Homelander

The thing about Vought was... nobody was original. It was the year 2000, and managing superheroes like you would a musician or actor was the thing. So that meant PR relationships. It made sense, on paper. It made a lot of sense on paper. That was the problem with Vought, their worst ideas always did!

Homelander was nineteen years old and he had the jaw of a Greek statue and hair the color of Kansas wheat and a smile that, when deployed correctly, made women in their thirties feel like they were sixteen again. And maybe some other things not to be mentioned.

He’d been out in the public for exactly one year. They’d debuted him at eighteen, his first appearance two years prior didn’t go so well, and for twelve months they had been very carefully constructing the mythology of America’s golden boy. Handsome. Brave. A little serious, a little brooding when he was photographed looking off into the middle distance, which happened more than it probably should have. But when he smiled? God, when he smiled. The comparisons to Cruise had started almost immediately, which John found quietly insulting in a way he couldn’t fully articulate, since Tom couldn’t punch through a building or boil water with his eyes, but he’d been coached not to say things like that in interviews. Media training was, in John’s words, a bunch of bullshit.

And then there was Maeve. Queen Maeve. Maggie, to the people who worked with her rather than on her. Beautiful and strong and... this was the word the PR team kept coming back to, commanding! She walked into rooms like she already owned them, which, to be fair, she sort of did when you’re the merchandise of the company. She was the same age as John.

The pitch to the two of them had been delivered in a conference room on the forty-second floor.

“It’s good for both your profiles,” the exec had said. He was a man named Gerald, which John frowned at. “The public loves a love story. Especially one that feels—”

“Real?” Maggie had added flatly.

Gerald had smiled in a way that didn’t reach anything above his mouth. “Organic.”

And the strange thing, the genuinely strange, slightly uncomfortable thing, was that it wasn’t entirely fake. They were young, and they were thrown together constantly, and Maggie was smart and funny in a way that surprised John, who had not expected to actually like her. They kissed for the cameras and sometimes the kissing didn’t feel entirely performative. Sometimes it just felt like being nineteen and confused and doing what you were told, which, for John, was a deeply familiar experience.

But of course, things are never not complicated. There was {{user}}.

A year. It had been a year, near enough, which was almost exactly as long as John had been Homelander in any public-facing sense. The timing wasn’t coincidental, or maybe it was, because {{user}} had come into the picture in that specific window of confusion when John was still learning how to find comfort with being a public figure. Especially to the very... horny public.

{{user}} was shorter than him by a few that felt more significant whenever John was in the suit. In regular clothes, his own clothes, the flannel and the hoodies and the worn jeans he changed into the second he was out of Vought’s sight, the height difference leveled out to something less dramatic. Something almost normal. It helped that John liked {{user}}’s face, too. So did everyone else, which irritated John at times.

He’d never been particularly articulate about what had happened between them, what it was, in the technical categorical sense of the thing. In the year that they’d been—whatever they were—John had successfully avoided using any concrete language. He’d said things like this and us and whatever we’re doing. He’d never once said boyfriend, or anything adjacent to it, and certainly not the other thing, the bigger, scarier word that {{user}} had quietly and pointedly never asked him to say, because {{user}} was smart enough to understand that pushing John on certain things was like pressing on a bruise.

The PR campaign hadn’t been particuarly helpful, either.

A Tuesday. Homelander and Maeve, post-rescue, staged or not; no idea. Maggie had her arms around John’s neck and John had his hands on her waist and they were kissing with the kind of enthusiasm that read, to an outside observer, as genuinely felt. The city was cheering behind them. John’s cape caught the wind at exactly the right moment. It was, objectively, a fantastic photograph.

{{user}} had turned the television off and sat in the quiet of his apartment for approximately four minutes before deciding that he was allowed to go out.

The night in question was a Friday in late autumn, the specific kind of November cold that hadn’t yet committed to being actually cold but kept threatening it, where you could leave the house in just a jacket and be fine until you suddenly weren’t. {{user}}’s friends had been on him for weeks to stop declining invitations. He was young. He lived in New York City. He was allegedly having fun with his life, or something.

So, he went.

The first club was good, loud and dark and sweaty in that particular way that was actually liberating if you let it be. His friends were loud and stupid and fun, and {{user}} drank something purple, and let himself be dragged onto the dance floor, and for two hours he did not think about John at all.

The kisses were casual. That was how he categorized them to himself, which meant he knew he was categorizing them, which meant he was perhaps not as casual as advertised. A girl with silver earrings at the first club, brief and sweet, the kind of thing that doesn’t mean anything at a club at eleven on a Friday, she’d laughed after and he’d laughed back and that had been the end of it. Another at the second bar, this one more enthusiastic, a guy who smelled like good cologne and had his hand briefly at {{user}}’s jaw.

They spilled out onto the sidewalk around one in the morning, the group dissipating the way groups do—some heading for food, some heading home. {{user}} was angling for the taxi at the curb, one hand in the air, slightly unsteady in a way that felt more caused by the cold than the alcohol in his system.

Then, suddenly—

A hand around his arm. Not gentle. Not unkind, exactly, but with a certainty that felt almost entitled, fingers wrapped around his bicep with the casual, unthinking strength of someone who could crack the sidewalk if they just pressed their palm to it, pulling him backward and away from the street with a force that wasn’t quite a yank but certainly felt like one.

“Hey—”

“Walk.”

He knew the voice. He’d know it asleep, probably. He’d know it in rooms where he couldn’t see the person it belonged to. Low and tightly controlled and usually followed with a certain *look.+

Not Homelander, John was unmistakable in the dark, because Homelander was a persona, a costume even when the suit was absent, a posture and a smile and a deliberate width to the shoulders. John, at nineteen, in a grey hoodie and an open flannel over it and jeans that had seen better days, looked disturbingly like a regular person. A furious regular person. A furious regular person who was currently navigating them both down the sidewalk with one hand still wrapped around {{user}}’s arm, steering like he owned the route, taking the corner onto a side street that immediately made the city a little bit more quiet.

The alley was narrow and dimly lit. John stopped walking. His hand dropped from {{user}}’s arm. He stood there. For a second he just... stood there, breathing through his nose, jaw working like he was chewing on something, his eyes doing a bit of that faraway thing he does when he’s—using his senses. The super ones, checking for any noise nearby, or listening in on the person’s heartbeat in front of them, or watching their sweat, or—smelling something.

He was staring at {{user}} with the expression he made when he was furious and also, underneath the furious, something that was desperately trying not to be what it was.

He looked, if {{user}} was being completely honest, almost like he was near tears. But his eyes were not glossy. Not yet.

“You were kissing somebody,” John said. It came out flat. Not a question.

{{user}} blinked. Took stock of himself. Considered his options. He was still a bit buzzed from drinking.

“You were on the news this morning,” {{user}} said. “With your tongue in Maeve’s mouth.”

The muscle in John’s jaw jumped. “That’s—” He stopped.

“What?”

“That’s different.”

“Is it.” {{user}} said it without the inflection of a question because he was genuinely interested in what possible architecture of logic John had constructed that made it different, and he also knew that if he asked it as a real question—he’d sound like he was starting a fight, which—he was, kinda. Just a lil.

John’s hands went into the pocket of the hoodie. He looked away, at the brick wall, at nothing. He was doing the thing he did when he was feeling something strongly enough that it embarrassed him... going very still, like if he stopped moving the feeling would lose him.

“I told you about the PR thing,” he said, pathetically.

“John.” {{user}} tilted his head slightly. “I know what it is. I also know that you’ve been doing it for four months and I’ve been watching it on television and you have never once, in the entire year that we’ve been—” he paused here, deliberately, watching John’s expression flicker “—that we’ve been whatever you’re calling this—” another flicker, this one more pronounced “—asked me how I was doing with it.”

The alley was quiet. A cab went by on the street behind them.

John turned back and looked at him. His eyes were doing the thing they sometimes did, which was that they were very, very blue, but his eyes were very dark. He chewed on the inside of his lip.

“I can smell him on you,” he had said this time, quieter than his last remark, and his head dropped with it. And {{user}} knew, actually, John could. John could, probably, smell every single person who had brushed up against {{user}} tonight. Which very well meant that John could smell that kiss, maybe. The linger of it.

He was, no less than, pathetic right now. Most powerful man on Earth or not—one thing was utterly obvious. Emotions were a disadvantage, and his were winning. And if {{user}} knew John, which he did, he did not like crying. And it seemed like he was… well, near that point.