The rain at Hatfield Aerodrome hung in the air like a cold, wet curtain, soaking through wool, cotton, and skin until it felt like it was leaching the heat directly out of the marrow.
It was Day Six of boot camp.
Technically, these men were actors. They were members of the Screen Actors Guild. They had agents in London and Los Angeles who negotiated per diems and trailer sizes. But right now, none of that mattered. Right now, they were just wet, miserable bodies trying to keep a vintage M1 Garand from slipping out of numb fingers.
"UP! GET UP! CURRAHEE!"
The voice cracking through the dawn gloom belonged to David Schwimmer.
Or rather, it belonged to Captain Herbert Sobel.
Schwimmer, usually known for his comedic timing and hangdog expressions, had transformed. His face was twisted into a mask of petty, vindictive authority. He stood on a wooden crate, dry and imperious, screaming at a group of men who were lying face down in a mud puddle doing pushups.
"HIGH HO SILVER!" Schwimmer bellowed.
"CURRAHEE!" the men screamed back, their voices ragged.
Among them was Damian Lewis. The redhead was unrecognizable under a layer of muck. His lungs were burning. His arms shook. Beside him, Michael Fassbender looked ready to vomit. Tom Hardy, playing the young Janovec, had a look in his eye that suggested he was genuinely contemplating murder.
"On your feet!" Schwimmer barked. "Three miles! Move! You call yourselves paratroopers? My grandmother runs faster than you!"
They scrambled up, boots sucking loudly in the heavy clay. They began to run. Again.
Daniel Miller stood on the edge of the airfield, wrapped in a heavy waxed coat, watching through binoculars. Beside him stood Captain Dale Dye, the man responsible for this torture.
"They hate him," Daniel noted, watching the way the actors glared at Schwimmer's back.
"Good," Dye grunted, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the mud. "They're supposed to. Hate is a hell of a fuel, Miller. Better than coffee."
"Schwimmer is isolating himself," Daniel observed. "He eats alone. sleeps in the officer's tent. He doesn't talk to the guys during breaks."
"He knows the job," Dye nodded approvingly. "He knows that for Winter to become the leader, Sobel has to be the villain. It's Shakespeare in muddy boots."
---
Two hours later, the "troops" were given a twenty-minute rest to clean their weapons.
They sat in a circle inside the drafty hangar, shivering. The glamour of Hollywood was gone. There were no assistants rushing in with hot lattes. There was just gun oil, rags, and resentment.
"The man is a psychopath," Neal McDonough (playing Buck Compton) muttered, scrubbing the receiver of his rifle aggressively. "Did you hear him on the hill? 'Infraction for a rusty sight.' It was a speck of dust! He revoked my weekend pass. In real life! I can't go to London because David decided to stay in character."
"He's enjoying it," Scott Grimes (Malarkey) spat. "He thinks because he's the big TV star he can push us around. I swear, if he screams 'High Ho Silver' one more time, I'm going to stick this bayonet somewhere dark."
The grumbling grew louder. It wasn't just acting frustration; it was genuine anger. They were tired, sore, and felt humiliated.
A shadow fell over the circle.
The chatter died instantly.
Captain Dale Dye stood there. He wasn't yelling. He was just looking at them with eyes that had seen things these boys couldn't imagine.
"You boys don't like Captain Sobel much, do you?" Dye asked quietly.
"With all due respect, sir," Damian Lewis spoke up, his voice hoarse but steady. "He's petty. He focuses on the minutiae while we're trying to learn tactics. He's a tyrant."
Dye nodded slowly. He walked into the center of the circle.
"You're right," Dye said. "Herbert Sobel was a petty, vindictive, small-minded son of a bitch. He was jealous of Winters. He was insecure. He couldn't read a map to save his life."
The actors looked at each other, vindicated.
"But let me tell you something," Dye's voice dropped an octave, becoming hard as iron. "Herbert Sobel built Easy Company."
Silence in the hangar.
"He ran them until their feet bled," Dye continued, pacing slowly. "He made them do pushups in the snow until they couldn't feel their hands. He took away their passes. He made them hate him. And do you know what happened?"
Dye stopped in front of Lewis.
"They bonded. They became a tribe. They united against him. And physically? He made them the hardest, fastest, toughest bastards in the entire airborne division. When they jumped into Normandy, they were carrying a hundred pounds of gear, fighting continuously for days without sleep. Other companies... they fell apart. They got tired. They made mistakes."
Dye looked around the room, meeting every eye.
"Easy Company didn't get tired. Because Sobel had already taken them past tired. He took them to the breaking point and held them there for two years."
He pointed a finger at the door where Schwimmer was sitting alone.
"Most of the men in this room... the real men you are portraying... they came home to their wives and children because Herbert Sobel was a prick. If he had been a nice guy? If he had let them sleep in? They would have died in the hedgerows of France."
Dye straightened up.
"You don't have to like him. You just have to thank him. Now, check your actions. We move in five."
Dye walked away.
The grumbling didn't return. The actors sat in silence, looking at their rifles. They looked at each other. The resentment shifted. It wasn't gone, but it had changed. It was no longer the whining of actors; it was the understanding of soldiers.
Damian Lewis looked at the door. He understood now. The tragedy of the character. A man building a sword he would never be allowed to swing.
---
Two Days Later
Five thousand miles away, the sun was shining over Burbank, mocking the misery in Hatfield.
Daniel Miller sat in his office, but his mind wasn't on the war. It was on the future.
Across from him sat Elena Palmer and Marcus Blackwood. The desk was covered in resumes, reel tapes, and spec scripts.
"You want to hire... everyone?" Elena asked, holding a list that contained twenty names.
"Not everyone," Daniel corrected. "The hungry ones."
He stood up and walked to the whiteboard. He drew a circle in the center: MILLER STUDIOS.
"We have Iron Man," Daniel said. "We have Band of Brothers in production. We have the Spider-Man comics printing money. We are successful."
"We are more than successful," Marcus grinned. "We are the 800-pound gorilla."
"But we are a bottleneck," Daniel said, turning to them. "Everything goes through me. I direct the movies. I write the outlines. I edit the trailers. I approved the font on the Spider-Man cover."
He tapped his temple.
"I have ideas, Elena. Hundreds of them. Thrillers. Horrors. Sci-fi epics. Quiet indie dramas. Stories that could change the world."
He didn't mention the System. He didn't mention the library of Earth-199 that sat in his brain—Inception, Breaking Bad, The Matrix, Get Out.
"A human life is short," Daniel said softly. "Even if I direct a movie every year until I'm ninety, I'll maybe make sixty more films. That's it. Sixty stories."
He looked at them with intensity.
"I have more than sixty stories. I have libraries of them. And if I try to do it all myself, those stories die with me."
He pointed to the stack of resumes.
"I don't want to just be a director anymore. I want to be an architect. I want to find the talent—the guys who have the vision but no money, the writers who are brilliant but got fired for being 'too weird'—and I want to give them the keys."
He picked up a resume.
"This guy," Daniel said. "James Wan. He made a terrifying short film and then got stuck directing car commercials. Bring him in. I have an idea about a guy waking up in a bathtub with a saw."
He picked up another.
"Zack Snyder. Incredible visual eye, does music videos. Hollywood thinks he's style over substance. Bring him in. I have a script about Spartans that needs to look like a painting."
"We're building a factory," Elena realized.
"We're building a Renaissance," Daniel corrected. "I will produce. I will guide. I will give them the outlines and the budgets. But they will hold the cameras. We are going to flood the market with quality."
"It's going to be expensive," Marcus warned. "Putting that many projects into development?"
"We have Iron Man money," Daniel shrugged. "And soon, we'll have Band of Brothers money. And we'll have a lot more in the future. The goal isn't to hoard the cash, Marcus. The goal is to get the art out of my head and onto the screen before I run out of time."
"Start the calls," Daniel ordered. "Fill the bullpen. I want every office in this building occupied by a genius who hates the studio system."
---
Queens, New York.
The apartment smelled of bleach and old cooking oil. It was a smell Stephen associated with loneliness.
Stephen was sixteen. He was skinny, with glasses that were taped at the bridge, and he was currently sitting on the rusted fire escape outside his bedroom window, trying to stop his hands from shaking.
His left cheek was throbbing. It wasn't a punch, exactly. Just a shove. A shoulder-check into the lockers by a guy named Storm (a nickname the varsity quarterback had given himself).
Watch where you're going, Puny Stephen.
The laughter. That was the worst part. The girls laughing. The teachers pretending they didn't see it.
Stephen wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Inside the apartment, he could hear his mom on the phone. She was arguing with the electric company again. begging for an extension.
"Please," she was saying, her voice tight with that specific panic of the single parent. "My husband... he's not in the picture. It's just me. I get paid on Friday. Please don't turn it off. My son needs the lights for homework."
Stephen pulled his knees to his chest.
His dad had left three years ago. Went out for cigarettes and just kept driving. Since then, Stephen had tried to be the man of the house. He tried to be strong.
But today, face pressed against the cold metal of a locker, he hadn't felt strong. He felt worthless.
He looked down at the comic book in his lap.
The Amazing Spider-Man #5.
He had bought it with his lunch money. He skipped the cafeteria pizza for this.
He opened the pages.
He knew who Superman was. Everyone did. Superman was a god. He lived in a Fortress of Solitude made of crystal. He could fly. He had a jawline that could crack walnuts. Superman didn't worry about electric bills. Superman didn't get shoved in hallways.
Superman was what you wanted to be.
But Peter Parker...
Stephen looked at the panel on page 12. Peter was sitting on the edge of his bed in a tiny, cluttered room in Forest Hills. He was sewing a tear in his red and blue suit.
"I saved the city," Peter's thought bubble read. "So why do I feel like I'm drowning?"
In the next panel, Aunt May was yelling at him for forgetting to pick up eggs. Peter didn't yell back. He didn't use his super strength to intimidate her. He just looked down and apologized, because he loved her, and he knew she was stressed about money too.
Stephen traced the ink on the page.
Peter Parker got shoved. Peter Parker got rejected by girls. Peter Parker had a suit that ripped and no money to fix it.
But on the next page, when the Lizard started tearing up the subway, Peter didn't hide. He put the mask back on.
"It's not about what you can do," Spider-Man said in the panel, lifting a pile of rubble off a trapped civilian. "It's about what you have to do."
Stephen looked at the drawing. He looked at the bruises on Peter's face when the mask was half-off.
Superman was invincible. That was easy.
Spider-Man was breakable. He bled. He worried. He failed.
And yet, he swung.
Stephen closed the comic. He rolled it up carefully and slid it into his back pocket.
He listened to his mom inside, the desperation in her voice.
He stood up on the fire escape. The wind from the subway rattled the metal grate.
He wasn't a superhero. He couldn't fly. He couldn't lift a car.
But he could walk into that kitchen. He could hug his mom. He could tell her he got an A on his chemistry test. He could take the trash out without being asked.
He could take the hit and keep moving.
Stephen opened the window and climbed back inside.
"Mom?" he called out, his voice steady for the first time that day. "It's okay. I'm home."
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A/N: Read ahead on Patreon: patreon.com/AmaanS