Madelyn's feelings for Homelander were nowhere near as intense as his infatuation with her. If anything, there was reluctant self-sacrifice in the way she handled him.
That framing might be a hard sell, given where she had landed. Vice President of Hero Management, with a real shot at Stan Edgar's own chair if the military integration bill ever cleared committee. For a woman in her late forties who had fought tooth and nail to reach that height inside a company like Vought, calling any of this a sacrifice was a stretch. Measured against everything she had already spent to get here—the tactics, the leverage, whatever conscience she had traded away along the road—nursing Homelander through one of his moods barely registered as a cost at all.
Was it even fair to call it that? A few words, deployed correctly, could steer his reactions perfectly. Years of careful conditioning kept Vought's single most valuable asset tethered to her approval, obedient without ever quite knowing he was managed. For a price this small and a return this enormous, sacrifice wasn't the word.
Harvest was the word.
But for her, in the room, in this exact moment, it was agonizing.
She stroked his hair. Her gaze fixed on him. She ignored the baby crying in the bassinet a few feet away, every bit of her attention locked on Homelander alone.
The truth is, I'm just too afraid to turn my head.
A dreamy, sated look settled over Homelander's face. This twisted comfort had been going on for years. Since the day he walked out of the lab and into the title Homelander, Madelyn had been the single fixed point in his world.
Edgar had told her himself, back when this started. "Homelander is going to be our most profitable asset. You'll be the one handling him."
Raised as a lab specimen with no real childhood to speak of, Homelander never had much chance at a stable personality. Dr. Vogelbaum, who built him, hadn't gone out of his way to fix that. Not back then, anyway.
Vought, for their part, couldn't have been happier. What they needed wasn't a stable hero. They needed something devastatingly powerful wrapped around a personality soft enough to shape. With the right mix of conditioning and affection, that kind of asset did whatever it was told. No questions. No conscience required. As for real danger to the talent—the kind that used to come with the job, once upon a time—that particular risk had quietly disappeared from the hero business sometime around the end of World War II.
Madelyn had done a brilliant job of it. In her own way, she really was Stan Edgar's best possible successor.
So what had it actually cost her?
"Shh. Easy. Easy now." She smoothed his hair back, watching his profile. Homelander stayed lost in his own quiet, greedy comfort, utterly unaware of what was going on behind her eyes.
This grown, godlike man, raised from infancy in a laboratory, still carried an infant's raw and bottomless hunger for exactly this.
Looking at him, Madelyn felt none of it back. No warmth. No affection.
What she felt, looking at the shape of his arm beneath the uniform, was the certainty of monstrous strength coiled just under the surface. Strength that, with no ill intent at all, a half-second of excitement, could tear her apart. So she never let him get too excited. Ever.
Those pale, narrowed eyes could flare red without warning. If his gaze so much as flickered wrong, that heat could cut straight through her. Every second of eye contact with Homelander required flawless, exhausting balance.
His hearing was sharp enough to catch her pulse and every hitch in her breath. She couldn't afford to let fear show, not for a second. She trained herself, over and over, to talk her own body down. She forced her heartbeat, her breathing, and the sweat on her palms into something that passed for calm.
His eyes could see straight through walls. The mask never came off, not anywhere in the building. No muttering to herself. No secrets kept anywhere he might look. No visible warmth shown toward anyone else. Not a coworker, not even her own infant son. The smallest flicker of tenderness aimed at somebody who wasn't him was enough to trigger a jealous rage she had no interest in testing.
She could have Lamplighter quietly removed from the Seven. She could force Starlight into a costume redesign skimpy enough to double as a swimsuit ad. She ran half the building by force of will. And there was exactly one person in it she never, under any circumstances, dared to truly provoke.
She could frustrate him. She could never really cross him. She could veto his plans. She could never punish his defiance. She could soothe his temper. She could never let him within arm's reach of the rest of her actual life.
Every time she shared a room with Homelander, one wrong step meant being torn apart.
Beast. Monster. That was the honest version of how she saw him. He could, on any given afternoon, wipe New York off the map if the mood struck him. There wasn't a single reliable piece of conscience in him that could be counted on to stop it. Angering him wasn't a business risk. It was provoking something with claws.
She had run that exact scenario in her head more times than she could count. It gave her more nightmares than she could count, too. Madelyn had been living inside that fear for more than a decade.
Which was exactly why, the moment Superman showed up, she had people reach out to him immediately. She pushed hard to get him into the Seven as fast as possible. She needed room to breathe. More than that, she needed someone with enough sense left in them to actually stop Homelander if he ever truly turned on them.
Clark, coming out of the gym, wasn't expecting the reception waiting for him. Not from a man who, a few days back, had been squaring up to teach him a lesson.
It was The Deep. Imposing to look at, but entirely fragile underneath.
"Hey, uh, sorry about that thing before, man." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Said some stuff in the moment I didn't really mean. We're teammates, no need for bad blood, right?"
"I don't hold grudges." Clark's voice carried no warmth. "Also, heard Starlight already chewed you out for it. Maybe take the hint. Learn some respect."
The Deep's face fell.
"Right. Right, cool, cool." He forced a laugh. "So, you keeping busy lately?"
"No. Madelyn hasn't given me anything to do." Clark studied him. "If you've got something to say, say it."
"I've got an idea. More like, something I want to actually do myself, for once. About Oceania." The Deep's voice steadied, a trace of sincerity creeping into his tone. "I want to do something that actually matters."