Wolverine in The Boys

(Logan POV)

Dawn bled over the horizon like an open wound, washing the trees in dull gold as I lit my third cigarette since sunrise. The porch creaked under my boots, cool air biting at my skin, but I barely noticed. The whole house behind me was quiet. Not peaceful, just waiting.

Inside, the team was stirring. Butcher had finally passed out on the couch sometime around 4 a.m., empty bottle of scotch on the floor and one leg hanging off the side. Frenchie sat at the dining table scribbling notes on everything Shawn had dropped the night before. MM was in the kitchen, on his third cup of coffee, eyes locked on an old Vought personnel dossier, muttering names to himself. Maggie was in the upstairs bathroom cleaning her gear.Kimiko was watching Lamplighter.

She hadn't moved since I gave the order. Just sat on the arm of the chair across from him, arms crossed, eyes locked, her expression unreadable. Shawn looked like he'd aged five years overnight, fidgeting with his fingers, avoiding her gaze. Every time he glanced her way and caught her staring, he shrank an inch lower into his seat.

Couldn't blame him.

I walked back in and shut the door behind me. It clicked loud in the silence. MM looked up, nodded once, then went back to his notes.

"Find anything?" I asked, walking past him.

"Plenty of nothing," he muttered. "Krüger doesn't exist. Not in any official database, not in the CIA archives Grace gave us access to, not even in old Nazi defectors. It's like he never left Berlin."

"Or someone made damn sure he disappeared," I said.

He nodded. "Exactly."

I poured myself a cup of whatever was left in the pot. Bitter. Stale. Didn't matter.

"I've been going through Project Paperclip records too," MM continued. "Back in the '40s and '50s, the U.S. was importing every Nazi scientist they could get their hands on. Some ended up working for NASA. Others went to pharma companies. But a few… Vought took the ones they didn't want on the books."

"And Krüger?"

"Was Stormfront's guy. Which means he was deep. You don't get that close to her unless you were in the inner circle."

Grace walked in then, looking like she hadn't slept in a month. Her eyes met mine, and I knew she had something.

"You got a lead?" I asked.

"Maybe," she said, holding up a manila folder and dropping it on the table. "Old records from a decommissioned Vought lab in upstate Vermont. Shut down in the late '90s. Leased under a fake shell company but still owned by Vought."

"Let me guess," Butcher said from the couch, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "No one's been in or out in years, officially."

"Officially, yeah," Grace said. "Unofficially, we got satellite images from two weeks ago. Two black SUVs. One cargo van. No plates. Heat signatures picked up six bodies inside for less than an hour before disappearing."

"Krüger?" MM asked.

"No way to be sure," Grace said. "But it's our only shot right now."

"Then we go," I said, finishing the last of my coffee.

"Hold up," Butcher said, sitting up. "We're walking into a site Vought went out of their way to bury, possibly full of Nazi science, off-the-record assets, and whoever the hell they've got guarding it? I say we send scouts first."

"Agreed," Grace said. "Small team. Quiet. No guns blazing unless we have to."

"I'll take Frenchie and Kimiko," I said.

"You sure?" MM asked.

I nodded. "Kimiko's quiet. Fast. Won't leave a trace. Frenchie knows how to disarm traps and slip past alarms. We'll check the place out, see what's inside, and report back."

"You want backup close?" Maggie asked from the stairs.

I looked at her. "Yeah. You, MM, and Butcher hang back a mile or so. Eyes on the road, comms open. If we need extraction, you're the cavalry."

She nodded and went back upstairs without another word. Frenchie gathered his gear quickly, humming some broken melody as he stuffed vials, lockpicks, and two sidearms into his coat. Kimiko said nothing, just stood up, nodded at me, and moved like a shadow toward the van.

Before we left, I turned to Shawn.

"You stay put," I said. "You even breathe wrong, she'll gut you."

Kimiko smiled at him. The kind of smile that made grown men consider changing their names and disappearing forever. He didn't argue.

We reached Vermont by late afternoon.

The woods were thick, overgrown. The kind of place tourists drive through thinking it's peaceful until they realize no one's around for miles. We parked the van half a mile out, and the other team stayed even further behind, monitoring radios and the drone feed from MM's setup.

The lab was built into a hillside, camouflaged behind a false rock face. Vines covered most of the structure now, but the air felt wrong. Tainted. Like something had lived here too long.

"Electric still runs," Frenchie said, pointing to a faint red glow under the old keypad by the door. "Backup generator maybe."

"Can you get it open?"

"Mon ami, I was born to do this," he grinned.

Three minutes later, the door hissed open. Cold air rushed out, stale and sharp, like chemical rot. Kimiko entered first, silent as fog. I followed, Frenchie brought up the rear, flashlight sweeping the corners.

The inside looked like time had stopped. Desks covered in dust. Chairs overturned. Old lab coats draped on hooks. But no cobwebs. No rodents. Too clean.

"Someone's been here," I whispered.

We moved deeper. The walls changed, steel became tile. Then tile became glass. Test rooms. Observation chambers. Names etched into plaques. Most too faded to read.

Then we found the file room.

And inside it, locked in a frost-covered vault, was a metal container marked, "KRÜGER - PHASE 2 - LAZARUS"

Frenchie opened it with shaking hands. Inside were vials. Photos. Pages of handwritten notes. And a reel of film.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

Kimiko pulled out a photo. A group of men in lab coats. One of them was Stormfront. Another was Frederick Vought.

And standing between them, taller than both, was a man with half his face burned, smiling like the world was already his.

"Krüger," I muttered.

The reel was labeled, "Prototype Test - Subject #0."

I looked at Kimiko. She nodded.

"Take everything. We're burning this place after."

Back outside, I radioed Maggie. "We've got something. Prep to exfil."

"Copy," she replied.

I turned back to the building one last time.

Whatever Krüger was, whatever Lazarus meant, we weren't just up against Vought anymore.

We were up against the past. And it had teeth.

I stepped out onto the back deck of the lab, a narrow platform half-rotted and overgrown with moss. The woods wrapped around the structure like a noose, thick with silence that didn't feel natural. The sky above was graying, clouds rolling in low and slow. Rain coming. Maybe snow if we waited too long. I took out a cigarette, lit it, and leaned against the rusted railing. Frenchie came out a minute later, eyes wide as he flipped through one of the old photo packets.

"These experiments," he said. "They were trying to replicate something or someone." We all fell silent trying to think what exactly this meant. 

I looked through the trees. I could almost hear Krüger's voice, just from the photo burned into my head. The man looked like he smiled when he hurt people. There was something cold in his eyes. Calculated. It made Stormfront look like a schoolteacher.

Kimiko exited last, holding the reel of film tight against her chest. She met my eyes and shook her head once. We didn't need to speak. We both felt it. This place reeked of something wrong. 

Before we lit the charges, I walked through one last time. Just me. Frenchie and Kimiko waited outside with the gear. I needed to be sure. I moved room to room, checking for anyone hiding in the dark, but it wasn't people I was afraid of.

It was memory. As I passed through one of the observation labs, I saw a wall of names. Half of them were in German. 

'Fucking Nazis, same shit as the camps,' I think as I walk through thbis hell scape. Some were scratched out, others circled in red. One jumped out at me, "Subject 0A: Lupus."

My hand clenched. I didn't know what it meant, but the chill in my spine said it wasn't good.

I took the file, would read more about it later.

When I stepped back outside, Frenchie was already wiring the perimeter with thermite charges. Kimiko was helping him, moving with the same speed and silence she always did. The wind had picked up. Leaves whipped around us in short, sharp flurries.

"Place is rigged," Frenchie said. "Ready on your mark."

I looked at the structure one last time. That false rock face. That buried history. "Do it."

The flames erupted with a low roar, bright against the falling dusk. Metal twisted and groaned as the inferno swallowed everything inside. The past was burning. But it wasn't gone. We were just getting started.

 As we hiked back to the van, Kimiko pulled out one last photo she'd swiped before the burn. It was a blueprint. Not for a weapon. Not for a serum. For a cage. With one word stamped across the bottom, "Der rote Tod." 'That was the same name the Nazis called me in the war…' as the memories come back to me, "Fuck" I say as they all look at me.