Homelander scoured the ground below, his eyes flared red. Jude kept his head down and his hands over his ears, running with the rest of the crowd. He was just another terrified New Yorker fleeing the blast zone.
Every so often he glanced up, tracking Homelander's shape circling overhead.
Yeah, that's the face of a man who wants to find the masked freak and take him apart piece by piece.
Shame that guy's got nothing to do with me. I'm Jude. Upstanding citizen. Just a bystander who happened to be in the neighborhood when the sky exploded.
Homelander had been out cold for barely two minutes before he came up swinging. That was already enough time for the compound decoction, dosed and topped off with Jude's usual surgical precision, to hit the end of its clock. Underneath the ghostface mask, the borrowed face and body—the one built to pass as a Shining Light operative—twitched, warped, and dissolved back into his own features in the space of a few seconds.
The black robe and mask went first, snapping back into storage along with the rest of the disguise. A new outfit, mall-bought and forgettable, replaced it instantly. He took a sip from a small vial, and the two bullet wounds he had painted onto his hip and leg a half hour earlier vanished.
One more dose after that, and Jude finished the transformation into a soft, unremarkable, middle-aged man. He was utterly indistinguishable from the next fifty people running down the block.
The whole changeover took under ten seconds. A drop of water rejoining the ocean. He slipped away with the panicked crowd without breaking stride. No matter how wide Homelander's search pattern got, no matter how many buildings he tried to peel back with his eyes, it didn't matter. The man he wanted was on the ground the whole time, walking, same as everyone else.
Half an hour left on this batch. Ration it. There's more where that came from.
He checked his mental inventory as he walked. To keep the timing airtight, he had skipped the twelve-hour Deluxe version of the potion—Snape's own recipe, if the label was to be believed—in favor of the one-hour Express version instead. A thousand dollars a dose, two thousand for the pair. Cheap, as these things went.
Cheap being relative. That was the other reason he had gone with the budget option. He was running low.
A hundred and thirteen thousand asset points sounded like real money. It would have been, back when he first landed in Gotham with nothing to his name. These days, with the caliber of the people he was fighting, it barely stretched.
Still haven't landed anything you could call a real job in this world. Bad look, spending money hand over fist with nothing coming in.
The hush money Vought had quietly handed him, and whatever Butcher had kicked into the pool, didn't touch his actual asset points. Different ledger entirely. And unlike Central City, where he could get away with running a food cart in plain sight, that kind of visibility here was a liability. Vought had eyes everywhere. The last thing he needed was Vought clocking his face at a hot dog stand.
Is the CIA planning to pay me at some point, or am I supposed to just live off good intentions? Keep stalling and I might just take a job at Vought instead. Say what you want about them, at least the paychecks clear on time.
Still turning it over in his head, he let the crowd swallow him whole.
Ten minutes later, Homelander touched down at Vought Tower.
He changed out of his uniform, scrubbed off the dust and blood, and stared at the scars still healing across his skin. His lip curled.
"Goddammit. Goddammit! That Shining Light son of a bitch. Where the hell did he go? What in the hell was that thing he had?"
He paced the length of the room.
"And Superman. Why didn't he just grab me and fly us both clear? Why bother moving people out of the way and just let me eat pavement? Stupid. Absolutely, unbelievably stupid."
His phone rang. Madelyn.
"What happened out there today?" Her voice came through the speaker, flat and direct. "How did you end up in the state you're in, and who did this to you?"
Homelander stared at the wall. He didn't answer.
"Come up to my office," Madelyn said, when the silence stretched too long. "We'll sort this out properly."
Back at the scene, Clark and Maeve stayed long enough to see Vought's cleanup crew roll in before heading back to the Tower themselves. They gave a short debrief on what had happened, then split off in different directions.
"That whole thing was seriously bizarre," Maeve said to Clark on the way out. "But that's above our pay grade. Let the higher-ups sort out the details. Drink?"
"No." Clark shook his head. "A drink now and then is one thing. A habit isn't. Besides, I had the company put in a private gym for me. Figured I'd try to actually feel something for once. Sweat. Muscle burn. The whole experience, while I'm still... like this."
Maeve had no idea what he meant by like this, so she let it go. "You're disciplined. I'll give you that."
"I know someone a lot more disciplined than me," Clark said. "Doesn't smoke. Barely drinks. Diet's locked down to the gram. Trains and drills every single day, sleep schedule down to the minute. Runs like clockwork. Not a single loose part in him anywhere. I don't think I've ever seen the guy actually relax. Laughs less than most people do, too."
"Seriously? There are people out there that intense?"
"There were." Clark looked down at the floor. "He's not in this world anymore. He was one of the people I admired most."
Maeve's mouth set in a tight, quiet line. She didn't push it.
Clark said his goodbyes and headed for the gym. Working out wasn't the point. He needed a private room to reach Jude and find out exactly what had happened tonight, and why.
Maeve gave up on the bar idea entirely. Ever since joining Vought, her actual training hours had shrunk year over year, crowded out by everything else the job demanded of her. These days she barely managed an hour a day sparring with hired muscle at the gym. Since none of them were supes, it barely counted as training anymore. More like recess.
Whatever. Might as well go hit the mats, she thought. I've burned through half my sparring partners this month. Need to put in a new hiring order.
Unseen by either of them, back in Madelyn's office, Homelander lay stretched across the sofa, his head pillowed in her lap. His eyes were soft and glassy.
Madelyn did not break her routine. She unzipped her blouse, her hands steady and practiced. She stroked his hair, settling him down.
Off to the side, Madelyn's infant started to wail from the bassinet, furious at having her meal taken away.
"So," Madelyn said, not glancing toward the crying, "what happened today? Who could possibly get to you, and get away clean, with Superman standing right there?"
Homelander answered around a mouthful. His voice was heavy, sulking. "Shining Light bastard. Had to be a supe. I saw his face. The mask, I mean. But I don't know a damn thing about where he came from. Superman couldn't even place him."
He pulled back slightly. "I will rip that mask right off him." His voice steadied into an even cadence. "We will find him. We will kill him."
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