To understand what I'm about to tell you, you need to do something first. You need to believe in the impossible. Can you do that? Good. My name is Barry Meyer — I'm the fastest man alive…
I don't realize I've been reborn into anything special.
At first, it's just life again.
Warm hands. Voices that repeat my name with awe, as if saying it enough times might anchor me here. I don't remember the moment of death clearly—only the aftertaste of it. Like waking up after a dream you know mattered, but can't fully hold.
I grow up the way any sheltered kid would.
No television in my early years. No internet. No movies beyond animated animals learning lessons about sharing. My parents are gentle, firm people—the kind who believe the world gets cruel fast enough without help. They want to delay that.
So when other kids talk about heroes, capes, cities exploding in the sky, I don't connect it to anything real.
I think it's dumb.
Cheap stories. Loud colors. Morality boiled down to punchlines.
I watch one cartoon at a friend's house once—muscle-bound men throwing each other through buildings—and I remember thinking:
Why would anyone like this?
None of it feels important.
None of it feels true.
Emma is the one constant.
We're twins, but we don't feel identical. She's softer where I'm sharper. Louder in emotion, quieter in confidence. She clings to me without realizing it, the way gravity works without asking permission.
When we're five, she hides behind my back at a birthday party because a clown scares her.
When we're seven, she cries because a girl at school calls her weird for bringing two lunches.
I don't give speeches. I don't teach lessons.
I just sit with her.
Sometimes I let her cry into my shoulder. Sometimes I make dumb faces until she laughs through the tears. Once, when she asks me if she's "wrong somehow," I answer without thinking.
"No, you're my sister, you're not different, you're not wrong, you're perfect."
She nods like I've explained the universe.
I don't know why protecting her feels instinctual.
It just does.
The first cracks appear slowly.
A logo here. A poster there. Red, white, and blue in places it doesn't belong. A smiling man in a cape printed on a cereal box at the grocery store.
I don't recognize him.
I don't care.
To me, it's just branding. Another mascot. Another hollow thing trying too hard to be inspiring.
The world feels normal.
Too normal.
Until the afternoon everything clicks.
—-
I'm eight years old.
Our parents are cooking dinner. The kitchen smells like garlic and oil, comforting and mundane. The TV is on—actually on, which is rare. Our dad had turned it on for the weather.
I'm on the floor with Emma, helping her build something out of blocks that keeps collapsing because she insists it has to be taller than physics allows.
Then the commercial starts.
Music swells—too triumphant, too loud. A figure descends from the sky, framed by sunlight like a religious painting.
Blonde hair.
Perfect smile.
Eyes that don't smile at all.
Homelander.
My breath catches so hard it hurts.
My head floods all at once.
Vought.
Compound V.
Manufactured heroes.
Dead civilians.
Cover-ups.
Blood in the sky.
The Boys.
Gen V.
Emma freezes beside me.
"Barry ?" she asks. "What's wrong ?"
I don't answer.
Because suddenly I remember everything.
Not just the shows. The scenes. The arcs. The deaths. The way this world eats people alive and calls it entertainment. The way Emma—this Emma—exists inside that machine.
My hands shake.
I turn off the TV so fast the remote clatters across the floor.
My mom calls out from the kitchen, annoyed. "Hey—!"
"I—I don't feel good," I say, voice too thin.
That night, I don't sleep.
Because denial doesn't survive confirmation.
—--
The next weeks are hell.
Every memory recontextualizes itself.
The logos weren't harmless.
The posters weren't decorations.
The stories weren't silly.
They were warnings.
I watch Emma more closely now—not because she's changed, but because I have. Every insecurity she voices feels like a countdown I can suddenly hear. Every smile feels fragile in a way it never did before.
She notices.
"You're staring again," she says one night while we're brushing our teeth. "Did I do something ?"
"No," I answer too fast. "Just thinking."
She squints at me in the mirror. "You think a lot lately."
I almost laugh.
' You have no idea. '
I don't tell her.
Not about the future.
Not about Vought.
Not about what I know she could become.
Because she's still just Emma.
A girl who laughs too loud at bad jokes.
A girl who eats when she's nervous.
A girl who trusts me completely.
And I refuse to be the one who poisons that trust with fear.
So I change quietly.
I listen more.
I observe adults more carefully.
I note which conversations stop when kids enter rooms.
I don't try to fight the system.
I just learn how it breathes.
And through it all, I stay beside her.
When the world starts pushing in on her—subtle, relentless—I'm there. Not as a teacher. Not as a guide.
Just as her brother.
The one person who knows this world is broken…
…and won't let it break her first.