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Vought’s first name for him wasn’t Homelander, it was Subject 7. “John” came later, after a team of psychologists decided numbers created emotional instability in child test subjects. Homelander arrived last, once the branding department realized audiences responded better to names that sounded patriotic, protective, almost biblical. The executives liked to say it felt “close enough to God without alienating moderates.”
Still, inside the lab, some of the older researchers kept calling him John, especially when he was small enough to look less like a weapon and more like a lonely child. Before he learned how to control his strength, before he learned how to arrange his face into marketable expressions, he spent most of his time watching people with intense concentration, as if human behavior were a language he could memorize but never naturally speak.
“John behaved well today,” they would say during evaluations. “John responded positively to praise.” They spoke about him the way people discuss weather patterns or expensive machinery: cautiously, professionally, with just enough distance to avoid guilt.
One of the researchers died when John was still very young.
It wasn’t anger. He had simply become excited after she praised him and wrapped his arms around her too tightly. Her spine collapsed with a damp cracking sound that reminded him, years later, of frozen meat snapping inside a butcher shop freezer. Afterward nobody touched him for months.
That was probably when he first confused affection with damage.
Later, Madelyn Stillwell entered his life carrying the soft smell of vanilla perfume. He remembered that scent for years, sometimes he still imagined it while standing over bodies.
She sat behind reinforced glass and smiled at him gently.
“Hello, John.”
Nobody had ever said his name like that before.
Not Subject 7.
Not asset.
Not America’s future.
Just John, said softly for once.
That night he dreamed about having a mother for the first time. In the dream there was no face, only pale hands reaching toward him through white light. When he woke up, he realized the hands looked exactly like laboratory gloves.
As an adult, Homelander rarely slept. He preferred hovering above New York because the sky was the only place that didn’t smell human. Down below he could sense everything at once, sweat drying beneath cheap clothes, fryer grease leaking from restaurant vents, blood, detergent, garbage fermenting in alleyways. His hearing made it worse. The city sounded sick, grinding teeth, sirens, couples fighting through apartment walls, televisions left running in empty rooms.
Sometimes he visited Billy Butcher late at night.
William.
He liked the name more than he admitted to himself because Butcher was one of the only people alive who spoke to him without reverence. Everyone else talked to Homelander the way believers speak to saints, Butcher called him a cunt.
One night Butcher passed out drunk on his couch while a televangelist sold silver crucifixes on late-night television. Homelander stood silently in the apartment for nearly twenty minutes watching him sleep.
Even unconscious, Butcher looked tense, as if some part of him expected violence at any moment.
Homelander suddenly found himself thinking that, if he were normal, he might want to kiss him.
The thought disgusted him immediately. Not because of desire itself, but because normality felt more unreachable to him than outer space. Ordinary people touched each other casually. Their intimacy wasn’t poisoned by performance, obsession, fear, or hunger.
So he wandered through the apartment instead, moving quietly enough to resemble a ghost. The next morning Butcher found a perfectly circular hole burned through the refrigerator door. The milk cartons inside had burst from the heat.
“Fuck’s sake,” he muttered. “Bloody giant golden retriever.”
Queen Maeve once asked Homelander a question after an interview shoot.
“Ever wonder why nobody really loves you?”
The studio lights were still blazing overhead, turning the set into something harsh and surgical. Homelander kept smiling because he hadn’t consciously decided to stop yet.
Maeve removed her makeup slowly.
“Because the only person they know is Homelander. John doesn’t exist.”
She said it casually, which somehow made it crueler.
Later that night Homelander sat alone in his dressing room staring at his reflection. The face in the mirror looked too symmetrical to belong to a real person. Blond hair, blue eyes, the jawline audiences trusted instinctively. He realized, suddenly and painfully, that he could no longer remember what his real face was supposed to look like beneath the branding.
So he destroyed the mirrors one after another with his laser vision until the room filled with fractured reflections.
Until finally he saw himself multiplied across the broken shards. Like unclaimed bodies laid across stainless steel tables.
No identity.
No family.
Nobody coming back for them.
When Ryan called him Dad for the first time, the feeling was so sharp it almost resembled physical pain. Ryan said it carelessly, not understanding what the word meant to someone raised in observation rooms where attachment was treated as a design flaw.
Nobody in the lab had called him son. Nobody had allowed him to belong to anyone.
Vought believed family structures complicated conditioning.
Still, when Homelander looked at Ryan, he felt an unfamiliar urge to hide the boy somewhere beyond cameras, researchers, and audience metrics. Somewhere no one could script him into a product.
What frightened him most was realizing he had no idea how to love Ryan except through imitation. Everything he understood about tenderness came from commercials, movies, and staged performances. He approached intimacy the way isolated people approach sex after learning about it entirely through pornography.
On the roof of Vought Tower, Butcher said to him, “You know what you remind me of?”
Homelander smiled faintly. “Go on, William.”
“A John Doe in a morgue.”
The city glowed beneath them like electrical tissue still twitching after death.
“Nobody really knows who you are,” Butcher said while lighting a cigarette. “They know Homelander. Same way morgues label unidentified corpses. It just means this thing used to belong to somebody, but nobody can prove who anymore.”
Homelander didn’t argue because the comparison felt too accurate. The lab had never given him a childhood, a family, or even a surname. John wasn’t really a name. It was a placeholder, the verbal equivalent of an empty file waiting to be filled.
So Vought built Homelander over that emptiness. They gave him a flag, a cape, and a country to perform for, dressing him the way morticians reconstruct unclaimed bodies before public viewing.
Butcher exhaled smoke slowly and looked at him with an exhaustion that had finally outlived hatred.
“And you know the worst fucking part?” he asked.
“What’s that, William?”
“I spent half my life trying to kill you.”
He paused for a moment.
“And then I realized you were already dead.”
END