some questions." A Vought representative approaches with the particular confidence that comes from knowing you work for people who rewrite laws rather than follow them. "About what you witnessed."
"I didn't see anything." Ben's voice carries the flat honesty of someone who knows the difference between truth and usefulness. "Just the aftermath."
The representative produces a tablet with forms already loaded. "Standard witness statement. For legal purposes. There's a small compensation package for your inconvenience..."
Ben signs papers that probably forfeit his right to speak publicly about superhuman vehicular homicide. The compensation check is larger than most people make in a month—Vought's way of ensuring that witnesses have strong financial incentives to remember events selectively.
"Take care of yourself," Ben tells Hughie as the crisis team begins loading body parts into discrete containers. "And call me when you're ready to do something about this."
"Do something?" Hughie's voice carries the hollowness of someone whose world ended in red mist and bureaucratic efficiency. "What could we possibly do?"
"You'll find out. When Butcher comes calling with his particular brand of justice, you'll discover exactly what ordinary people can do to gods."
"More than you think," Ben says, and disappears into the crowd before Hughie can ask follow-up questions that Ben can't answer without triggering the System's temporal protection protocols.
That night, Ben sits across from Sarah at dinner, her happy chatter about hospital politics fading to white noise as he replays Robin's death in microscopic detail. Enhanced speed meeting human fragility. Love transforming into abstract art in the space between heartbeats.
"You're quiet tonight." Sarah serves pasta with the particular care reserved for people she's worried about. "Bad day?"
"Witnessed an accident." Ben pushes food around his plate without eating. "Supe-related. Someone died."
Sarah's expression shifts to the practiced compassion she reserves for trauma victims. "I'm sorry. Those are always hard to process."
"She doesn't know. Doesn't understand that I could have prevented it if the System would let me speak truth instead of protecting whatever cosmic narrative brought me here."
"The randomness is the worst part," Ben continues, letting controlled grief color his voice. "One second everything's normal, the next..."
"The next, someone's gone." Sarah reaches across the table to squeeze his hand. "I see it at the hospital. The families who come in expecting good news and leave with holes that never quite heal."
Ben nods and tries to eat, but everything tastes like copper and the particular shame that comes from using tragedy to build alliances. Robin Ward died because he couldn't speak, and now he's weaponizing her death to position himself for future manipulation.
"This is who I am now. Someone who turns murder into opportunity, who uses grief as currency for purchasing influence."
In his pocket, his phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number:
This is Hughie. You were right about calling. I can't stop thinking about what you said. About doing something.
Ben stares at the message while Sarah talks about her patients, each word building the foundation for relationships that will eventually require him to risk his life for people who can't understand the sacrifices involved in protecting them.
Outside Sarah's window, the city breathes with the rhythm of eight million heartbeats, most of them belonging to people who go to sleep believing that heroes exist to protect them rather than exploit them. Robin Ward had been one of those people until enhanced speed taught her the difference between marketing and reality.
Ben texts back: It gets easier. The thinking, I mean. The anger stays.
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again. Finally: Good. I think I want to stay angry.
"And there it is. The first step toward becoming someone who can survive The Boys' particular brand of justice."
Ben pockets his phone and forces himself to eat while Sarah describes a patient who'd recovered against impossible odds. Her happiness is infectious in the way that hope always is—bright and fragile and completely dependent on not knowing too much about how the world really works.
"I'll keep her from learning. Whatever it costs, whatever I have to become, I'll make sure she never has to see what Robin Ward saw in those final milliseconds."
The resolution tastes like cold steel and the particular loneliness that comes from loving someone you can never fully trust with the truth.
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