Chapter Text
The line to get into Translucent Memorial Plaza wraps twice around the block. Mara has been crying since before they even reached the barricades.
She can’t help it. The whole city feels like it’s crying. There are people weeping openly on the subway platforms, holding candles on street corners, and every single screen in Manhattan, every last one, is showing his face.
Or, well.
Showing the idea of his face, since Translucent never really had one the public could see – just that noble, faceless suit of carbon skin, rendered in soft-focus tribute footage on the side of the Vought Tower jumbotron, forty stories tall. A hero you could never see, watching over everyone.
And now he’s gone, and it feels like a hole has been torn in the sky.
“You okay?” Theo asks, squeezing her hand. He’s wearing his good jacket, the charcoal one, because he said Vought would probably charge a grieving fee if they caught anyone looking underdressed. He’d said it like a joke, but he’d ironed the jacket anyway.
“No,” Mara says, and laughs wetly, wiping her cheek with the heel of her palm. “I know it’s stupid. I never even met him. Obviously. Nobody ever — you couldn’t even meet him, that was the whole —” She gives up and digs a travel pack of tissues out of her bag. “It’s not stupid.”
“It’s not stupid,” Theo agrees, and kisses her temple, and they shuffle forward another three feet.
The street outside is a shrine. Banners on every lamppost, Translucent’s suit photographed against a sunrise, against the flag, against a crowd of children reaching upward, each one stamped with the official Vought logo in tasteful memorial silver instead of the usual blue. There’s a booth by the entrance selling commemorative Translucent figurines: Limited edition, proceeds go to the Samaritan’s Embrace Children’s Fund.
There’s Vought volunteers in silver windbreakers passing free memorial candles into every pair of hands (batteries included, the Vought logo printed on the little plastic flame-guard). Above the doors, a digital marquee repeats the same phrase in glowing white letters:
#NeverTrulyVanish — A VOUGHT REMEMBRANCE.
But it’s when they pass through the doors, tickets scanned, bags checked, that Mara’s breath actually leaves her.
The auditorium is enormous — a proper theater, thousands of seats and balconies stacked into the dark. Every wall is paneled floor to ceiling in glowing geometric slabs of red, white, and blue, angled like folded bunting, so bright and so vast that stepping inside feels like walking into the beating heart of America itself. The stage, by contrast, has been dressed like a cathedral: a backdrop of towering gothic arches in dark carved wood, warm spotlights slanting down through artificial haze like God’s own fingers. Banks of white lilies climb the stage in tiers, their smell reaching all the way to the back rows. All around are framed portraits of suits on easels… and the center of everything, raised on a sculpted pedestal, a casket. A glass-lidded casket of pale polished wood, lined in white satin, lit like a jewel.
And empty.
Of course it’s empty. There is no body — he was murdered by cowards, by terrorists, the news said, by that monster El Diablo and they didn’t even leave his family anything to bury.
Somehow the empty casket is worse.
Mara can’t stop looking at the smooth undented pillow.
An usher shows them to their seats, and the house lights fall, and all through the vast dark, the little Vought candles come on one by one until the auditorium is an upside-down sky, thousands of tiny stars trembling in mourner’s hands. On the towering screen above the stage, the tribute plays on a loop: Translucent’s suit walking away into a sunrise of pink and gold clouds, ascending, beneath two dates.
TRANSLUCENT. 1980-2020
Forty years old. Mara holds her plastic candle against her chest and cries again, and she is not alone. The woman beside her is sobbing into a Homelander tote bag. A grown man two rows down keeps taking his glasses off to wipe them. Ten thousand inside and fifty thousand more watching the jumbotrons in the street(the news will say later) and it feels like every one of them loved him.
“He saved a school bus once,” Mara whispers to Theo. “In Delaware, The brakes went out on the overpass and nobody could figure out how it stopped, and then they found his handprints in the metal. He never even took credit. They only figured it out later.”
“I remember,” Theo says softly. He didn’t grow up on hero stories the way she did — his mom thought the whole thing was tacky, a cult with a gift shop… but even Theo has his hand over his heart right now.
Then the lights change, and the crowd’s murmur dies all at once, like a held breath, because Homelander walks out onto the stage.
He is golden.
That’s the only word Mara’s brain can produce. The flag of his cape hangs still against his shoulders. He crosses to a clear glass podium beside the casket and stands there for a long moment without speaking, jaw working, eyes bright, looking out over the thousands of trembling-candle stars, and when he finally does speak, his voice cracks on the very first word.
“Translucent,” Homelander says, “was more than a hero. He was my brother.”
He pauses, gathers himself, one gloved hand flat on the podium. “And you know, people ask me — they ask me, Homelander, how do you mourn a man you can’t see? And I’ll tell you what I told them.” He looks up, and the screen behind him catches the shine in his eyes, forty feet of grief in high definition.
“You don’t have to see someone to know they’re standing right beside you. He is here. Right now. In this room. In every child he pulled from a fire, in every one of you he kept safe while you slept. Invisible? No. No, folks.” A slow shake of his head. “We just have to learn to see with our hearts. And I promise you… I promise you, as God is my witness — the people who did this will face justice. American justice.”
The auditorium erupts. Mara is on her feet with everyone else, candle held high, screaming herself hoarse, tears running freely, and she feels it… that enormous, warm, terrible feeling of being one tiny cell in a body that is loved and protected by gods. That whatever darkness is out there in the world, it will break itself against men like this.
And then the stage lights dim to a single soft column of gold, and Starlight steps into it.
She’s in her hero uniform, white and gold. Her eyes downcast while she held the mic to her chest.
“We’re..,” Starlight whispers. “defended by our heroes” her voice sings.
Mara closes her eyes, she knows the song already — Vought released it that morning, “Never Truly Vanish,” and it’s been playing on every radio station in the country… but hearing it live is something else entirely. Starlight’s voice climbs, aching and pure, and on the highest note she begins, very softly, to glow. Light rises off her skin like steam, gold and gentle, until she’s shining brighter than every trembling candle in the house put together, one true star above ten thousand plastic ones, and the choir comes in underneath her, and Mara stops even trying to hold it together. She sobs into Theo’s shoulder while a woman made of light sings a dead man into heaven, and she thinks, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
They get dinner afterward at the little Salvadoran place on the 9th that they have been promising to try for nearly a year. Tonight, neither of them has the energy to make another excuse and Theo claims all the crying earlier made him hungry.
The restaurant is half-empty and warm, steam on the windows, a muted TV in the corner replaying the memorial highlights on a loop. Homelander’s speech. Starlight glowing. The hashtag.
“Okay,” Theo says, tearing a pupusa in half, “big news. I was going to wait until the weekend, but.” He slides his phone across the table. “Read that.”
Mara wipes her hands and reads. Then reads it again. “Vought International — Financial Analyst, Corporate — final round interview.” She looks up. “Theo. Theo.”
“Thursday,” he says, grinning that lopsided grin she fell for three years ago at somebody else’s terrible birthday party. “Ten a.m. Fifty-second floor of the Tower. They flew my resume through two rounds in like a week and a half, Mar. The recruiter said — okay, she has to say this to everybody but — she said my case study was the best she’d seen this cycle!”
“Oh my God.” Mara grabs his hands across the table, nearly upending the curtido.
“The Tower.” You’d be working in the actual Tower. With the — do you think you’d see them? In the elevator or whatever?”
“I think the Seven probably have their own elevator,” Theo says, laughing. “But the benefits, Mar! Full dental. Tuition reimbursement — you could finally finish your nursing degree without us eating instant ramen for two years. There’s a — I looked it up — there’s a subsidized daycare on the eight floor. For, you know.” His ears go red. He pushes the food around his plate. “For employees. With, uh. Kids.”
Mara’s heart does a summersault. “Are you — Theodore Vega, are you talking about kids right now?”
“I’m talking about daycare infrastructure,” Theo says, with dignity, and then he smiles at her, soft and hopeful and terrified. “I’m talking about…someday. A someday that has a floor plan. Two bedrooms in Queens. You in scrubs, me in a tie. A kid with your laugh.” He turns her hand over and traces the lines of her palm with his thumb, a thing he does when he’s nervous. “And like a really ugly dog. That part’s non-negotiable.”
“Hideous,” Mara agrees, blinking hard for the second time today, for entirely different reasons. “The ugliest dog in New York.”
“We’ll go to the shelter and ask for their worst one.”
The world outside the steamed-up window has felt darker lately, everyone says so. The news is all supervillains now, terrorists with powers, cities on edge. Her mother calls every Sunday to say be careful out there, it's not like how it used to.
But here, with the TV replaying Starlight’s golden light and Theo’s thumb moving over her palm and a future with a floor plan, Mara thinks: it will never touch us. Things like that happened to other people, in other neighborhoods, on the news.
And even if — even if….that’s what the heroes are for. Sixty thousand candles can’t be wrong.
Theo pays the bill, over her objections, because soon-to-be Vought money, and they walk out into the cool night with their arms around each other, taking the shortcut towards the lot.
The shortcut is a mistake.
The alley between the shuttered print shop and the parking structure, the one streetlight at the far end burnt out, the security camera above the loading dock hanging by its cable, dead, vandalized months ago and never fixed. No windows. No people. Just dumpsters, wet cardboard, and — she’ll remember this detail forever, with a hatred so pure it scares her — a row of old Vought promotional posters pasted along the brick, sun-bleached and peeling. Homelander’s smile, blistered by the weather. Queen Maeve missing half her face where the paper has curled away. And under them, in flaking letters four feet high:
VOUGHT: BECAUSE HEROES WATCH OVER US ALL.
They’re thirty feet in when the four men peel out of the dark behind the dumpsters.
“Phones, wallets, jewelry.” The one in front has a knife, held low and casual, fidgeting with it like a pen. He’s young. They’re all young, hoods up, jittery, one of them bouncing on his toes. “Fast. Don’t be stupid.”
“Okay,” Theo says immediately, both hands rising, voice steady. “Okay, man, no problem. Nobody’s being stupid.” He moves — slowly, cautiously, in front of Mara, and hands over his wallet, his phone, his watch. “Mar. Babe. Give them your stuff.”
Her hands are shaking so badly it takes her three tries to get her ring off. She gives them everything — phone, purse, the thin gold chain from her grandmother, all of it, take it, take it — and for one second, one whole second, she believes it’s over, because that's how it works, right? You give them what they want and they run.
But the one with the knife is looking at her now. Up and down, slow, and his mouth curls, and something in the alley changes temperature.
“You know what,” he says, “I don’t think we’re done.”
“Damn,” one of the others says, laughing, circling wide to her left. “He’s right. Come here sweetheart, let me get a look at —”
“Hey.” Theo’s voice cracks like a whip, and he’s moving, putting his whole body between them and her, arms spread. “Hey, no. No. You got everything, you got it all, we’re walking away and you’ll never see us again —”
“Move,” the knife one says.
“Take the stuff and go,” Theo says, and he doesn’t move.
Afterwards, Mara sees it happen. It’s fast and it’s ugly and it’s nothing like TV — a shove, a scuffle of sneakers on wet asphalt, Theo grabbing a wrist, someone snarling: get him off me!, bodies colliding with the dumpster in a horrible hollow boom, and then Theo makes a sound… a short, punched-out huh, almost surprised.
He takes two steps back and sits down against the wall like his strings have been cut, both hands pressed under his ribs, and the blood comes through his fingers black in the dark.
“Oh shit,” says the one who’s been bouncing on his toes. His voice goes up an octave, a kid’s voice. “Oh shit, Rico, you— oh my God —”
And they run. All four of them, sneakers slapping, gone in five seconds, scattering into the dark like the whole thing never happened, leaving her grandmother’s necklace glittering on the wet ground where somebody dropped it.
“Theo.” Mara is on her knees without knowing. “Theo, hey, hey, look at me — oh God —” His jacket, his good charcoal jacket, is soaked through already, and when she presses her hands over his, the blood wells up between all of their fingers, impossibly burning. He’s trying to say her name. It comes out wet and clicking, and a thin dark line runs from the corner of his mouth.
“No no no, don’t — HELP!” Her voice tears out of her, huge in the empty alley, bouncing off Homelander’s peeling forty-foot smile. “SOMEBODY HELP US! PLEASE! SOMEBODY!”
And somebody comes.
She hears him before she sees him — a rhythmic slap-slap-slap of boots, fast, superhumanly fast — and then a figure blurs to a stop at the mouth of the alley, and Mara’s heart detonates with hope, because she knows him. She’s seen him on morning shows, on cereal — Streamline, the speedster, red and silver suit with the swept-back wings on the cowl, ranked somewhere in the C-list but a hero, an actual Vought hero, and every hour of her whole believing life comes out of her at once:
“Help us! Please — he’s been stabbed, please, he’s dying, please —”
Streamline looks at her, then at Theo, his eyes flickering down at the black lake spreading across the asphalt.
It takes maybe a second and a half, and in that second and a half Mara watches him do the math. That’s the only word for what happens on his face. His eyes flick up the alley — the dead camera, the dark windows, the nobody… and something in his expression simply closes, like a shop turning its sign around, and there is a tiny device in his ear and a voice in it that Mara can’t hear saying something about a location, about a bodega on Lafayette, about cameras rolling in six minutes.
“Sorry,” Streamline says, “There’s another crime I have to stop.”
Mara waits for the rest of it. There has to be a rest of it — a but, a hang on, a someone's on the way — because heroes don't just... they don't—
“What?” Mara’s voice doesn’t sound like hers. “No — no, wait, WAIT, he’s DYING, you can’t — PLEASE! PLEASE!”
But he’s already gone, a red-and-silver smear and a slap of displaced air, and the alley is empty again, and her fiance is drowning on the ground under a poster that says heroes watch over us all.
Theo’s breathing has gone terrible. Shallow, rapid, each inhale ending in a wet catch, like a straw at the bottom of a glass. His hands have stopped helping hers. His eyes find her face and hold onto it, and they are so , so frightened, and she realizes with a clarity like falling through ice that she is watching him understand that he is going to die, that the floor plan, and the ugly dog, and the kid… are all bleeding out through her fingers into a puddle behind a print shop, and no one is coming, no one was ever coming, and she can’t do one single thing about it except be here.
“Stay,” she sobs, forehead dropping to his. “Stay, stay, please, baby, stay —”
The streetlight at the mouth of the alley flickers.
She feels him before she sees him too — but it’s nothing like the speedster’s slapping boots. It’s the faint sound of wings flapping, and the pressure. A low, faint hum in her back teeth and breastbone, like standing under high-voltage lines. And when Mara lifts her head, there is a man standing three feet away, and she doesn't hear a single footstep.
He’s…ordinary, is her first hysterical thought. Not wrapped in a cape or stamped with a logo. A rumpled tan trenchcoat over a dark suit, his tie slightly crooked, dark hair slightly messy. In the weak spill of light from the streetlight, she can barely make out his face — and then he tilts his head, a small, precise, oddly birdlike motion, and she sees his eyes glint.
Blue.
They are too blue.
There’s nothing back there to reflect and they are catching light anyway. The hum in her bones is coming from him, she’s sure of it.
“Please help,” she whispers. It’s all she has. Theo’s breath rattles under her hands, slower now. “Please.”
The man in the trenchcoat looks at Theo, and something moves through his expression she couldn’t parse. He crouches, unhurried, coat pooling on the wet asphalt, heedless of the blood. He doesn’t tell her it’s going to be okay. He doesn’t say anything at all. He simply reaches out and lays two fingers, gently, in the center of Theo’s forehead.
There is no light. No sound, no wind, no shimmer, nothing like one of Vought’s blockbuster movies. There’s only a single moment where the hum in Mara’s bones deepens, one half-step down —
— and Theo gasps.
It’s a huge, whooping gasp, the gasp of a man surfacing from the bottom of a lake, and he lurches half upright, coughing, hands flying to his ribs — to the tear in his soaked shirt, to the smooth, whole, unbroken skin underneath. The blood is still everywhere. On his clothes, on her hands, splatter cooling on the pavement. But the wound is simply gone and Theo is breathing, staring down at himself and then up at her with his eyes enormous and wet and alive.
“Mara,” he says. Clear as a bell. “Mar, I — what —”
She makes a sound and grabs his face in both bloody hands, and for one second — one whole second — she takes her eyes off the stranger.
When she looks up to thank him, to fall at his feet, to ask his name so she can tell this story to her children someday, the alley is empty.
No footsteps. No red-and-silver blur. Not even the hum — just the ordinary night, the drip of a gutter, a siren three blocks over, sixty thousand battery-powered candles going dark all across the city.
Above them, Homelander’s sun-blistered smile peels quietly off the brick.