Chapter 157: Matthew: The Elevator's Too Slow. Why Not Take the Window?
Translucent stepped through the gap the cat had opened and walked in.
The office was exactly what he'd been expecting from the corridor: the same medieval English manor aesthetic, all the way through. Dark wood, period furniture, the kind of space that cost money to look this effortlessly old.
Matthew had always liked the style. Even after Salvatore Moreau had done his best to demolish the place some months back, the renovation had restored it exactly as it was. Same layout, same pieces, same feel.
Translucent let his eyes move around the room and felt something grudging surface.
Didn't expect the rich kid to have taste.
Then he spotted something that didn't fit.
What exactly is the chairman of Umbrella Corporation doing with children in his office?
He looked at Sherry Birkin, Nikki, and Eveline, who were sitting on the floor in the middle of a Monopoly game and paying no attention to anything else in the room. His mind started going somewhere he would not have put in writing.
Does Matthew Lawrence have some kind of... hobby involving minors?
Translucent was still working through this thought when Eveline, who functioned as a permanent psychic early-warning system and had been running continuous background scans for exactly this kind of intrusion, looked up from the board.
She didn't look at the space Translucent was standing in. She looked straight through it, across the room, directly at Matthew.
"Boss," she said, without any particular preamble. "There's a transparent idiot in your office who clearly doesn't value his own life."
"I've been in his head. He's with Vought's Seven. He came to search your office while you were out, looking for anything he could use against Umbrella or against you personally."
"As for the miniature camera he brought to document whatever he found..." Eveline's eyes had gone white at the edges, reading. She paused. Her expression shifted to something that belonged on a face that had just bitten into something wrong.
"...he stored it in his rectum."
"So. Boss. Do you want me to cook his brain from the inside?"
The white in her eyes brightened.
Translucent discovered in the next second that his body had largely stopped responding to him. Under Eveline's control, he was becoming visible, the transparency bleeding away piece by piece.
Before he came fully into view, Eveline reached over and pulled the blanket off the sofa, draping it over his lower half. The children didn't need to see that.
The moment Translucent registered what the girl had just calmly offered to do to his brain, his heart went into something irregular and all the words he might have said vacated his head entirely.
Matthew, who had been working through documents at his desk, looked up at the sound of Eveline's voice. He took one flat look at Translucent, set the file down, and addressed Eveline.
"Not necessary."
"When you cook a brain, the tissue fluid comes out through the nose. That gets on the floor and then someone has to clean the floor."
"Since he's a visitor from our old friends at Vought..." Matthew's tone had the pleasantness of someone who has already decided what's going to happen. "Let's just send him back the way he came."
Translucent let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding. The fear in his expression shifted toward something that looked like relief. Something that looked almost like gratitude.
That lasted about three seconds.
Because Matthew's finger moved, and a window opened.
"Though the elevator does feel like a slow option. I think this is more direct."
The gratitude in Translucent's face went somewhere else very quickly.
Then he realized his mouth still worked.
"Wait! Wait! Matthew Lawrence!"
"I have something to say! Let me finish!"
Eveline did not particularly care what he had to say. She moved him toward the window at a calm, steady pace.
"Matthew Lawrence, you can't kill me!"
"I broke the law here, I'll admit that. But the law is how you deal with that. I should be handed over to the authorities!"
He tried the legal angle. He watched the faces in the room receive it and understood immediately that the legal angle was not going to do anything useful here.
The panic that followed was total.
"Matthew Lawrence! I'm a member of Vought's Seven! You kill me and Homelander will come after you personally!"
"When he does-" He stopped mid-sentence. He could feel his forward movement accelerate.
His approach changed. "Wait! Mr. Lawrence... Mr. Lawrence, sir!"
"No Chairman! Chairman, sir! I made a mistake, I genuinely made a mistake!"
"Please. A man of your standing doesn't hold a grudge against someone as small as me. Just let me go!"
His voice had developed a quality it hadn't had before. His body was sliding toward the window whether he wanted it to or not, one slow inch at a time, and he could feel every inch.
The wind reached him before the window did. A low roar pushing in around the frame.
"I'm nobody! Vought made me do this!"
"They said if I didn't come and get the footage, I was out of the Seven!"
"I have dependents, okay, I don't actually have dependents, but I have a cat!"
"I can see you're a cat owner too. You understand what it does to a cat when its owner doesn't come home!"
His toes found the windowsill. The blanket around his lower half was making a sound in the wind.
"A man of your generosity can afford to let this go!"
"I'll be a double agent for you!"
"Everything Vought has planned against Umbrella and the Avengers, I'll tell you all of it!"
"They didn't just send me here to dig up material on Umbrella and on you. They're going after the other Avengers too. Looking for anything they can use to damage all of them!"
He was trying to grab onto something. His body wasn't cooperating with any of it.
"Please, Chairman Lawrence!"
"I swear I will never set foot in this building again for the rest of my life!"
"I won't even come down this street! I'm leaving right now, I'm going straight back to Vought and I'm never—"
He stopped talking.
Half of him was already outside the window. Ninety-two floors down, the street was a distant line of geometry and miniature movement, and his heart had done something final and stopped.
Eveline had not changed her pace.
In the middle of his screaming, his legs pushed off.
He went out like a torpedo.
"Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!!" Translucent screamed it at the open sky above him, at full volume, at nobody.
Eveline had let go. His body was his again.
That was not the improvement it sounded like.
The paralyzed half-conscious freefall of a moment ago had been terrible in the abstract. Being fully present for this, feeling every detail of the drop with complete physical clarity, was something worse entirely.
His brain was running very fast.
At the far end of the street he caught sight of the Vought building.
Homelander. Homelander was in there right now. Had to be.
Homelander had superhuman hearing.
From this distance, a full-volume scream would reach him in an instant. That was physics.
Something in Translucent's chest made a sound like a lighter catching.
No hesitation. He opened his throat.
"Homelander! Help! Homelander !"
And exactly as he'd calculated, the figure inside the Vought conference room didn't wait. Homelander punched through the glass exterior wall and came at him fast.
When Translucent saw him coming, something in him settled.
Locked in.
At that speed, Homelander would catch him well before he hit the ground. Easy.
In the seconds while he waited, he was already constructing the plan. The story. If he survived this, he went directly to the press. He'd go on record with the full account: Umbrella Corporation had abducted him, he'd been slated for human experimentation, he'd fought his way free and made the only choice left, threw himself from the roof rather than submit, and Homelander had pulled him out of the air. Clean narrative. Witness. Survivor testimony. That alone would be enough to bring Umbrella down.
He was still working through the details of his own future media appearances when it happened.
An enormous weight dropped onto him from nowhere.
Gravity. Wrong direction. Completely without warning.
His velocity doubled in the space of a blink.
Then the street arrived.
The sound was not loud. It was flat, and wet, and immediate.
Homelander, who had been half a second behind, came down into what was left of Translucent and wore it.
The splatter was thorough. Even at the speed he'd been moving, the coverage was comprehensive. There was a tooth in his hair.
Homelander looked at what was on the ground. At what was on him.
His expression said nothing and everything at the same time.
He had seen the acceleration. The moment the fall had stopped being a fall and become something directed. That was what had caused him to miss.
Which meant someone had done that deliberately.
Someone had been watching.
He stepped back twice and pulled his foot out of what had been Translucent.
He raised his eyes to the Umbrella building standing in the sunlight across the street.
It didn't take long. Top floor. A hand extending from the open window, just visible against the light.
The hand noticed him looking.
It gave him the middle finger.
"...Fuck."
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