Chapter 185: An Arrest Needs Evidence. Counter-Terrorism Just Needs Coordinates.
Inside the sealed cabin of the car, Homelander's heat vision sat loaded behind his eyes, visibly close to firing.
The driver, hearing the growling coming from the back seat, asked carefully, "Boss, want me to change the destination?"
The question landed at exactly the wrong moment and reignited everything Homelander had been holding back.
He snapped around, finger jabbing toward the front seat. "Fuck off! Drive the car and shut your mouth! Say one more word and I'll crush your skull into the steering wheel!"
The fury filled the cabin entirely.
Homelander, in this moment, was a powder keg. Matthew was the flame steadily approaching it.
The flame hadn't actually touched the keg yet, but the heat radiating off it was enough to push the whole situation right to the edge.
Matthew glanced at the keg about to go off and ignored the outburst entirely. "Keep driving. No change in destination."
"And what this gentleman just said—" He paused. "Ignore it."
"You think I won't?" Homelander snapped his head around, locking onto Matthew.
Matthew smiled at that without answering directly. Instead, he reached into the car's minifridge, pulled out a cold beer, popped the tab, and took a slow, unhurried sip.
Once it went down, he picked the thread back up. "Mr. Homelander. Actually, I received another piece of information not long ago."
"A joint investigation between SHIELD and my company has found that approximately seventy percent of Vought's senior leadership has been secretly affiliated with an organization called HYDRA."
"You may not be familiar with HYDRA."
"That's fine. I can explain."
"HYDRA is an organization pursuing world domination through whatever means available."
"Its history traces back to World War II, where it began as a deep-cover research division under Nazi Germany before evolving into a global covert organization."
"It has spent decades infiltrating governments and institutions, using fear and instability to advance its political and military objectives."
"In short: it's an enemy of humanity as a whole. A genuine terrorist organization in every sense of the word."
"And not long ago, once Vought's leadership realized their cover was blown, they decided there was nothing left to lose."
"On one hand, they've hidden a portion of their roster of enhanced individuals, waiting for further instructions."
"On the other, they've directly released the enhanced individuals destabilized by Compound V, or who already had psychiatric issues to begin with, and turned them loose to cause damage worldwide."
"If I'm reading this correctly, you're about to get that call yourself, very soon."
As if scripted to confirm exactly that, the phone in Homelander's pocket rang.
"What are you waiting for? Answer it."
"Or is answering your own phone something someone else handles for you at the office?" Matthew added.
Homelander shot him a sideways glare, forced the rage back down, and pulled out his phone.
"Ikorela Joni" sat centered on the screen.
He stared at the name for a few seconds before finally answering. "Yeah—"
He didn't get a second word out before Ikorela's voice came through, frantic.
"John. Vought is finished."
"Someone inside the company blew the whole thing wide open."
"The illegal human experimentation, our objectives, the people backing us... they even dug up footage of you killing civilians, the cover stories on those incidents."
"It won't be long before agents claiming to be from SHIELD show up to take you in."
"Listen to me. Run."
"As long as you're alive, there's always another play."
"Because even with everything you can do, the evidence that's already public is enough to put you away for the rest of your life." Every word landed cleanly through Homelander's ear, tearing apart the last thread of any fantasy he'd had about coming out of this clean.
At the same moment, a news segment popped up on a screen mounted on the street outside, with perfect timing.
The sound carried through the window and straight into Homelander's ears.
[Breaking: Vought's "Seven" member Homelander has been exposed as a serial killer responsible for the deaths of hundreds. Evidence shows he deliberately allowed a passenger aircraft to crash in order to advance the Seven's bid for inclusion in national defense operations.]
Homelander turned sharply toward the sound, looking out through the window.
On the screen, footage was playing of him standing in a crippled airliner, threatening passengers that anyone who moved an inch closer would get reduced to ash by heat vision.
"Fu—" The word came out of him without him deciding to say it.
Only now did it fully land. He was actually finished.
There would be no place left in society for Homelander after this.
"...John? John!"
Ikorela's voice was still calling urgently through the phone, getting nothing back.
Matthew, sitting beside him and noting the prolonged silence, leaned toward the phone and answered for him. "Miss Joni. He doesn't seem inclined to talk to you right now."
"...Matthew Lawrence?"
"You recognized my voice. I'm flattered."
"Of course I did."
"As the company currently positioned as our most direct competitor, there's no version of this where I don't recognize your voice," Ikorela said, the words coming out through gritted teeth.
"Matthew Lawrence."
"If I had to guess, this is all your doing."
"Miss Joni, I have to say, that's a very large hat for me to wear."
"This is your own organization's exposure. How exactly does that land on me?"
Listening to Matthew's breezy denial, Ikorela let out a sharp scoff. "Drop the act."
"If it wasn't you, I genuinely cannot account for how that material got out."
"Maybe it was SHIELD's own agents?"
"Absolutely not." Ikorela dismissed it flat out.
HYDRA had assets embedded inside SHIELD itself. If an actual agent had been planted inside the company, leadership would have known.
Getting wiped out with zero advance warning meant only one thing in her mind: Matthew Lawrence had done this.
She took a breath, her tone dropping a register.
"Vought is finished in everything but name at this point. Are you really not going to give me anything?"
Matthew didn't take the bait.
To the outside world, his position remained consistently three words: I don't know.
Even though this had, in fact, been entirely his doing.
The person who'd actually pulled it off, however, hadn't been him directly.
It had been Miranda.
The former Mother Miranda.
A former enemy now operating entirely as his ally, fully under his control.
Though "under his control" wasn't physical. It was psychological.
Matthew had personally promised Miranda that if she cooperated, he would bring her daughter back, and that the child would remain with her permanently.
At first, Miranda had assumed it was a cruel joke at her expense. Then she watched, in person, as Matthew brought her daughter back to life in front of her, and then immediately took the child away and locked her up.
Whatever resolve Miranda had left collapsed in that moment.
What replaced it was a loyalty so total it had no remaining room for resistance. Matthew said east, she didn't go west. He said hit the dog, she never touched the chicken.
After a period of operative training, Miranda successfully embedded herself within Vought's leadership and steadily accumulated a substantial body of criminal evidence.
Today, she handed all of it over to Matthew, who passed it directly to SHIELD and the NYPD.
There's a reason people say it pays to stand under a big tree.
Once you have access to an organization like SHIELD, you make full use of it.
That's how things get done cleanly.
SHIELD and the NYPD, working jointly off the new evidence, launched an immediate full-scale investigation and coordinated arrest operation targeting Vought.
With an international terrorist organization like HYDRA in play, nobody was treating this casually.
Based on what had already surfaced, Vought's roster of enhanced assets extended well beyond the Seven. There were super-powered prisoners. There were enhanced serial killers being held in reserve.
Inside the car, Homelander finally pulled his eyes away from the screen outside.
In the moment he fully understood there was no walking any of this back, it felt, briefly, like the sky had come down.
And then, almost immediately after, something else replaced it. A lightness he had never experienced before.
It felt like shedding a set of heavy chains he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten the weight. Something close to being reborn.
If he'd been born in a cultivation novel, this would have been the moment for a dramatic declamation about shedding old shackles and finally understanding his true self, followed by ascension to some kind of godhood on the spot.
Unfortunately, this was America. There was no precedent here for reciting poetry your way into divinity.
In the car, having accepted that nothing about this was reversible, Homelander said nothing further. He simply reached up, tore the roof off in front of Matthew, and let his eyes flood with red.
A streak of light.
The screen still rolling coverage in the distance was sheared cleanly in half by the heat vision.
Once that was done, he turned back to Matthew, his smile gone fully unrestrained.
"Matthew Lawrence. Honestly, I should thank you."
"If it weren't for you, I'd probably never have understood how worthless all of it actually was. The applause. The flowers. The whole act I built my life around."
"And now that I've thrown all of it away, do you have any idea how light I feel?"
Homelander stood, pushing his upper body through the torn roof, letting the wind tear at his face unobstructed.
He had never, in his entire existence, felt wind make him feel this free.
"You want to know something, Matthew Lawrence?"
"Going through all of this, I finally get it. The flowers, the applause, all of it was fake."
"The only thing that was ever real—" His eyes flared red again, dangerous. "Was fear."
"I've decided. I'm going to make America feel it. No. I'm going to make the entire world feel it."
"I'm going to make sure every single one of them understands exactly what happens when you make a god angry."
He looked down at Matthew, still seated calmly beside him. "Of course, before I get to any of that, the first order of business is dealing with you."
"I've put up with you for long enough."
"So. Any last words?"
"Or better yet — how do you want to die?" His expression settled into that signature dangerous smile.
Matthew glanced up at the look on Homelander's face, an expression that suggested he wanted to eat someone alive, and didn't answer directly. Instead, he turned his attention to the driver. "Hey, Ford. You ready?"
Ford, feeling the pressure of whatever was building behind him solidify into something almost physical, took a breath and asked, with strained composure, "...Ready for what, Boss?"
"This." Matthew said it without further explanation.
The car door, doing seventy on the freeway, blew open with no warning, snapped outward by something invisible.
Ford's seatbelt shattered a half second later, and the same invisible force tore him bodily out of the driver's seat.
Before he hit anything, a sparking portal opened directly beneath him.
The next instant—
A wet thump.
Ford dropped through the portal and landed squarely on his own bed at home.
His timing, unfortunately, was not ideal. He landed directly in the middle of his wife and several of his girlfriends mid-card-game, producing a chorus of screaming.
Ford took this in with a moment of total silence.
Then: "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON IN HERE!"
Matthew, hearing the outburst echo out of the closing portal, let out a soft snort and shook his head, then turned back to Homelander.
"Your turn, Mr. Homelander."
"Ready?"
Cold wind poured in through the torn roof. The driver's seat sat empty, but the car kept going, unmanned, full speed down an empty highway.
Homelander looked down at Matthew, still relaxed in his seat, and spoke with open contempt. "Ready? Ready for what, a fresh set of clothes so you don't get blood on the ones you're wearing?"
Matthew shrugged. "Not quite."
"What you actually need to get ready is a few adult diapers."
"Because once I finish beating the shit out of you, you're going to need somewhere clean to go."
A provocative smile spread across his face, his eyes flaring red in matching response, and the coat he was wearing transformed in an instant into a sleek black armor that wrapped fully around him.
"What do you think? This setup's a step up from that discount uniform you're wearing, isn't it?"
Homelander absorbed the open taunt and laughed, genuinely furious now.
"Heh. Matthew Lawrence."
"I have to say, I didn't expect your mouth to back up half this much."
"Don't worry, though. Once I tear that mouth off your face, I'll get a good close look and confirm whether it's actually as tough as it talks." He laughed, a low ugly sound, and reached forward, fingers going straight for Matthew's throat.
Before his hand reached the target, a gauntleted hand sheathed in black armor closed around his own throat first, and in the same motion hauled him straight up into the sky.
At the same instant, the car underneath them was flattened to a sheet of metal by an invisible field of gravity and tossed off to the side of the road.
A burst of acceleration hit Homelander hard enough to white out his vision for a moment.
Before he could react, several portals tore open behind him in sequence.
By the time he managed to process anything at all, he was already standing in open space.
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