You were never supposed to be here. Not in a team like Payback, not surrounded by men who saw violence as validation, blood as currency. But the world had a twisted sense of humor, and Vought's even worse.

Your powers were simple—at least on the surface. You could regenerate missing limbs, knit shattered bones, and pull someone back from the brink of death with a touch. The first of your kind, a supe who could heal. But healing wasn't just a power for you—it was who you were. You'd been a nurse long before Compound V ran through your veins, patching up young soldiers in blood-soaked tents during World War II, where death was more common than clean water.

That's where you first met him.

Soldier Boy.

Back then, he was all swagger and bravado, the walking embodiment of everything wrong with blind patriotism. Even without the serum, he'd been larger than life—arrogant, self-important, and full of the kind of unchecked hatred that men like him wore like armor. He'd strutted through the war like he owned it, barking orders, acting like he was invincible. But he wasn't. And every time he bled, it was your hands that kept him alive.

Decades later, in 1983, fate—or maybe Vought's sick sense of irony—landed you both in Payback.

The team accepted you quickly enough. You weren't a threat, not like the others. You were the glue holding them together, the one they crawled to when the fights got too rough, bones shattered, skin burned, blood pouring out faster than they could stop it. Gunpowder respected you in his own childish way. Mindstorm trusted you more than anyone, probably because you didn't look at him like he was broken. Even Crimson Countess, with her sharp edges, softened around you sometimes.

But not Soldier Boy.

Never Soldier Boy.