Work Text:
It’s late – way past bedtime, which is at 9.30, and which he’s usually a stickler for. Tomorrow is a very important day, and John knows this, and he knows that’s all the more reason he should be fast asleep by now.
But he just… can’t.
His tummy feels funny.
He thinks this is excitement. Or maybe nervousness. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell the difference out here; everything is much messier than he was told it would be. A good messy, most of the time.
In any case, this not-quite-identifiable feeling is why he’s currently sat cross-legged in bed, his upper body functioning like tentpoles propping up the covers above him, while he reads his book on George Washington.
He’s heard from… somewhere… he’s not quite sure where now… that reading in the dark is bad for your eyesight, but that probably doesn’t apply to him because his eyes work better than everyone else’s. Red still isn’t the best colour to be reading to, but it’s not as if John had any choice over what colour his lasers manifested as. Besides, he doesn’t mind reading slowly.
He never used to get the choice.
Back when he was there, he would try to memorise whatever reading material he was given as quickly as possible in an effort to impress everyone – and because sometimes, if he didn’t learn it fast enough, he’d hear them all sighing and tutting and would start wondering why he couldn’t do something as simple as reciting lines if he was supposed to become a hero one day. In those instances, they’d usually correct his mistakes by having him sit in front of large screens with the information repeating again, and again, and again until his mind felt like an echo chamber of nothing but the things he’d failed to learn by himself.
Reading now isn’t like that at all. For one thing, this book on George Washington is more interesting than what he was taught about him when he was back there – even if, on occasion, it gets confusing when the book suggests George Washington wasn’t such a hero to every American. John struggles to understand how that could have been and why it didn’t seem to bother the man. But he can tell he’s taking in more from this book than he did from the memorised lines and the screens; like his brain chews and tastes rather than just swallows these words, and something about that satisfies him.
Maybe that’s why reading under the covers tonight is calming the strange feeling he’s experiencing. He’s actually read this particular chapter before, but the familiarity of lines he knows well is soothing nonetheless. He wishes the library would let him keep this book. It isn’t as if they don’t have hundreds of others on all those shelves he saw. He remembers the little swell of pride he felt when the librarian told him not many kids his age go for non-fiction.
Creak.
That’s the sound of feet padding up the stairs – a nice sound, because John knows whose feet they are. This house is made from wood, like most happy American homes he was shown in those never-ending slides, and John can sense wherever someone’s moving about in it the moment that they do. He likes it. He prefers it to all that concrete and metal.
However, the sound on the stairs should be his cue to shut his lasers off and lie down. He knows he’s a good actor, and sleep is so easy to fake to people who can’t look inside your body to make sure, but for some reason he stays sat up with the book and doesn’t bother trying. He doesn’t even dim his lasers, though they’re definitely visible through the fabric of the duvet.
He’ll just finish this sentence…
“Hey there, mister.” John hears her pause in the open doorway of his bedroom before she speaks. “There’s a bunch of cars outside waiting for the green light, you know.”
Her voice is kind and soft whenever she talks to him. Everything about her is. John can’t help his giggle as he finally pulls the covers down and gazes across the room, smiling at the sight of her welcome figure haloed by the nightlight from the upstairs hallway. He illuminates her further in his own scarlet glow.
“That’s not true, mom. We live on a farm.”
John can always tell when people are lying, but mom isn’t telling a proper lie when she talks about non-existent cars waiting to go – she’s making a joke. John likes it when mom jokes with him, like they’ve got secrets no one else is in on; he doesn’t even mind that technically she’s joking about his powers, which make him special and unique in ways she and no one else is, because he knows this is one of her methods of showing him she’s not afraid.
John can also always tell mom isn’t afraid from the steadiness of her heartbeat around him, but he knows that’s sort of cheating.
“Ah, you got me there.” Mom chuckles as she steps towards his bed, where she sits and reaches over to stroke his hair. He powers down his lasers so she can see him more clearly and leans into her touch.
Mom’s very gentle with him despite the fact she doesn’t have to be.
“You okay?” she asks, and her eyebrows draw together in the way that still makes John feel funny, even though they’ve known one another for nearly a year now. “Is George keeping you company?”
She tilts her head towards the book, which John notices he’s gripping tight above the duvet – but not too tight, of course. He does try to be careful.
He hums in affirmation. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Thinking about tomorrow, huh?”
Mom sounds happy – she’s smiling that strangely familiar smile John could swear matches his own sometimes, although he knows that doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes, too, he thinks her blue eyes look like his, with the same freckle by her right pupil, but that doesn’t make any sense either. Regardless, if he had to guess, he would say mom is excited and not at all nervous about tomorrow. She has more experience with these things than he does.
“I just want to make sure I do it right,” John says seriously. He lets the book drop on to the duvet so he can ball up his fist without wrecking the pages. “I want it to be perfect, like it’s supposed to be.”
John’s not sure why saying this out loud is suddenly making his chest feel tight. Tomorrow is going to be something good, not bad. Maybe it’s because talking about it has him remembering his lessons on different celebrations and holidays – and how they’re all blurring together in his head like the faces of his fake mothers. Dr Vogelbaum wouldn’t be pleased with how much he’s forgotten since he left.
“There’s no right or wrong way to do it, Johnny,” mom says, her voice growing somehow even softer. John feels her hand around his waist. He’s tense now, and she still isn’t afraid. “Birthdays are whatever you want to make of them, and I promise tomorrow is gonna be a happy one.”
John nods and shuffles closer to her, letting her rub his back while he rests his head against her shoulder. Just under a year ago, he could barely stand to have her touch him at all, despite suspecting deep down that it might feel nice like this and not painful like the doctors and the operating table. It was hard for him to trust mom when she was still a stranger. It’s not as though he even remembers properly how she brought him here. He’s forgotten when exactly she became mom.
He just knows his mom is the real hero. She saved him from the lab.
“Will it just be us?” he asks, wrapping his arms around her middle.
“Just us,” mom says.
John squeezes her – harder than he should – but mom doesn’t mind. She squeezes him back like it’s another of their jokes. Mom never breaks under his strength the way she probably should. It’s something else about the outside world that John doesn’t quite understand. She should break. She’s only human. The fake moms in the lab all broke.
But mom told him back then, almost a year ago, that she’d never leave him. And she wasn’t lying.
“Well, it’ll be us and Daisy,” mom corrects herself. “I have a feeling she’s been saving her best pint of milk for you, so I can make you a special birthday milkshake.”
John hums again, feels his eyes slowly drooping. He lets mom guide him so he’s lying down, all snug and ready for the sleep he was supposed to surrender to hours ago. He blinks up at her blearily, watches as she carefully moves the book on George Washington to his bedside table.
“Mom,” he whispers. “Why did you save me?”
He can’t remember if he’s asked her directly before. There are a lot of things he can’t remember, but that might just be because he’s tired. Saving people will make them love you, so John was told – and John does love mom – but he certainly didn’t love her when he was fresh out of the lab. She must have taken a lot of risks for him.
Mom gives him one of her John-like smiles again.
“Because it was the right thing to do,” she whispers back. She leans over to kiss his forehead, her sweet scent wafting over him. Her safety. “And because I love you, John.”
She pulls his powder blue blanket out of what appears to John’s sleepy mind as thin air and tucks it around him. The sweet smell intensifies. John smiles.
“Love you too, mommy,” he mumbles back, but his eyes are already closed, and he can sense reality tearing at its seams.
He thinks he hears her wish him goodnight, her voice only a faint, wispy caress against his eardrums now, drifting far, far away…
And then there’s something else. His own voice, but older. Deeper. Growing louder in his ears. John’s sleep-spun mind can’t pinpoint the source of it.
And I gotta tell you.
It was perfect.
Perfect.
Everything.
Down to the last, minute details.
He’s lying.
Just like her.
Homelander sits up with a start.
He gasps, lasers sputtering on in self-defence, and scans his dark surroundings through their eerie red hue.
“What the–”
It’s been a while since he had a dream – not a nightmare – that was that vivid. His heart is racing in his chest, and it’s almost embarrassing, except–
This isn’t New York. He’s not in his penthouse.
He wrenches his body up into a sitting position, his eyes, ears, and nose all alert and tingling with the sudden stimulation of being awake somewhere he didn’t expect to be. This never happens to him. How could it? He’s about to stand and fly off to get a better vantage point when his agitated gaze actually takes in what he’s seeing:
Model airplanes. Framed baseball posters. Pictures of strangers. That fucking childish bedspread.
His lasers fizzle out. He knows where he is.
Now Homelander does stand up, flinching away from the kids’ bed he let himself fall asleep on, the bed that isn’t his to rest in. The creased length of his cape flutters along after him. It’s become rumpled in a way the Homelander’s cape just can’t be. Why the fuck did he come back here? This place is hell. He hates that it exists.
Get it together, John. You’re fine. What? You gonna let some shiny pile of chopped down trees give you the spooks?
It must be gone midnight, judging by the near silence surrounding him. Vought purposely built his family home in the middle of bumfuck nowhere to keep away nosy types during its construction. His backstory has always been plausibly normal, intentionally vague. A Midwest boy born with the mightiest of powers, who loves America, and baseball, and mom’s apple pie. It sounds too good to be true and doesn’t he know it.
He strides towards the door and growls under his breath. He could destroy this place right now. No one would know it was him.
Madelyn would.
“Fuck,” he hisses, pausing in the doorway – like she did, or didn’t, because she doesn’t fucking exist – and ramming the palms of his hands into his eye sockets.
Breathe, tiger.
So much for busting out of here in a flash. There will be no blasting a hole in the roof and having done with it. No, no. This place has got to be kept pristine, just like the rest of his fake fucking life. Filming the tour here to help get supes in the military was one thing, but Homelander knows what the long-term plans are. After all, won’t it seem a little bit odd that his white picket fence home is exactly the same way it was when he was a child? What, do thirty-odd years and two touchingly-implied dead parents not matter?
Why would the place still look like this now? He’s almost forty years old.
“We think this could be a big, big earner,” he recalls them saying. He’d eavesdropped on the meeting, watched from fifty floors above. “It worked for Elvis, and he’s so dead people are probably starting to wonder if there was ever a time he was actually alive. Whereas Homelander? He’s a living, breathing superhero, out there saving citizens right now, and you lucky people can go visit where it all started for him! Be a true patriot! And kids get in on a five percent discount every third Tuesday!”
They want to monetise his happy non-existent childhood.
Well, whoop-de-fucking-do to that.
An image flashes through Homelander’s mind of fans parading instead around the cold lab he really grew up in: of cell phones snapping pictures in awe at the oven he was burnt alive inside for small eternities; of greasy, greedy faces pressing up against glass cases displaying the time-rusted implements the doctors used on him when they were trying to figure out what on earth they’d created; of old video footage featuring a blond child alone in a white room, running on a loop on polished screens throughout every bit of the tour. No privacy. No end to it.
But it was done in the pursuit of scientific advancement and human endeavour, they’d say, if anyone cared to ask. It helped make our wonderful hero who he is today. He isn’t like you and me. He’s strong. He didn’t feel any pain. None that could actually result in physical injury, anyway. Moving on.
“This is the place he called the bad room,” one needlessly chipper tour guide would explain to her group of cooing imbeciles, her smile as pearly white and blindingly bright as the tiles around them. “Does anyone want to guess why?”
And everyone would smile, and cheer, and laugh, because that’s all mudpeople ever fucking do. Sunshine and justice. It’s a joke that isn’t funny.
Creak.
Homelander gasps again, and this time he is embarrassed.
His arms drop to his sides, his face slack as he blinks into the darkness of the house that was never his home.
Creak.
That sound is coming from the staircase, just ahead from where he’s stood. But he knows no one else can be here; he would have sensed them. He could doublecheck to be sure with a single glance if he so wished. There is nothing he could not do. And it’s fine if someone is here. It’s not like anyone could ever hurt him. Not anymore. But he knows he could hurt them.
And doesn’t he deserve that? Don’t they?
He doesn’t check to make sure. Instead, like a human, he clears his throat, unclenching his jaw from the position it’s seized up into, and blinks profusely. His eyes are damp.
“Is anyone there?” he calls out. “Show yourself. You’re on Vought property.”
His voice still sounds commanding, despite everything, because he is the big, strong superhero who saves everybody. He doesn’t need rescuing.
No one makes any reply.
He sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. This is really fucking stupid. He can’t believe he’s about to do this.
“Mom?” he whispers, and his voice wavers pathetically.
Creak.
He grinds his teeth. His cheeks are damp now too.
“This isn’t fucking funny!”
He advances towards the top of the stairs and glowers down them like he expects someone to be there. Below him, in the shadows and the moonlight that dance slippery silver along the wooden steps, no one stands waiting. The stairs creak again: just the foundations of a building shifting and settling in the night.
He is alone.
She isn’t there.
How could she be when she never even existed?
Homelander swallows and fights the rising tide of more tears by burning them away with crimson heat. He needs to get out of this place. Soon enough, it’ll be tainted by the paws of the masses, too disgusting for him to ever set foot in again. For now, though, it’s haunted – and Homelander doesn’t believe in ghosts.
He shuffles off downstairs and out the door he came in through. He doesn’t look at the piano where nobody once played tunes. He ignores the unfamiliar feeling of sweat itching under his suit. Homelander made a mistake in coming here. He made an even greater one in lying down and drifting off for a while. He just didn’t expect… her.
The homesy door that marketing selected closes behind him with a click as he steps on to the grass where he made his tender speech about the non-existent mother who took him to baseball practice and baked him the perfect diamond baseball birthday cake. He scoffs. He should’ve realised he was dreaming early on – they were about to celebrate his birthday, weren’t they? Yet another one of those things he doesn’t have.
He won’t turn around to say goodbye, because there’s no one to say goodbye to. Even Daisy the cow was just a figment of his dreamscape he’d rather not dwell on. This is no farm.
With a final glace this way and that to triple check not even the lowest of evolutionary lifeforms have spotted him here, he shoots upwards into the inky sky. The only caresses he gets out here are the icy slices of wind on his cheeks and through the dishevelled strands of his hair.
This never happened. None of it.
It’s late – way past any reasonable bedtime – and Homelander feels ill at ease as he lands on the balcony of his penthouse at the tower. But he isn’t a little boy who needs saving from anything or anyone. He’s the world’s greatest superhero, and he does live in the real world now.
It’s not his fault the real world isn’t perfect.