Wolverine in The Boys

(Logan POV)

It started with a knock.

Three in the morning. Snow falling sideways against the safehouse windows. Grace stood in the doorway, files in hand, coat dusted with ice. Her face was pale, grim, and when she spoke, it was through gritted teeth.

"We found him." I didn't need to ask who. Krüger.

She dropped a manila folder on the table. Photos. Satellite imagery. Redacted intel from defunct Russian archives. Grace had leaned on every old Cold War asset she still had in Europe, and someone finally cracked.

"There's a site outside Smolensk. Long abandoned. Officially, it was a Soviet research post. Unofficially, it was where Krüger continued Lazarus off-grid. If he's still alive, that's where he'd be."

Butcher lit a cigarette. "How sure are we this isn't a trap?"

"I'm not," Grace said. "But if he's there and he's still experimenting, we can't afford to wait."

I looked at the map, marked in ink. My gut twisted.

"Then we go now," I said.

Everyone else fell silent. Kimiko nodded while eyeing Shawn still as she was incharge of him during the mission. Maggie cracked her knuckles. MM sighed and started packing gear.

Frenchie just said, "About bloody time."

A fifteen hours later, we were crossing the Polish border. Five hours after that, we hit the treeline in Russia. We didn't know what we were walking into. But whatever it was? It was waiting.

The Russian sky looked like steel. Cold, flat, unfeeling. Snow fell in slow spirals across the broken tree line as the van rolled up the last stretch of dirt road. The trees around us were skeletal, leafless, like they'd been dead for decades and no one had the heart to bury them.

The safehouse sat a few clicks outside of Smolensk, half-buried in frost, carved into the earth like it'd been hiding for a long time. Probably because it had. This wasn't on any map. No sign. No power lines. Just a crooked gravel path and an old Soviet communications tower rising like a scar in the forest.

Frenchie cut the engine. No one moved right away. We all just sat there listening to the wind batter the sides of the van.

"Looks friendly," Butcher muttered from behind me.

"It's not," I said, stepping out into the cold.

Kimiko followed close behind Shawn who tried to look as small as possible. Maggie landed next, dropping from the roof of the van where she'd been scouting on approach. She nodded to me, her eyes alert, bare fists already clenched at her sides.

We breached the outer perimeter with no resistance. That felt wrong. Places like this didn't go unguarded, not if what they were hiding was still worth keeping alive. Still, we pressed on.

A rusted blast door marked with Cyrillic slashed in red opened into a winding staircase carved into bedrock. We descended in silence, flashlights off, moving by muscle memory and instinct. Kimiko led, her steps silent. Maggie took the rear, fists curled, head on a swivel. I walked center, I didn't like it, felt too easy.

We reached the main corridor, lined with frozen pipes and buzzing lights that flickered just enough to piss you off. Frenchie checked the tablet he had rigged to track heat signatures, one red dot, deep underground, unmoving.

"That him?" MM asked.

"Either Krüger's sleeping like a corpse or he's already one," Frenchie said.

"He's not dead," I muttered. "Not yet."

At the heart of the complex sat a room marked LAZARUS. It was sealed tight. Took us twenty minutes to get it open. The door groaned and split, releasing a wave of stale, chemical air that clung to the skin like oil. Inside, we found him, Soldier Boy.

Suspended in a cryo-chamber. Naked from the waist up, wired to a dozen machines. Beard overgrown. Chest scarred. Eyes shut. And next to him, half-lit in the greenish glow of old monitor screens, stood the last ghost of the war.

Then we heard an old voice, with a german accent, Krüger. He turned slowly, like he'd been waiting years for this moment. 

"I knew you'd come," he rasped.

I stepped forward. "Krüger."

"You haven't changed," he said. "Not really."

"You've aged like shit."

He grinned. "You always did bring the worst out of me."

"Where's the rest of your team?"

"Gone. They left me here to finish what I started."

He reached toward the control panel. My claws came out fast.

"Fuck," I said as moved to stop him, but then the chamber hissed. Soldier Boy stirred.

Kimiko raised her fists. Maggie stepped into position. MM readied his rifle. Soldier Boy's eyes snapped open. His first breath came like a snarl. Then he looked straight at me.

"You."

I didn't move. He stepped out of the chamber, wires falling from his chest. Frost still clung to his skin. But he moved like he'd been waiting for this.

"Logan," he said again. "You son of a bitch. I thought you died."

"I thought you'd stopped talking," I muttered.

He grinned wide, bruised knuckles cracking. "I owe you for all the bull shit you pulled."

I just flipped him off as he roared and charged. The first punch caught me clean across the jaw. It didn't stop me. I slammed my fist into his throat, drove him back a step, and followed with a left hook that sent him crashing through a monitor.

"This is between me and him, I want to make this hurt," I say as the others move to help, I have a few pent up emotions of anger for this fucker. Sparks flew. Metal screamed. He got up laughing.

"Make him bleed," MM says with extreme anger and rage I haven't seen on his face before. 

"Still got that old man strength, huh?"

"You still talk too much."

We collided again. This time I drove him through the wall. Pipes burst. Steam hissed. He grabbed a hunk of rebar and swung. I caught it, snapped it in half, and jabbed both ends into his ribs. He bellowed and drove his knee into my chest, launching me back into the cryo pod.

I came out swinging. For a while, it was just fists and blood. He was strong. Stronger than I remembered. But sloppier. Rage made him stupid. And I was done holding back, about to maim or critically injure him. 

"Remember we need him alive!" Maggie says as she sees me bringing out my claws. 

"Fuck!" I say in annoyance reining in my claws as Solider Boy charges back at me. I went for a knockout blow, smashed him across the temple, dropped him hard, and reached for the cuffs Frenchie tossed me.

But he laughed. And started glowing.

"Everyone move!" I shouted.

The blast ripped the room in half.

White-hot light. A roar like thunder. The floor cracked. Metal melted. The walls turned to ash. It hit me full force. I didn't feel pain right away, then it came like nothing I felt before. My skin peeled away. Muscles burned off bone. Organs charred. Eyes boiled in their sockets. And then there was nothing left but fire. When the light faded, I stood in the center of the crater. Smoke rising off my metal skeleton. No flesh. No blood. Just glowing adamantium.

The others stared. Silent. Even Soldier Boy stopped moving. I looked at him. And started healing. First my eyes followed by my chest, then my arms, then my face. Skin grew back. Veins reformed. Heart restarted. Ten seconds later, I was whole again. Soldier Boy's mouth opened.

"Jesus Christ." Fear echeded his face as I walked toward him.

"Nope not Jesus, just the an old man," I say as I then look to the others seeing them frozen in shock too before turning back to Soilder Boy. 

"We can't contain him," I say as Soldier Boy flinches and realizes what I mean a few seconds at I say it. 

He makes a desperate attempt to knock me away, which I bring out claws and slice his arm off. He screams in pain grabbing his arm, before I use my other hand to sink my claws through his head making the ends come out from under his jaw. He just stares with a look of utter surprise as his life slips away.

I turn to look at the others, seeing them all just staring at me, like I'm a ghost. Even Butcher looked unsettled after everything he's done.

"What the bloody fuck are you made of?" he muttered.

"Bad decisions," I said, while spitting on Soilder Boy's corpse, MM walks over and spits on his corpse too. I turn to Krüger who is staring at me with a mixture of fear and adoration.

Frenchie knelt next to Soldier Boy's corpse, checking for any final readings or biometric spikes. "He's definitely not coming back this time," he said. 

Kimiko crouched by a charred wall, fingers tracing the edge of the impact crater left by the blast. She signed something quick.

"She says that was like a nuclear blast," Frenchie translated.

"But Logan walked through it," MM said, still wide-eyed.

"I didn't walk," I muttered. "I stood and burned. Then I came back."

We moved to Krüger who was just laughing as he stared at me still. 

"Fucking crazy ass Nazi," Maggie says as he ignores Frenchie putting the hand cuffs on him while giving me a wild eyed look. 

"You!... You really are the apex of humanity! Nothing we can replicate could ever reach your heights! Not Solider Boy or his child!" Krüger says with a fanatical glee. 

"Child?" Butcher says with a confused look. 

"The one you call Homelander, is Solider Boy's child. Unknowing Child, one meant to be the pinnacle of my creations… But another failure. No, we could never make something like Der rote Tod," Krüger says still staring at me with his mad fanatical look. 

We bring him out and head back to the meeting place Grace gave us earlier. There we meet our exit team, another eighteen hours later and we found ourselves back in the US in our safehouse. Krüger remained quiet the whole time, Grace then came with a small team to take him. 

"We'll get everything we can out of the old prick. Hopefully he can help us get some more insider info—" Grace says, but Butcher cuts her off. 

"How is Beck and Ryan doing? Are you sure they are still safe?" Butcher says giving Grace an serious look. 

"Yes, Butcher. I promise they are in good hands. I'm personally making sure they remain hidden," Grace says to him giving him a small rare compassionate smile, before her stone face comes back. 

"Once we learn more, we'll decide next steps," Grace says to us before taking her leave.