Spoilers: This article discusses B's first love, first child, and the modern relationship between B and Diana.
BRZRKR #5 is the quietest issue in the opening half of the series, and one of the most painful. Instead of measuring B through a mission or an experiment, it measures him through intimacy. A recovered memory shows B living with the woman he calls his first love, learning that she is pregnant, and losing the chance to become an ordinary father. In the present, B and Diana spend time together outside the formal laboratory routine. The two stories are placed beside each other so that the reader can see what immortality has taken from B and what trust with Diana might still make possible.
The issue is not a romance that happens to include a warrior. It is an argument about time. B can survive for eighty thousand years, but survival does not let him remain present for the lives of the people he loves. A child can be born while he is away. A relationship can become a memory before he has understood that it was a home. The issue gives those losses a face without pretending that one new relationship can erase them.
The first love
B's first love is unnamed, but the lack of a name does not make her an interchangeable figure. She is the first person shown sharing a domestic life with B rather than meeting him as a fighter, captive, or weapon. Their relationship is built around ordinary closeness: conversation, physical affection, and the hope that a life can be arranged around more than the next campaign. B is still shaped by the village and by the violence that made him Unute, but with her he begins to imagine that his body might be part of a family rather than a tribe's defense.
The memory is important because B does not describe love as an abstract feeling. He remembers the practical details of being with someone, the way a shared space feels, and the possibility that a future might have a recognizable shape. The relationship does not last because B's history keeps pulling him away. He is still subject to the demands of war, and he has not yet learned that leaving can destroy the person who waits for him.
Pregnancy and hope
The woman tells B that she is pregnant. The news gives the memory a new emotional direction. B has already lived long enough to know that battles end in death, but he has not yet accepted that a child could make him responsible for a life that cannot follow him into war. He wants to be present, yet the forces around him make presence difficult. The issue holds the hope and fear together rather than turning the pregnancy into a simple happy scene.
B's response also complicates the later revelation that he and Diana can have children. The first child proves that B's immortality does not make him biologically incapable of fatherhood. What it makes difficult is continuity. He can create life, but his own life moves through eras so quickly that ordinary family time cannot hold him. The tragedy is therefore social and emotional as much as biological.
The execution
The memory ends with B captured and executed while his first love gives birth. The exact political circumstances are less important than the cruel separation of events. B is dying in public while his child enters the world somewhere beyond his reach. His body will eventually return, but the moment in which he could have met the child will not return with it.
The issue does not use the execution as a surprise resurrection trick. B's regeneration is already known. The point is that a body can come back after death while a relationship cannot. When B says he never saw the child, the statement is not an admission of infertility or a claim that the child died. It is a confession that he missed the beginning of a life because the world kept treating him as a weapon.
What B remembers about the child
B later says that he learned something about the child's fate, but the memory does not provide a complete biography. The child has no confirmed name, adult history, or direct role in the original series. That absence is emotionally deliberate. B's regret comes from not knowing the ordinary details that other parents take for granted: a child's voice, habits, fears, and the way a face changes while growing up.
The unnamed child also becomes a measure of B's honesty. He does not invent a comforting reunion or claim that the family line continued in a way he can verify. He admits the limit of what he knows. For a man whose memory is almost impossibly large, the missing relationship is a wound precisely because it cannot be repaired by recall.
B and Diana outside the laboratory
The present-day scenes move B and Diana out of the formal memory room. Their time together is less controlled, but it is not free of the program's shadow. Both know that the government wants B's biology and that Diana's work is part of an institution with interests beyond his well-being. The difference is that they begin to speak as two people who recognize the risk of continuing the arrangement.
Diana is curious about B's past, but her questions are not only extraction. She wants to understand what the memories have done to him. B responds with skepticism because every other authority in his life has converted knowledge into leverage. The issue gives their conversation pauses and silences in which trust can grow without being announced as a cure.
Love as a form of danger
B's first relationship and his relationship with Diana are not presented as identical. The first love belongs to an ancient world in which B is still learning what a future might mean. Diana meets him after millennia of loss and knows that the government may be using her ability to build trust as part of a larger plan. Yet both relationships show why intimacy is dangerous for B. People he loves can be threatened, used as leverage, or left behind when he is called to fight.
B's reluctance is therefore not simple emotional unavailability. It is a survival strategy built from experience. If he refuses attachment, fewer people can be taken from him. The issue also shows the cost of that strategy. Detachment protects him from one kind of pain while ensuring that his life contains almost no place where he can be known.
The meaning of fatherhood
The first child changes the way B understands his own father. B's human father treated him as a weapon before he could make a choice. B's memory of the birth reveals the opposite fear: he may become a father who is absent because the world keeps taking him away. He does not want to repeat the pattern, but wanting to remain is not enough when an execution, a campaign, or an order can interrupt the life he is trying to build.
This tension remains present when Diana becomes pregnant in the final arc. The later family does not erase the first child's history. It gives B an opportunity to act differently while reminding him that opportunity is fragile. The issue's domestic memory is the emotional groundwork for the final choice to become mortal. B wants not only to die; he wants to be alive in a time that can include the people he loves.
Diana's position inside the bargain
Diana is not outside the government's arrangement when the issue begins. She has used protocols, drugs, monitoring, and carefully controlled prompts to reach B's memories. Her empathy does not cancel the fact that she is part of a system that treats his mind as a route to information. B understands this and presses her on it. Their relationship becomes meaningful because she does not demand that he forget the imbalance.
The issue allows Diana to see that the past cannot be separated from the present research question. B's child is not only a story about loss. It is evidence that the immortal can father children, that family life has existed before, and that B's assumption that he can never remain with anyone may be partly a consequence of repeated coercion. Diana's work begins to move from studying B's biology toward understanding the choices that biology has made difficult.
Memory and narrative time
The issue's structure refuses a straight chronological movement. An ancient childbirth and a modern conversation occur on the same emotional plane. The reader learns about B's first family at the moment his connection with Diana becomes more intimate. This arrangement reflects how B experiences his life. Eighty thousand years do not separate the memories; they accumulate. A new affection can call an old loss into the present without warning.
The format also prevents the first love from becoming a disposable flashback. Her story changes how the reader interprets every later scene in which B claims not to need anyone. The statement is not proof that he lacks feeling. It is a defense built over the memory of a child he could not meet and a woman he could not protect from his absence.
The issue's restraint
The first love receives no complete name, portrait, or later appearance. The comic could have supplied a twist in which she became an important historical figure. Instead, it leaves her as a person B loved and lost. That restraint respects the difference between a meaningful life and a fully documented one. Her importance comes from the change she produces in B, not from a future revelation that makes her more famous.
The same restraint applies to the child. The story does not claim that the child inherited B's condition, became immortal, or founded a known lineage. Those possibilities remain open, but the issue's actual fact is simpler: B became a father, missed the birth, and carries the absence through every later relationship.
Place in the series
BRZRKR #5 turns B's desire for mortality into a desire for continuity. The first four issues show why he was made and weaponized. This issue shows what the weaponization costs when B tries to live as a person. The modern scenes with Diana do not solve the problem, but they create the first relationship in which B can speak about it without being ordered back into battle.
The issue is therefore a hinge. After it, the series can no longer treat B's past only as a catalogue of wars. Every mission is also a missed homecoming. Every promise of a cure is connected to the possibility that B might someday stay long enough to be a father, partner, or friend. The tragedy of the first child is that B understands this possibility only after the moment has passed.
The life B cannot revisit
The first love sequence gives the series a rare image of B without an audience. No army is watching him, no ruler is measuring his usefulness, and no scientist is waiting for a memory to produce a location. He is simply trying to be present in a home. The fact that the scene ends in separation makes the ordinary details more valuable. A table, a conversation, and a pregnancy become evidence of a life B could have lived if history had not kept turning him into a weapon.
The issue does not ask the reader to imagine that B could have stayed forever. His immortality would still have created difficult questions, and the relationship might have ended for ordinary reasons. What matters is that he never receives the chance to discover those reasons. The execution interrupts the life before it can become a complete story, leaving B with the most painful kind of memory: enough detail to know what he lost, not enough time to know who the people would have become.
References
[1] Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt, Ron Garney, Bill Crabtree, and Clem Robins, BRZRKR #5 (BOOM! Studios, 2021), B's first love, pregnancy, execution, birth of the first child, and B's statement that he never saw the child.
[2] Reeves, Kindt, Garney, Crabtree, and Robins, BRZRKR #4-6, Diana's changing relationship with B and the transition from memory sessions to personal trust.