Chapter Text
It starts like this: there's a boy, and he grows up with stories, patriotism pumped like blood into his veins, the walls of his bedroom plastered with Soldier Boy's all-American smile.
In the shadow of such heroism, it's only natural that every child wants to save the world, too.
The problem, as always, is reality. He is no soldier, misses out on the war due to a weak lung, and superpowers are only for those who have earned them; all these venerated, saintly figures, their costumes glittering with medals, not a single crooked tooth or grey hair in sight.
The boy, with crooked teeth and bad lungs, prematurely greying due to what he'll always claim is the stress of missing out on defending his homeland, never had a chance.
V1 is impossibly far away, ungraspable. The trials are long over, the heroes he looked up to—the ones who were not blown up, shot, or chopped to pieces—are nearing retirement, withdrawing to their mansions heaped with medals and spoils of war, both adoration and money a well that will seemingly never be tapped.
But there'll be a new generation of heroes. There are whispers of new trials, open for civilians; there are whispers they're looking for kids. A boy like that—for he never truly grew into a man—of course had to cement his legacy in some way, make sure his precious bloodline is carried on, and his wife, though quite dull, is pretty enough, and compliant enough to bear him a child. The pregnancy makes her a bitch, makes her scream and throw things and hug her stomach when he tells her of his plan, but she's never been strong enough to defy him for long, and though the hormones make her wily, they also make her weak. It may be her body, but inside her, there is his child.
She gets the preparatory injection, and though she cries as the needle slides into her arm, the boy standing beside her is smiling.
It's too late for him—he's too old now, not attractive enough to be a hero, the injection would kill him, the doctors said—but there's still hope for his son.
Reality, unfortunately, has a way of smashing apart all your well-laid-out plans.
Compound V is a spin of the wheel: indestructible skin, laser eyes, the antennae of a cockroach bursting forth from your forehead, your bones melting to rubber whenever you draw a breath.
This is why his wife worried, why she sat awake in bed, mind racing through possibility upon terrible possibility, haunted by whispers of someone's child turning into a monster. She hasn't even met the kid yet, but already she's terrified. Sometimes, though she always hates herself for it, she wishes her son dead inside her, so she'll never have to know what he'll one day become.
He, of course, never worried. Of course, his son will be powerful, with flight and strength and that smile like the glare of the sun, a statue erected next to the crumbling ones of soldier boy—bigger, shinier, better in every single way.
And, yes, the face on the statue is always his own, but the way he imagines it, it'll be his son‘s face, too. For a boy-man like this, those will always be one and the same.
He's the one who shows up to all the appointments, smiling down at his screaming infant as the needle glows a promising, beautiful ocean blue. His wife, at home, hugging a body that no longer feels entirely her own, that might never feel that way again, is no longer a real part of the story. She was way too emotional anyways; women never know what's for the best.
Did she already feel a small twinge of what would happen? Surely she knows that she'll be blamed for it, too. Maybe she's mourning the son she could have had, that perfectly average childhood, that perfectly normal man.
Nobody knows exactly how Compound V works, if it can be influenced in some way or if it simply latches onto a rogue string of DNA, but something that will haunt her for decades is this: when pregnant, on those days where her husband's gaze on her belly was too much to bear, when pretending to sleep so that he would stop talking, when that needle slid into her arm, she'd go somewhere far away inside herself, a place of complete and total quiet. No voices, no other humans around, just the soft murmur of the sea all around her, the warmth of the sun filtering through the water above, everything gentle and swaying with the lap of the waves.
She'll take this secret to the grave.
He writes angry letters to the Vought scientific division, screams in front of the building until police escort him away, cursing every single one of the bastards who promised him glory. Laser eyes and flight and statues chiseled in solid gold; reality has come crashing in with a son who's kept in an aquarium.
He yells at his wife about all the swimming lessons, girly sport that it is, that maybe with football things would have turned out different, but she doesn't react anymore, just stares, glassy-eyed, away in some distant place where none of the insults can reach her. Warm water and whalesong.
After his son started gasping for breath on dry land, when they rushed him to the lab, he remembers sitting there, in the waiting room, looking at all those smiling faces on the wall, all those lucky bastards with their wonderful powers, and imagine one day his own—his son's—face, hanging there, too, for other people to marvel at, a power that‘d turn everyone green with envy. Until his death—decades of drinking catching up at last, alone and forgotten and cursing at the television where his laughing stock of a son has left him behind—a part of him will stay stuck in that waiting room, hoping, eternally inside that moment where the future still seemed impossibly bright, where the statue bearing his face stands front and center.
Everything afterwards remains a blur: masked faces calling him in, his son's guilty expression as if he already knows this is only the first in a lifetime of humiliations, the pitying glances of the doctors, what looks like four bloodless wounds carved into the torso of his first and only child. He looks closer. It‘s breathing. It's trying to breathe.
Worst of all, he has to go through all this shit alone. His wife has completely abandoned him; she never seems to return anymore from wherever she's gone, didn‘t even react when he lifted the boy's shirt to show her the mutation, as if somehow, she'd already known. A quirk of the corner of her lip, and a door slammed shut as she left to light another cigarette, the last flickers of hope gone with her.
There's counseling sessions for the parents of compound V mutations gone wrong, but they throw him out and ban him after he screams at the mother of a child whose skin sticks like glue to all surfaces that at least her glue child doesn't spontaneously forget how to breathe and needs to be plunged into the giant aquarium that now takes up most of their living room, that her stupid spoiled sticky bastard of a son isn't disgusting to look at, can be seen naked without any woman in the vicinity immediately throwing up, that her ugly fucking adhesive asshole kid doesn't cry when they walk through the supermarket because he claims he can hear all the seafood moaning in pain.
There's a man visiting him that tells him to better keep quiet because he signed a contract, a man who does not seem like the wimpy lawyer type at all, a man in black clothes who wears his sunglasses indoors, and though he does not have a gun that makes him somehow more terrifying, as if he doesn't even need one, as if getting shot were preferable to whatever this man could do. And he's a coward, so the angry letters stop, or at least they stop getting mailed; he'll keep writing them forever, an angry scrawl growing increasingly incomprehensible and furious with age, balled up and tossed into a corner, eventually nothing more than a string of expletives almost punched through the page.
He's not a bad father. He tries to connect. On his son's tenth birthday, he tries to take him to the local aquarium, and he has a panic attack in the parking lot. He tries to take his son to the beach, and he breaks down sobbing, claiming that a sea turtle is choking on a plastic bag and there's no chance to save her; that a barracuda is ripping a family of herrings apart, blood tinting the ocean bright red; that the grouper a fisherman is proudly presenting to his friend in a boat too far off the coast to reach in time is terrified to die, has had dreams he'll now never be able to fulfill, a husband he never got to say goodbye to.
He slaps his son for lying, for making up all these stories about creatures too dumb to form thoughts, pretending that fish could be gay. For being too emotional, because boys are not supposed to cry about lobsters and dolphins and porpoises tangled in kelp.
All throughout this, the mother remains far away. She's slipped into the cracks of the story, and who can blame her for this? Sure, if she'd been there, a positive influence, maybe things would have turned out differently, but we need to remember that none of this was her choice, that sometimes shutting out the world is the only thing you can do to survive.
As her son slowly gets warped into something terrible, she lies in bed, lit cigarette dangling from her hand, waiting for the bed to catch on fire. Watching kelp sway gently overhead, slowly drifting away on a cocktail of pills to a place far beyond the shore where no one can reach her.
There's one thing, at least: his son is pretty. He has his mother's eyes, ocean blue with long, dark lashes, a smile that could be all-American if you don't know he cries about goldfish being kept in too small a glass.
There might still be hope if you go about it the right way. There are many roads that lead to that statue. Not every asshole grinning down from the advertisements littering the highways has a power that's immediately useful; some simply take advantage of what assets they've got.
One day, he'll lay a hand on his boy's shoulder. Tell him that fame is something to fight for, that there's a chance for him yet, that the injection could still have been worth it. If you want to change something, you'll have to do what it takes. Even if what it takes is something you'll never get back.
It starts like this: there's a boy, and he grows up with stories, patriotism pumped like blood into his veins, the walls of his bedroom plastered with Homelander's all-American smile. Homelander, of course, is not as all-American once you get to know him, except for all the terrible ways in which he is. The boy learns quickly that people are willing to do a lot for their personal hero, that if someone you've admired all your life smiles and asks you to do something for them, you nod and smile back. They're doing you a favor. Besides, by now, you know how to get to the top on your knees.
For a boy like that, with no flight and no lasers and his mother's pretty eyes, a boy with a cause he's still willing to do just about anything for, there is only one way this could go.
Is it love? No, probably not. Deep may not be the smartest supe there is, but even he knows that anything capable of such feelings has long gone to die in the small room with white walls Homelander sometimes whispers of when his eyes go all glassy and the muscles in his jaw go all lax, when he's all John and no hero. But it has to be some sort of affection, or at least that's what he tells himself, and that's good, too, if it‘s someone like Homelander, if it's still on the positive side of the like-dislike spectrum.
And besides, it could still turn into something even more special if he keeps at it, if he's there and available and so much better than all the dumb bimbos Homelander cycles through when he needs someone capable of producing milk. Milk is stupid anyways, a boring mammal thing. What he has is much better, or at least that's what it seems like; that's something so easy to believe when Homelander's eyes go a little less steely blue, a little more bright sky in them, and it hurts, yes, and it's kind of humiliating, but some things are worth gritting your teeth for.
Afterwards, sometimes his hero pats him on the back, tells him good job, in a voice that could almost be genuine, and it seems like this special, important thing, a secret kept just between the two of them, a side of America's hero only he gets to see. Not quite Homelander, not only John.
And it might not be real, but there are moments where it feels like it is, and that's good enough, that might be the best that he's getting. Sometimes it seems that all they ever do in that tower is pretend, anyways. If the world around you is carefully constructed, you can learn how to convince yourself of anything.
A new movie, a new media appearance, a new scandal to handwave away. Being a hero is busy work, busier still if you've got some enemies, if your team is bleeding members left and right, and public perception is gradually shifting into something not entirely favorable to you. Homelander is upset, constantly tense, and finally seems to have grown bored of Firecracker, as he always inevitably would, as he always does, because none of these women can offer what he can, and none have been at Homelander's side for so long.
A man like that, a man with so many options, may stray, but he'll always inevitably come back home, into the supportive embrace of the one person who cares about him, who'll do whatever he asks. Out of fear, yes, but that's not all of it. There's another part to it, too, but nobody knows about this thing they've got between them, or if they know, they don't understand.
There are times when Deep does a good job, when Homelander is in a better mood than usual, when something seems to go, somehow, right, and afterwards, the man who still is his hero, might always be, will look at him with something that could almost be tender, could almost, if you squint, be respect. As if they're something nearing equals, or if not that, as if at least the gulf between them isn't quite so unbreachable for once. Nothing compares to the thrill of that; he'll ride the high for days on end. For one moment, they become more than bros.
Yes, there are other times, too, but it's worth it, it has to be worth it. If it weren't, he could just leave. If it weren't, he never should have come here.
So, it's not only fear that makes him undo the zipper of his vest and gasp as the bright shining light of America slides heroic fingers inside him three knuckles deep. You can get used to anything. You can twist a hand into the golden locks of everyone‘s savior and pretend you‘re only crying because of the pain.
Homelander's bed always looks like it‘s never been slept in. As if every night he hovers a few inches above, not touching the covers; as if maybe he does not even need sleep, simply haunts the night with his laser eyes gleaming red in the darkness. Have there ever been women in this bed? Probably. Maybe. But he likes to pretend that there haven't been, that indeed, this is a special privilege earned through unflinching loyalty, that this is the reward for every painful step of the way. The windows of Homelander's—or John's, as he sometimes secretly likes to call him—apartment look out at the most beautiful part of the city, rooftops bathed in the golden light of the setting sun, and the sight almost makes up for the fear of someone looking up and seeing, far away in the clouds, his face pressed against the bulletproof glass.
"Tell me how badly you want it." The voice of America has dropped to a low rasp.
This is the tricky part. You can't want it too much. You also can't want it too little. You have to strike a very sensitive balance between wanting it and not wanting it, but Deep likes to think he's gotten pretty good at that balance, though of course he's long tilted towards neediness and desperation in a way that Homelander despises but that keeps him coming back.
You can want someone dead and still want to fuck them. You can be disgusted by someone's embarrassing insecurity, the whole of them like a raw, aching wound, and find enjoyment in spreading the edges of that wound just a little bit wider. You can tell yourself it's because he's a good fuck, and you can tell that to him, and it's certainly part of the truth, but it's not the whole of it, and both of you know, which is why you hate him so much, and why, as you push him down, you whisper into his ear all the ways in which you'll one day tear him to shreds.
It's a threat and a promise, but somewhere along the way, something has gone wrong, so now it's also a form of flirting, and when you tell him you'll gut him, he moans and bucks back against your still clothed crotch, and when your grip tightens on his throat, you swear the whole city below can see green spandex tint a few shades deeper.
"You're like…a dog. A needy dog."
He rubs himself against you as if trying to prove something, as if there were any chance of that impressing you. As if maybe you'll like him if he puts in enough effort, though the naked desperation of it only serves to disgust you, something you struggle to believe he still does not understand about you yet.
"Thank you, Sir."
"That wasn't a compliment. Why would you think that's a compliment? Dogs are desperate for attention and get their slobber everywhere. They have no identity."
A low moan. "I mean, I think they're not so bad for mammals. Not cats. Or bears."
"You'd rather be a dog than a bear?"
"I mean…bears skin salmon alive before they eat them. It's totally cruel, bro.” He catches himself with a stutter. “I mean, Sir."
Such a stupid, pathetic way to think. Why would he think you give a shit about his stupid fish when you're disgusted by most humans, most supes? Why does that make you want to fuck him even more?
"One day," you whisper, "I'm going to skin you alive," and if he showed the appropriate fear, maybe, if he were to turn on his heel and run, you might just let him get away. You might put your fist through the back of his head while he waits for the elevator, then tongue blood and brains from the hole. It might be worth taking a chance on.
Of course, your words don't seem to matter much at all. A shudder runs through his body; he thrills at the sound of your voice, no matter what it is that you‘re saying, a dog perking up when called by its owner. He's taller than you, but he's always cowed by your presence, acknowledges you as superior in every single way, and somehow, that pisses you off, too, how submissive he is, though you know you'd be just as annoyed if he weren't.
He needs you too much, and that‘s why you hate him. You only want him because he needs you this much.
You slide your fingers into his mouth because you hate the sound of his voice, hate all the words he is saying, and he repays you by sucking on them like the girls in those shitty Seven pornos that have never titillated you in the least. You imagine this, imagine him sitting in front of the television, practicing for you, taking notes in a pathetic little notepad, sucking on his own fingers as practice, and that, somehow, is what excites you more than anything, more than him writhing underneath you like a fish torn from water. Fabric has turned damp in seconds: his wet, warm mouth; your cock, softly leaking.
Your other hand, ungloved, you place against solid muscle, glide lower, feel them quivering at your touch, a flutter against your fingertips. You smell the excitement curdle into dread, the small twitches as his body betrays him, the deliciousness of a small whine that slides past his teeth. A woman only has one pussy. Your woman has six.
Wet and ready, they open for you, and the way he starts shaking only makes it better, the scent of his fear. You wish you'd made the effort of fucking him properly; the way he tightens when you do this is close to divine.
"It‘s cute how wet you get for me. You love it when I touch you like this. Tell me you love it."
"I love it." His words are garbled, but he'll always do what you ask of him. He'll eat his closest friends. He'd eat his own family.
"Nobody else would ever touch you like this. Because it's disgusting. You're disgusting."
"I know. Thank you, Sir."
Why is he like this? What has gone wrong inside him?
You assume the reason this works at all is that you both know he deserves this. If you were doing this to someone innocent, someone with pride, it would not be as satisfying.
He thanks you even as he starts crying. Sometimes, afterwards, you like to lick the tears off his face; most often, though, you just watch them dry, watch the shaking, sniveling mess of him collapse on the floor, utterly pathetic. It rouses something inside you that you cannot quite identify, a morbid fascination akin to watching that plane hit the sea.
It has happened before that people address him with his fake name, the name of the construction plastered on the posters for shitty movies you'll never watch and sushi you imagine tastes utterly terrible, and it takes you a moment to understand who they’re talking about, to make the connection between the man and the facade.
Like this, so terrified of you he can barely breathe—still, for some dog-headed reason unwilling to leave you—he’s only ever been Kevin.
You can do it with your gloves on. It's more degrading that way, and you like that. It proves that none of this means anything to you, that you're simply passing the time.
You always, inevitably, end up taking them off. You want him to feel your fingerprints on his lungs, want him to never forget the way your hands felt inside him. If you take care to leave your mark on someone, they‘ll never get away even if they were to escape.
That feeling of sickness afterwards never entirely fades away, no matter how many times it has been. There are certain places that shouldn't be touched, a soft protective membrane that, once broken, needs its time to heal up. It's invasive and it's disgusting and it makes him feel unclean, even though he knows he could have stopped it, technically, that Homelander is being more generous than he himself has been in the past.
The cruel irony of it all does not make it less painful, except, perhaps, from an outsider perspective, as long as the outsider is not of the particularly empathetic kind. Sebastian sea bass, a good friend of about two decades now, since the day he was liberated from the decorative tank in an unlicensed chiropractor's office, is very empathetic, as far as fish go, and has watched this go on for too long.
He circles his tank twice, gathering up courage, then glides towards the glass, watching the only human he'd ever consider a friend lick his proverbial wounds. He could have taken the opportunity to be released into the ocean; he could have lived a long, happy life surrounded by his scaled brethren, returned to the place he was once taken from as a young, foolish fish. Instead, Sebastian has decided to remain by the side of his friend, maybe out of genuine sympathy, maybe feeling that he owes some kind of debt.
A part of him, maybe, has always worried he would not recognize the ocean if he were released back into it, that everything had changed in his absence. Sebastian hears whispers of environmental disasters and whale populations reduced to shreds, of sharks murdered for their fins, twitching bodies tossed bleeding back into the ocean. Lobsters boiled, silently screaming and writhing, alive, his friend with his head in his hands at the injustice of it all, change promised that doesn't come, until one day the news anchor drones on about toxic waste pumped into the ocean, and the eyes of the lord of the seven seas are hollow and empty, something scabbed over inside.
Throughout the years, he has watched that bright-eyed, ambitious boy grow into someone unrecognizable, and yet he'll never be able to let go of the sparks of goodness he knows are buried within. Maybe that person still lies underneath all that scar tissue; maybe there's still a way to pull him up to the surface. Sebastian is old for a sea bass, and he does not have much time left; he knows what he needs to do.
He clears his throat, because yes, fish can do that, and watches the hollow gaze of his friend drift towards him.
"You think he actually likes you?"
"Don't be a dick."
"I'm just being honest. I wouldn‘t be saying this if I didn't care for you, kid. But you‘re fooling yourself, and frankly, it's pathetic."
"Shut up."
"He doesn't care about you. He'll kill you the second you annoy him too much."
It hits home, Sebastian knows it hits home. Can see, with his fish eyes, the exact moment when his words register, the complete absence of shock, the way his friend flinches regardless. You both knew this already, but he hates to hear it said out loud.
"Shut. Up."
"Someone has to say it! You're deluding yourself. I can tell you one thing, Kev, and that's that you're just a distraction. Soon enough, he'll grow tired of you, and you'd be lucky if he just dumped you, then. He‘s gonna chum you. If you don't swim away soon, he'll gut you like a fish."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up. You're just jealous." He's close to the tank now, all red in the face in that particular mammalian way. Sebastian watches a vein throb on his forehead. Knows he should stop; knows, too, that he can't.
"Jealous? Of what? Being Homelanders chew toy? His cumdump?"
Kevin reels, wounded. Genuine hurt flashing up in his eyes. "Don't call me a cumdump, bro!"
"I‘m just saying it like it is! Because I care about you! I'm the only one who does! Do you think Homelander cares about you? Are you really that stupid?"
He's gone too far, and he knows it. As he's ripped from the water, as he's gasping on air, Sebastian's only regret is that he failed to save him, that boy who earnestly loved the ocean, who only ever wanted to help those who could not help themselves.
"I'll show you who‘s stupid," the boy hisses, "You're stupid. I'm not stupid. I know what I'm doing."
Sebastian feels himself fade. The lick of the waves is so close, the peaceful depths of the ocean. Returned to his birthplace at last, fear falling like scales from his soul. If fish could smile, he would be smiling.
"I…pity you."
"Fuck you! I'm not a victim! Stop looking at me like that!"
The rush of water, and then nothing, as Sebastian sea bass is sucked like a turd down the drain.
Kevin stands in front of the toilet, reeling, regret washing over him in waves. His knees buckling, he drops to the floor, helplessly scrabbling at the toilet lid as if that could undo what he's done, as if he could dive down there himself and still rescue his friend.
"Fuck no, no, fuck. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. Oh god. Sebastian."
Sebastian is soaring through the pipes, twirling in a heaven of wet wipes, tampons, and disintegrating toilet paper. Everything blurs into bright colors, into dazzling reefs and endless blue water, a saltwater paradise with no glass and no pollution and no fear; eternally deathless at last.