Work Text:
(Butcher is at odds with the nature of soulmates.)
Mum used to tell the story of how she met dad. Coming into the graduation party soaked from the rain. Her friends daring her to ask the boy across the way for a dance, and the way his hair shone in the dim lights as she staggered over. How she stuttered out the question as her heart beat through her ribcage. The sparking moment he took her hand, and everything around them froze in place to let her hear his slurred laugh. Like angels singing. The story always ended with them dancing into the morning, never letting each other go. Then a kiss on Billy’s cheek as she told him to have sweet dreams.
Smashed china, beer bottles carpeting the floor, blank staring at the wall waiting for him to stumble back from the pub, she never mentioned them. The stories were meant to send Billy to sleep, but he was always up past midnight, trying to stitch together the shiny man in mum’s head with whoever slept next to her now.
“You take care of your soulmate,” she said once, while Billy dropped dad’s empties into the bottle bank behind Tesco’s. She would do it herself, but her hands were so blistering red from bleaching the smell out of the kitchen tiles that she couldn’t stand getting dripped on. She kept asking for that fancy hand cream off the telly, but there was always something more important to buy. “You take care of them.”
(Maybe it was a joke.)
Lennie never met his soulmate. Hardly anyone that young does. The priest made sure everyone knew they weren’t only mourning Lennie, but the future that could have been. “Perhaps, if they had been part of the lucky few who met early, we would not be here today.”
“It’s tragic, how someone can be so selfish,” one of the Irish cousins said. “His soulmate’s all alone in the world now.”
(Billy always knew how to fight. Here’s where he learned to enjoy it.)
Butcher let his visa run out in the States. Mainly because the yanks had better drugs, maybe because most soulmates are the same nationality. Leave all that back across the pond, drown the rest in gin and fentanyl.
Of course, then Becca came along, and oh.
Becca, Becca, Becca.
The chainsmoker who took a lend of his lighter and never gave it back. With crows feet from smiling so hard so long, and a singing voice too reedy to make up for her shit music taste. Who hadn’t met her soulmate at twenty-five and wasn’t much bothered by it. Who dip-dyed her hair so she could cut the purple ends off to visit grandma. Who didn’t give a rat’s arse about what was written in the stars.
(If the universe had any sense, it would have set her up with some nice millionaire instead of convincing her the best she could do was Butcher.)
Billy let his guard down. Stopped planning for an empty bed or a note left in the night. He could wake up wrapped in Becca’s arms without that sick stab of relief. On the best mornings, when the sun lit Becca up gold and neither of them had to go anywhere, he could curl up against her and fall right back asleep. He trusted her when she said they were building something together.
(The universe either has the same sense of humour as mum, or it fucking hates him.)
(Back to the gin and fentanyl.)
It’s not about Homelander. Butcher knows that, in the darkest part of him. If life’s as set in stone as people like to think, then Homelander isn’t the thing at fault.
So when a gangly twink asks if he’s interested in nanny cams, and the air around them shudders like angels sighing with relief, and the kid’s eyes go wide as the moon, and the darkest part of Butcher’s heart flutters its wings-
(Well. There’s plenty of grieving widows in this city.)