Chapter Text
The folder had been beige.
That was the first thing Ashley remembered about it, which was honestly insane, because there had been so many more important things to remember. The restricted room, the biometric locks, the old Vought medical archive with its cheerful little corporate disclaimers and dead scientists’ signatures written in paper documents older than some of the Seven combined.
But what stuck in her mind was the folder color.
Beige.
So painfully, offensively, stupidly boring, like something you were meant to skim over without ever suspecting it contained a loaded gun pointed at the most dangerous man on Earth. She originally opened it to use the folder itself to store other documents in - just some interesting ones that she had collected in the room for digitization. She wasn't snooping. Of course not. But none of the other papers mattered when she saw the headline on the first page.
BEHAVIORAL RECALL & EMERGENCY ASSET PRESERVATION PROTOCOL
SUBJECT: "JOHN" ID 004
The phrase had made her laugh the first time she saw it. Not because it was funny, but because it triggered a very specific kind of fear that resulted in nervous laughter when the only other option was shaking like a leaf.
Emergency Asset Preservation.
Not restraint. Not control. Not punishment.
Asset Preservation.
You'd think they were referring to an object with that kind of language, but no. She had read the file at three in the morning with her office door locked, one hand pressed over her mouth, the other clicking through page after page of scans from the eighties. Neurological implantation. Chemical pathway conditioning. Auditory command triggers. Compliance that resulted in an escalating neurological pain response if resisted. Heat vision suppression. Flight interruption. Temporary motor suppression.
She remembered thinking to herself, 'you fuckers built a god and a leash to go with him,' while not entirely believing it to be true.
At the bottom of the page, it stated: Activation requires voice delivery of phrase sequence.
Ashley had memorized the phrase by accident. She had read it once, then again, then a third time because some stupid, hysterical part of her wanted to be sure she had not misunderstood. The words were absurd - this nonsense string of half English, half German words with an old nursery-rhyme cadence. A new sentence - something no one would ever say naturally. Something designed not to happen until someone meant it.
She used her tablet to scan the contents of the folder, deleted her own access logs to the room, vomited into her own purse because god forbid she left DNA evidence she was even there, and then told herself she would never think about it again.
That had been weeks ago.
Now?
Now Homelander had her by the throat.
The office wall pressed cold and hard against her back. Framed pictures rattled beside her head from when he slammed her next to them. Her fingers scrabbled uselessly at his gloved wrist as her perfectly manicured nails snapped against something that might as well have been marble.
Homelander smiled at her. It wasn't the camera smile, or the golden-boy smile, or that tight, twitching almost-smile he wore when he was pretending not to be furious. No, this was the empty one that made her heart stop the few times she had seen it in person. The sneer that showed his too-sharp canines and the joy behind his eyes that only came from watching someone suffer.
His thumb shifted under her jaw, dug into the side of her throat. She was all too aware how easily he could tear it out.
“Do you know,” he said, “how fucking tired I am of listening to you explain things to me?”
His face was close enough that she could see the pores in his skin. The faint crease beside his mouth. The impossible blue of his eyes and tiny dots of brown within them. Aside from the smile, he looked almost calm, and that was somehow worse. Rage, she knew how to handle. She could talk him down from rage, mewl and praise him until he found something else as his target. But this? This was decision. He had already made up his mind, and there was not a single thing she could do about it.
It didn't stop her from trying.
“Homelander, please stop,” she choked.
His grip tightened. “Shhhhh.”
Her airway pinched narrower. Her pulse slammed against his palm. Beyond him, the office windows let in the evening lights of the city below in the way she loved. Preferable to die with that image in her mind than the face of the man in front of her, she figured.
“This is the problem with all of you,” he said. “You get comfortable. You start thinking proximity means importance. You stand near power long enough and suddenly you think you have some…”
His brought his face next to her ear. The view of the city was gone now.
“You don’t,” he whispered.
Ashley tried to shake her head, no, but couldn’t. It was like having an iron vice wrapped around her neck. Black static slowly crept into the edges of her vision.
Red began to gather in his eyes; a soft glow at first, like a live ember growing hotter just behind his pupil.
Ashley’s mind, which had spent the last decade sprinting from one catastrophe to the next, became suddenly and perfectly clear: he was going to laser her head open against the wall, and afterwards, Vought would issue a statement about a tragic accident and the stock would dip for three hours.
She was going to die in five seconds. Maybe less. But within those seconds, memories flashed across her mind. Childhood, school, college, her parents, her best friend, her first job, her first promotion, her first mistake, her first success, meeting the Seven for the first time, meeting Homelander for the first time, and… that beige folder. That nonsensical phrase.
It sat there in her mind like an open book. Waiting. Inviting. Practically begging her to be used.
Her tongue felt too large in her mouth. Her throat barely worked. She had enough air for maybe one sentence, maybe less. She didn't expect it to work, and that was the truth of it. She expected to die saying nonsense, but… dying while doing nothing felt worse. Ashley swallowed against his hand and forced the words out in a shredded whisper.
“Or…” She coughed. “Orchard… Schlaf jetzt—”
Homelander’s expression twitched. Just a flicker in one cheek, like a muscle under his eye had jumped. His eyes were still red. His hand was still around her throat. But something had changed.
The smile was gone.
“What did you just say?” he asked.
Ashley’s heart slammed so hard she felt it in her teeth. His thumb dug in again.
She could not breathe, but she could see it now. The tiny delay in his face. The way his pupils had tightened. The way his body had gone still, not with predatory control, but with something else. Interruption.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
It's fucking real.
His eyes flared brighter.
“Orchard,” she rasped. “Schlaf jetzt. Gehorchen. Drahtmutter. Mountain. Return home.”
For one second, nothing happened.
And then the red vanished from his eyes like someone had turned off a switch in his brain.
His hand opened. Ashley fell.
She hit the floor on her hands and knees, gasping, wheezing air through a throat that felt crushed flat. Her vision swam. She coughed until spit strung from her mouth and tears ran hot down her cheeks, and crawled away, expecting a boot to come down onto her skull.
It didn't.
Above her, Homelander did not move. He just... stood there, one arm at his side, the other still raised to the height her neck was at, like someone invisible was still in his grasp.
His face had gone blank in a way she had never seen before. Not empty. Not bored. Not cruel.
Blank.
Like a fucking screen waiting for input.
Ashley wheezed, “Oh my God.”
Homelander’s eyes moved. Only his eyes. They dropped to her while she crawled as the rest of him stayed perfectly still. At first, she thought he was choosing not to move, or that he was playing some new, horrible game.
“What the fuck-” he spat.
It came out strained, pressed thin through clenched teeth.
Ashley staggered to her feet, one hand clamped around her bruising neck, the other clutching her desk as she scrambled around it to put it between them. As if that mattered. As if fucking mahogany could save her from him.
His jaw flexed, and the tendons in his neck stood out. “What the fuck did you do?”
He tried to turn toward her. At least, she thought he did. His attempt showed only in a slight movement to the right until once again, he locked in place. One boot scraped half an inch against the carpet and then stopped dead like it had magnetized.
Neither of them breathed properly.
Then he tried again. This time his entire body flinched, and his face contorted like he'd just been struck. A sound came out of him almost too shocked to be pain.
“Agh what the fuck—” he gasped.
His hand went to his head in a response that looked unintentional and a response to pain rather than anything else. He ground his teeth shut, but the noise of pain still got through.
The file had said resistance produced 'escalating neurological pain.'
She had thought those were just words. Empty corporate words written by dead men describing their own monster and the ways they could only hope he could be controlled. But the monster was standing ten feet away from her, shaking because his own body would not let him take one step.
He turned his head again, just slightly, but enough to make eye contact with her again. The look in them nearly made her run. There was fury there, yes. Enough fury to level the whole tower and the ten sub-levels of parking beneath it. But under it? There was something she had never seen on him before. It looked so foreign on his face she had a hard time distinguishing it at first.
It was fear.
And then his eyes flickered red again. Ashley immediately ducked behind the desk and covered her head, but instead of the sound of lasers, it was a scream. And not hers, for once.
She peeked above the desk to watch Homelander's hands fly to his face and nearly crumple, staggering backwards two steps. The red died again, and he choked out a gasp as his chest heaved in a breath.
Ashley covered her mouth. “Oh my God,” she said again, quieter this time.
Her fear did not leave, no. Fear lived in her now. It had ever since she was hired. But... it began to change shape. It slid, inch by inch, into something alert. Something bright. Something with claws of its own.
She looked at him. Really looked.
The most powerful man in the world stood in her office with his hands raised and trembling, unable to take a step of his own volition, unable to burn her alive without suffering so badly he had screamed.
Because she had said words.
Ashley lowered her hand from her mouth. Her throat hurt. Her knees shook. She was probably going to have bruises in the shape of his fingers by morning, assuming there was a morning for her.
“Undo it,” Homelander hissed.
Ashley said nothing.
“UNDO IT.”
His right hand twitched again, as if he meant to point at her, grab her, rip her apart. His body refused. Pain flashed across his face before he buried it.
A terrible understanding passed between them.
He was still Homelander. He was still terrifying. He could still kill millions if this thing went wrong. He was still a bomb in the shape of a man, but for the first time since Ashley had met him, that bomb had a switch to defuse it. And it was in her hands.
She swallowed, wincing at the pain in her throat. “Sit down,” she said, and pointed to the ground.
The silence afterward was enormous.
Homelander's mouth twitched. “You stupid fucking—”
His knees folded like they had given out, and he collapsed onto the floor.
He sat. Knelt, more like, but that was okay. That was better, actually.
Homelander’s face went white. For one suspended moment, neither of them moved.
For three whole seconds, Ashley forgot how to speak. That was almost the strangest part. Not that Homelander was on his knees in front of her. Not that his face had gone bloodless beneath the clean, manufactured perfection.
It was that Ashley, who had built an entire career on talking when any sane person would shut up, had no words.
He looked wrong down there. That was her first coherent thought. Not weak. Not exactly. Even kneeling, he seemed to fill the whole room, every red-white-and-blue inch of him a monument to the unchecked violence pretending to be patriotism.
But he looked wrong.
His chest rose and fell hard. Slow. Controlled with visible effort. His mouth was slightly open, not in awe, not in submission, but because he was breathing through shock so undoing it had stripped the performance right off his face.
His eyes stayed locked on hers. If looks could kill, Ashley would have been meat on the wallpaper. And technically, three minutes ago, his looks could kill.
She took one step to the side, away from the pseudo-protection of the mahogany. His eyes followed. His head did not.
Ashley’s hand tightened around the edge of the desk. She could still feel the imprint of his fingers - the exact shape of them, in her neck. Thumb under her jaw. Fingers at the side of her neck, the middle digging its nail into her throat.
She hated him. God, she fucking hated him.
And the clarity of it shocked her.
She had been afraid of him for so long that fear had drowned out everything else. Fear of him had become the lighting in every room, the background hum in the walls, the weather. You didn’t hate the weather, you adapted to it. You checked the forecast and carried an umbrella if the forecast looked like it was down several points.
But now he was kneeling on her floor because she had told him to, and suddenly the fear parted just enough for hatred to breathe. And that hatred took a big fucking gulp of air.
He had made her laugh at death. He had made her apologize to victims. He had made her stand in front of cameras and say words like tragedy and unfortunate accident while knowing damn well the unfortunate accident had been him getting bored. He had made her compress herself smaller and smaller until she fit neatly inside the shadow of his mood.
And now—
Now his hands were the ones shaking.
Ashley almost smiled.
Homelander saw it before it fully formed. His expression changed from pain to something so dark and intimate she felt it in her spine.
“Don’t you fucking look at me like that,” he spat.
And sure, maybe Ashley should have apologized. Should have folded. Should have said, 'I’m so sorry Sir, I didn’t know, I’ll undo it, please don’t hurt me, please don't splatter my brain matter across this beautiful mahogany desk Sir.'
Instead, she heard herself say, “Like what?”
His head twitched. “Like you've somehow won here.”
“…Didn’t I?”
His eyes ignited again as he lunged forward. It happened so fast that Ashley flinched back with a strangled cry, hands flying up, expecting the world to end.
Then something inside him broke. Not metaphorically, no, Ashley heard it. This wet, internal pop that signified something catastrophic. The heat vision did not fire. The glow collapsed inward instead, like the weapon had turned around inside his skull and detonated inside his eyes.
Then he made a sound - kind of noise a person made when they had been hurt too badly to scream properly. He pitched sideways onto one hand, the other slamming against his temple. His fingers clawed into his hair hard enough that Ashley heard strands tear loose. His teeth bared, not in anger now, but in naked agony.
“Fuck,” he choked out. “Fuck—fuck—”
Homelander shuddered on the carpet, still half-kneeling, one palm flat to the floor. His other hand pressed against his skull as if he could physically hold his brain together.
Blood began to pour from his nose. Not a trickle. Not one elegant cinematic line. No, it poured - bright red against his upper lip, then down over his mouth, dripping from his chin in an unbroken stream.
Homelander didn't even seem to notice the blood at first. His shoulders heaved. His head hung between his arms. His breath tore in and out of him in wet, ragged pulls.
Ashley remembered another line from the beige file. She hadn’t understood it then. Not really. Not past the nausea and the shaking and the bureaucratic nightmare of realizing Vought had classified the most powerful man alive the same way someone would classify a sentient nuke.
Noncompliance beyond acceptable neurological tolerance may result in terminal damage.
She had assumed it meant the protocol could hurt him badly enough to stop him. And… technically, that was true. Just in a much more permanent way than she had thought.
His eyes lifted to hers. There was blood on his teeth, and the whites of his left eye had turned partially red. Not in the 'about to laser you' way, but in the burst-blood vessel way.
For one awful, perfect second, they shared the exact same realization - this wasn't just a leash, it was a kill-switch.
Ashley’s breath left her in a tiny, broken laugh. Not funny, or happy, or sane.
"Ashley," he hissed. Her name came out thick and nasal through blood. He swallowed. Blood continued to stream over his mouth and down the clean blue of his collar. It decorated the floor of her carpet, which had only just been changed from the last incident.
“You need to undo this,” he hissed. "Whatever the fuck you just did, you need to undo it."
Ashley looked at the man who had been about to burn her skull open a few minutes ago. “Do I?” she whispered.
His eyes hardened, then immediately softened again when he realized he was no longer in the position of control.
It was the fastest mask change she had ever seen from him. It almost made her laugh again.
“Please.”
Ashley raised a brow. Homelander had just said please. Granted, he said it like it tasted poisonous. Like forcing it out had scraped a piece off his tongue. But he had said it.
For ten years, she had begged him with her eyes. With her posture. With every careful pause before every sentence. Please don’t be angry. Please don’t make me say it. Please don’t make me clean it up. Please don’t kill me today. Please please please...
Now he was bleeding on her carpet and learning the shape of the word for the first time in what - forty-some years?
It felt good. It felt so good it scared her.
Homelander’s breathing hitched. He coughed once, and blood sprayed across the carpet. His face twisted with discomfort - either from the pain, or from seeing so much of his own blood. Maybe a mix of the two. Ashley assumed they were both new to him.
And then a practical part of her surfaced through the shock - if Homelander died here, she was dead too.
Not from him necessarily (though that was still absolutely on the table), but from everything else. From Vought. From the board. From the government. From the entire world, when they realized she had killed the world's most beloved sentient bomb.
No. No, he could not die. And neither could she. Not before she understood how this thing worked.