Nobody stays good all the time.
An old instructor of hers had said it once: doing one good thing isn't hard. Doing nothing but good things, for an entire lifetime, without a single exception, is the part nobody actually manages. Sometimes it's necessity. Sometimes you run out of room. Sometimes you pick whichever bad option does the least damage. A person only has so much strength to spend. Being good for one day doesn't buy you a permanent membership.
Sometimes the world grinds a person down until bad is the only option left.
Ever since signing with Vought, Maeve had leaned on that logic to get through the days. Padding a business deal was just making a living. The product wasn't bad enough to actually kill anyone. Helping Homelander stage a scene was just closing out a job. The men who ended up dead were criminals anyway, and criminals had it coming. Looking the other way when a colleague crossed a line was just going along to get along. They were heroes, after all. Their particular brand of ugly wasn't hers to police.
Either way, I'm still a hero.
Ten years of telling herself that, and the lie finally ran out of road.
Maeve looked over a cabin full of wide, staring eyes and white knuckles. Every face begged their hero to be exactly what the word promised.
Homelander's voice cracked out behind her.
"Everybody back the hell up! Back up, or I swear to God I light up this whole cabin with my eyes! I will burn every single one of you to ash!"
The volume drove the crowd backward. Even the biggest men near the front flinched and scrambled clear. Everyone on the plane understood what those two points of red in Homelander's eyes could turn into. Nobody wanted to find out what getting sliced in half actually felt like.
The hero I grew up watching. Standing right there, a cold-blooded, feral thing that hates the people it's supposed to protect.
Or maybe that's always been what he was, and hero was the mask the whole time.
Maeve stepped forward. She planted herself between Homelander and the crowd.
"Don't be an idiot. No reason to die with the rest of them." The tight lines in Homelander's face relaxed as he looked at a fellow member of the Seven. "Let's go."
There it is. My exit. Can't fly on my own, sure, but grab hold of him and I walk away from this fine.
She almost laughed out loud.
A week ago, me? I'd have torn myself apart over this. Guilt for days. And I'd have taken his hand anyway.
Nothing wrong with that, really. Most people would do exactly the same thing in my shoes.
She shook her head.
But I'm not most people. I'm supposed to be a hero.
Funny how much practice I've had lately at being a coward instead.
Almost had myself convinced, too.
"I'm not coming with you," she said.
Whatever Homelander had been expecting, it wasn't that. The muscles in his jaw worked. His upper lip twitched, baring the edges of his teeth. The skin around his eyes tightened.
We've both been the face of this company for years. Now you're the hero, and what's that make me? Who am I supposed to be if I'm not standing next to you?
He didn't wait for an answer. The red in his eyes flared, bright enough to cast a scarlet glow across the rows of seats.
A hard gust of turbulence rocked the plane. Everyone staggered on their feet. Homelander blinked. The red faded out, his eyes returning to normal.
Torch the whole cabin, and salvage crews are going to have questions nobody wants answered. Too many bodies burned the exact same way.
Homelander's gaze moved to Maeve. Her arms remained wrapped around a mother and her daughter.
"Your call. Your funeral." He drifted backward out through the gap in the fuselage, unhurried.
"Maeve, Queen Maeve, there has to be something you can do!"
"You're a hero! You can save us!"
"Please. I don't want to die."
Maeve swallowed. Her throat felt tight. "I'm sorry. I can't. I can't fly."
"I can hold onto this little girl, take the impact myself when we hit. If she's lucky, that might be enough to save her." She paused. "But realistically, even for me, surviving a fall from this height isn't likely. Everyone should probably call their families now."
Both wings flashed bright orange. A deafening crack tore through the fuselage. Both pilots collapsed against the console in the cockpit.
"That's it. That's it, we're finished. Engines are gone too."
The screaming stopped. All that was left was quiet crying, and the soft, scattered sound of people dialing numbers with shaking hands.
Maeve held the girl against her chest. Her eyes locked on Homelander's shape overhead. He was already shrinking to a speck against the sky.
A second speck cut across the first.
Homelander's voice drifted down through the open hatch.
"Superman! What the hell do you think you're doing?!"
"Superman?! He's back, Superman came back!"
Did he come back to actually save us?
The next second answered that.
"Maeve, get the pilots to the middle of the cabin, seal every hatch, now!"
A shape streaked past the window and vanished beneath the plane.
Metal shrieked. The plane's freefall began, slowly, to ease off.
Maeve moved. She pulled the rear hatch shut until the locking mechanism caught. Up front, both pilots scrambled out of the ruined cockpit and back through the cabin. They threw their weight against the forward hatch. With both ends closed, the roar of the rushing wind dropped to a muffled hum.
A wave of heat radiated through the cabin. A thin line of molten red sheared straight through the nose of the aircraft. The ruined cockpit section fell away, dropping toward the sea. Two more precise cuts followed, slicing through the wing mounts. Both dead engines came free and fell.
Clark dusted his hands off in midair. He dropped back down beneath what was left of the fuselage.
"Strip enough weight off, and the field should hold it steady. Should." He dove back under and pressed upward.
Steel groaned again. But this time, Superman didn't punch straight through the hull. The force he used spread out evenly across the underside of the fuselage. It held the weight without tearing the metal apart.
A second shape closed in fast from above.
Homelander watched Clark hold the plane steady. His eyes ignited. Two beams of crimson light lanced out.
"Superman! Don't you dare wreck this for me!"
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