Chapter 184: Homelander, You Have the Right to Remain Silent, But Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You
Matthew hadn't raised his voice, but every word landed clearly for everyone in the room.
Pietro, who had still been working up to saying something, stopped completely. Whatever he'd been about to say evaporated.
Human experimentation on mutants.
The weight of that accusation, for mutants specifically, was not abstract.
It was enough to strip away every trace of the hero-shaped lens Pietro had been viewing Homelander through, and enough to kill any remaining interest in Vought, instantly.
Outside the window, Homelander stared at Matthew without blinking, his hands clasped behind his back trembling slightly without his permission.
In that moment, the picture became clear.
This man had been treating Vought as the opposition from the start.
He wanted Vought gone.
And along with it, the Seven. And him, personally. All in service of whatever he stood to gain from it.
This wasn't a spontaneous move. It had been in motion for a long time, carefully built toward exactly this.
And today, apparently, the pieces had come together.
Something in Homelander, for just a moment, considered dropping the act entirely.
Forget what the world thought of him.
Forget the spotless image. Forget the symbol of America. Forget the so-called Protector of the Nation.
One word covered it.
Kill.
If he just turned the heat vision loose on everyone in front of him, one by one, reduced them all to ash, the entire problem would resolve itself permanently.
In his mind, he'd already cut Matthew clean in half from the heat vision and was working through the screaming crowd below, painting the street red.
Then a voice pulled him back out of it.
He blinked, refocused, his blue eyes coming back into the present.
He hadn't actually done any of it.
He was, in the end, still Homelander.
The version of him that cared, intensely, about applause and flowers and what other people thought of him. The external gaze and the public narrative had become, somewhere along the way, the single most important thing in his life.
So once again, he swallowed it.
He forced a smile, took a breath, and turned back to Matthew, shaking his head with manufactured composure.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"And honestly... are you sure you've got the right person?"
Which, stripped of everything else, came down to a flat denial.
As a senior, core figure at Vought, he knew better than anyone how to keep public damage contained. He knew he needed an absolute denial, and that he needed to engineer his own complete distance from whatever was coming.
That way, even if Vought went down, he'd still be the Homelander everyone worshipped.
Even though, privately, he'd had some idea of what was happening behind the scenes at Vought for a while now. He knew Compound V hadn't come from anything resembling legitimate research.
Matthew's expression stayed completely flat at the denial.
"Mr. Homelander, whether we've got the right person isn't something you need to worry about."
"As for whether your 'no idea' is true or not—"
He shifted gears without warning.
"Mr. Homelander. I assume you're aware that human heart rate increases when someone lies."
"During deception, the brain releases additional adrenaline and cortisol to manage the perceived threat. That increase produces a faster heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and accelerated breathing."
"A moment ago, your heart rate and breathing both spiked briefly but noticeably."
"With your physiology, every organ system in your body operates at peak baseline regulation. Under normal conditions, a fluctuation like that shouldn't be possible for you."
"The only explanation that accounts for it is that you just lied to me."
Homelander: "..."
He had spent his entire career using exactly this method to determine whether other people were lying to him. It had never once occurred to him that someone might be able to use the same method on him.
It occurred to him even less that this particular man had sensory precision sharp enough to actually pull it off.
Matthew, met with silence, kept going. "You're welcome to keep denying it. Keep claiming you have no idea what Vought's been doing. Keep your hands clean."
"But." He let it land. "I should remind you, Mr. Homelander: you have the right to remain silent, but everything you say from here forward is admissible."
"I'm formally requesting, as a SHIELD advisor, that you submit to questioning."
"Now. Land."
Homelander's frustration at the tone was real, but there wasn't a single move available to him.
As long as he was still wearing the public face of America's Homelander, he could not afford a single visible misstep, and he absolutely could not be seen resisting a government agency in front of an audience.
With the Maximoffs watching, he flew into the building, landing on the ground floor with no further protest.
Once he'd touched down, Matthew turned to Pietro. "Pietro. Anything else you want to say to me?"
"...No. Nothing." Pietro shook his head.
What was there to say?
A minute ago he'd been genuinely weighing whether to join the Seven. Now Vought had just publicly detonated.
And not only that — Homelander himself, the literal face of the Seven brand, was about to be hauled off for questioning by Matthew personally.
Pietro was, at that exact moment, more grateful than he'd ever been that he hadn't acted on impulse and jumped straight into that particular fire.
Looking back, the man he'd thought was the legendary horse-trainer who'd finally recognized his worth had not, in fact, been that at all. He'd been a horse-meat dealer wearing the trainer's coat.
What that man had actually been interested in wasn't his talent. It was the meat on his bones.
"Since there's nothing else, remember to report to SHIELD on time tomorrow." Matthew gave Pietro's shoulder two light pats, then added one more thing.
"Pietro. One more thing, while I think of it."
"You'll officially be in the Avengers tomorrow, but in terms of where you actually work day to day, you're still Umbrella's employee."
"And the Avengers don't live a constant high-stakes action movie. Everyone on the team has their own life outside of it."
"Tony Stark, for example. Or Peter Parker. They both have their own things going on most days. The team only actually convenes when something major happens."
"So on a normal day, you're still coming back here for work."
"What you'll actually be doing day to day is Ada's call. Don't worry about that part."
With that settled, Matthew turned his attention back to Homelander.
"Mr. Homelander. From here, I'll need your cooperation with the investigation."
"...Sure." Homelander forced something resembling a smile and nodded.
What in the world had just happened.
The whole plan had been to use his recent power boost to deliver a calculated humiliation, to win back the dignity he'd lost with interest.
Instead.
Not only had he failed to recover one ounce of the dignity he'd lost, the man had effortlessly used legal authority to pin him to the wall.
This had been supposed to be his big comeback move. Instead he'd embarrassed himself spectacularly, right at Umbrella's front door, no less.
Homelander followed Matthew into the same elevator they'd ridden together the first time they met.
The same suffocating tension filled the cab. A few times, he started to say something, then caught sight of the cameras mounted in all four corners and swallowed it back down each time.
Matthew Lawrence.
Those cameras were the only reason he was still standing here.
If there hadn't been any surveillance, the version of him that existed off-camera would almost certainly have taken a swing right there in the elevator.
Then, afterward, he'd have flipped the story: claimed the other man struck first, framed the whole thing as self-defense.
Unfortunately for him, that particular play wasn't available this time either.
Homelander stood with his hands clasped behind his back, fists tightening until the knuckles cracked audibly.
The elevator stayed unbearably quiet.
After some time, Matthew finally spoke.
"John. What do you think happens to you once Vought goes down over this?"
The cab was tight enough, and Homelander's hearing sharp enough, that every syllable came through with total clarity.
Especially the name. John.
There was nothing resembling pleasure on Homelander's face when he heard it.
If anything, his fists closed tighter.
He'd been raised in a laboratory from infancy. The staff there had given him the name John, and it was the name the technicians used every single time they were about to begin a procedure on him.
Which meant the name John carried no warmth, no childhood comfort. It carried the laboratory's clinical indifference and a backlog of memories he'd spent years trying not to look at directly.
Matthew using it had landed precisely on the one nerve guaranteed to hit hardest.
He kept his eyes fixed on Matthew's back, expression dark, voice dropped to something that bordered on genuinely frightening.
"Matthew Lawrence. I don't know where you dug that name up."
"But I'm warning you. Don't use it again."
"I've already been more than courteous to you."
Matthew didn't react to the warning at all.
"What, are you actually considering taking a swing at me now?"
"You sure you can handle what comes after that?"
He turned around, smiling. "Do it now, and the case against you closes itself."
He knew Homelander too well for this not to land. A man this obsessed with preserving his own reputation would absolutely get angry over words. He would not, under any circumstances, throw away the entire polished image of himself over a moment of anger.
Their eyes met.
One smiling. One like a held frost.
That was when the doors opened.
Before either of them could take a step, a wall of reporters surged forward.
"Mr. Homelander, are you aware of what Vought has actually been doing behind closed doors?"
"...Was everything you've done up to this point part of a script Vought wrote for you?"
"Vought's senior leadership is being taken in for questioning. Any comment?"
"Is it true Vought has been conducting human experimentation on mutants?"
"If Vought collapses, will you go back to being an ordinary citizen?"
"Question—"
"Question—"
The questions came at him from every direction, openly hostile, some sharp enough that he genuinely considered stopping to put his fist through someone's face.
Instead, faced with a wall of flashing cameras from every angle, he swallowed it again.
"I can't speak to most of this, but I can tell you I had no knowledge of whatever Vought's been doing."
"If I'd seen the truth sooner, I would have done the right thing and exposed it myself, no matter who it hurt."
He delivered this directly to the cameras, full hero composure intact.
Matthew, listening to the performance, gave Homelander's shoulder a light pat and spoke at a volume calibrated for everyone present to hear clearly.
"Mr. Homelander. If you'll get in the car."
"You're still going to need to cooperate with the rest of this investigation."
"And while we're at it—"
"You can explain this footage to us too."
Matthew pulled out his phone. On the screen: Emily, handling the body disposal.
In the clip, Emily was dragging a heavy black body bag toward a vehicle, struggling with the weight. Before she got it loaded, a team of armed agents in full tactical gear closed in and surrounded her.
Faced with a half-dozen weapons aimed directly at her, the decision took her almost no time at all.
Hands on her head. Down on the ground. Waiting quietly for the cuffs.
And once she understood that Vought, mid-collapse, had no bandwidth left to protect her, Emily made the obvious calculation to save herself: she gave everything up, in full, about Homelander's history of killing candidates who failed his personal vetting.
In her account, Homelander was a complete fraud wearing a hero's face.
Warm and radiant for the cameras, vicious toward anyone who worked under him, capable of ending someone's life on a whim if his mood soured. By her account, there was nothing he hadn't done.
Listening to Emily's description of him play back on the phone, Homelander wanted nothing more than to launch straight up through the cloud layer, come back down at ninety degrees, and turn that disgusting woman into a smear on the pavement.
He glanced at the press pack still pushing cameras toward his face, forced another smile, and answered the room with something close to a joke. "Do I look like the kind of person who'd do that to you?"
Then, whether to escape the cameras or just to recompose himself, he got straight into the waiting car.
Inside, the driver was already there.
Matthew and Homelander took the back seat together.
As the car pulled away, every trace of expression dropped off Homelander's face completely.
"Matthew Lawrence. I'll admit it. You've actually managed to get under my skin."
"Mm. And?" Matthew said, unbothered, crossing one leg over the other.
"Same thing I told you before. You don't make a move, and the worst that happens is I take you in through the normal process."
"You do make a move, and this becomes a different conversation entirely."
He glanced over at Homelander.
A small motion of his fingers, and a portal opened. He pulled a cup of hot milk out of it.
"I looked into you, John. You've got a habit not many people know about."
"You like milk. So—"
A sharp crack.
Homelander knocked the cup out of his hand before he could finish the sentence.
The spilled milk reassembled itself mid-air inside a zero-gravity field and flowed back into the cup, which Matthew calmly set back down, looking entirely unbothered.
Homelander, by contrast, had a visible red glow behind his eyes.
"Matthew Lawrence! I warned you. Don't use that name again!"
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