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The farmhouse hadn’t been empty long enough for the earth to begin reclaiming it in soft ways. Moss still crept over the railing of the porch. Ivy wound itself lovingly around the fence posts and mailbox as though trying to keep the old place warm. The windows, dark and unblinking, reflected a thousand cold stars from the Pennsylvania sky, each pane shimmering faintly like black water disturbed by air.
No moon hung overhead that night. The heavens had opened without it, vast and endless, the darkness richer for its absence. Stars crowded every inch of the sky, scattered in impossible abundance above the sleeping fields. They burned silver-white over the long grass and the rows of abandoned corn stubble, over rusted machinery left beside the barn, over the orchard where apples had fallen weeks ago and now sweetened slowly into the earth.
The farmhouse stood alone among the rolling green acres, its shape gentle against the horizon. A place built for lamplight and supper and muddy combat boots left by the door. A place where curtains had once blown blue in the evenings. Now the curtains hung still and faded behind the dusty glass, untouched by human hands, while the night rested itself against the siding.
The fields whispered constantly.
Dry grass blew beneath the cool wind with the sound of distant rain. Crickets in their endless songs carried into the silence. Somewhere far beyond the grass, a creek moved over stones with a sleepy trickle. The stars seemed lower here than anywhere else. Close enough to gather in one’s palms like frostwater. The Milky Way stretched overhead like flour dusted across dark wooden countertops, so soft.
The old barn leaned slightly westward under the weight of years, its weathered boards silvered pale beneath starlight. An owl rested in the rafters, silent. In the nearby pasture, tall weeds swayed around the skeleton of an old tire half-sunken into the ground.
Everything carried the ache of abandonment; as though the house had once loved being lived in and had never quite realized it stopped.
The scorch marks began at the front door.
Not beside it, or near it, but directly beneath the threshold itself, as though something terrible had stepped out from the house and split the earth open on its way into the night. They ran side by side down the porch in two perfect blackened lines, old wooden boards cleaved clean through, half the porch reduced to charcoal and splinters that still crumbled softly beneath the wind. The railing nearest the marks had vanished entirely, not broken but erased, leaving only warped, spiky nails protruding from blackened timber.
Even under starlight the burns seemed darker than the rest of the world. The farmhouse remained pale beneath the heavens, silvered by the endless scatter of stars, but those twin scars absorbed all light that touched them. Their surfaces were brittle and cracked like cooled volcanic stone. Frost would never grow there again. Grass would never return.
The marks cut through the yard with violent precision.
Wildflowers surrounding them had become gray dust months ago. Fence posts nearest the path stood warped inward, melted by unimaginable heat. The great maple tree beside the drive bore a permanent wound along one side, bark peeled away in curling black ribbons. One entire half of its branches remained dead and skeletal even in springtime.
Yet beyond the destruction, the countryside lived on undisturbed.
Crickets still sang in the weeds.
Wheat still bowed in the distant fields.
Stars still glittered overhead in unbearable numbers across the moonless Pennsylvania sky.
The contrast made the scars feel unnatural, like a tear in reality itself rather than simple fire. The twin burns continued through the grass in an arrow-straight line toward the driveway.
No wandering. No staggering. Whatever had made them had moved with absolute purpose.
Ash lay thick along the trenches, soft as the snowfall when they were made. Here and there, fragments remained embedded in the dirt; melted glass blown out from living room windows, twisted bits of fencing, something that may once have been stone but now resembled cooled obsidian. The earth beneath the marks had hardened into strange rippling textures, frozen as though the ground itself had briefly become liquid… and then, abruptly, the destruction just… stopped.
At the edge of the driveway, the scorch marks ended so suddenly it unsettled the eye. One moment the earth was blackened ruin, the next untouched gravel glimmered beneath the stars as peacefully as the rest of the farm road. There was no gradual fading of heat, no diminishing trail… it just stopped.
The silence around that place felt different. Not the gentle silence of rural midnight; not the sleepy hush of fields and distant woods, but a silence that pressed inward against the ears. The wind avoided the scorched path. Grass at its edges bent away from it no matter which direction the breeze traveled. Even insects refused to cross the blackened lines. Fireflies drifted over in wavering gold lanterns but vanished before reaching the burns, turning elsewhere.
The old place seemed wounded by the marks, as though they had not merely torn through wood and soil but through memory itself. Something had happened here that the land could not digest. Something so violent the earth still carried its shape long after the heat had gone, leading nowhere, ending nowhere, waiting like an open grave.
Sitting upon what remained of the front steps was a man who looked less like a survivor and more like part of the ruin itself.
He occupied the narrow strip of porch untouched by the twin scorch marks, one foot resting on a lower step that had long ago cracked down the middle. The wood beneath him sagged softly with age and weather, but he barely seemed to notice. He sat with the stillness of someone who had forgotten movement mattered.
His white T-shirt had once fit properly, perhaps even neatly, but now it hung loose against his frame, wrinkled and weather-stained. Old blood had dried into the fabric in broad rust-coloured blooms across the ribs and shoulder, soaked so deeply into the cotton it no longer resembled fresh violence, only permanence. The jeans he wore had been bloodied, were faded at the knees and streaked with dirt and ash from and grime months spent too close to the earth.
He looked exhausted in ways sleep could never repair.
Not merely tired, but worn hollow. Like grief and time had scraped him down to the barest version of a person and then just kept going.
His blonde hair had grown out badly over the months, pale gold giving way to uneven brown roots. At some point, perhaps weeks ago, perhaps yesterday, he had just cut it himself with shaking hands before a cracked mirror somewhere inside the farmhouse. Jagged sections stuck upward awkwardly around his crown while others fell unevenly across his forehead. One side near the ear had been hacked much shorter than the other. It looked ridiculous.
Summer wrapped the countryside in warmth now. Cicadas sang from the trees. Long grass shifted silver-green beneath the stars. Fireflies drifted lazily over the fields like wandering embers, but the man still carried winter upon him.
You could see it in the stiffness of his shoulders. In the way his hands remained tucked beneath his arms even in waning August heat, as though memory alone kept him cold.
After all…. it had happened in winter.
One could imagine the snow then; enormous drifts gathered against the beautiful porch railings, frost silvering the dead fields, breath clouding pale into the night air. The twin scorch marks had erupted across the frozen ground with impossible heat, turning snow instantly to steam. Perhaps the stars had looked just as vile then. Perhaps the farmhouse had screamed beneath the violence of it all as sections caught fire, and somehow, through all the months since, he had never truly left those steps.
The seasons had changed around him instead. Rain had come and gone. Spring mud had softened the fields. Wildflowers had bloomed and died. The apple trees were red with green summer leaves while the man remained seated beside the blackened scars in the earth and fell to the ground.
His eyes lifted occasionally toward the horizon. Blue eyes. Not bright like polished glass nor pale like ice, but the blue of a Pennsylvania summer sky moments before dusk fully settles; deep, endless, touched by exhaustion at the peak of his world. They carried the same openness as the fields themselves, something vast but wounded and impossible to entirely look away from. The kind of blue that belonged to July evenings and old denim and forgotten gingham linens. Yet now they seemed faded by too many sleepless nights beneath the stars.
There was ash gathered beside his feet. Burned grass clung to the porch around him, the moss there had been crawling toward him. The farmhouse loomed silently at his back like a body too large to bury. Still, every so often, the man would glance toward the end of the scorch marks where they vanished at the driveway, just waiting… As though part of him believed that if he kept watch long enough, the thing that had disappeared there might someday return and explain why it left him behind.
When he looked at the stars, he did not think of wonder anymore… Not really. Other people looked upward and saw eternity, destiny, maybe even heaven. He was a god, or used to be, at least. They saw romance in the constellations and poetry in the endless dark, something he didn’t have anymore, and now the stars above the farmhouse had become mirrors to him; cold, distant things burning themselves empty simply because they did not know how to stop, and maybe he didn’t either.
He sat motionless on the ruined steps while summer wind moved through the fields around him, carrying the scent of clover and warm earth and old ash. Above, the Pennsylvania sky stretched on forever without a moon, every star his only light source, his only reflection onto his life, where looking up only meant all he could even think about was everything he had once been. The memory came not in pieces but in flashes of unbearable, awful clarity; cameras exploding white against his vision. Crowds screaming his name until entire stadiums trembled with it. Velvet ropes. Flashbulbs. A gold gilded penthouse suite glowing above the skyline of New York City. Limousines he didn’t need to take, slick with rainwater beneath neon signs and billboards with his face on every turn. Hands, dirty civilian, gross little hands reaching for him from behind barricades like believers desperate to touch a saint.
Fame so enormous it had ceased feeling real years before he gave it up. He had possessed the kind of stardom that devoured ordinary life whole. The world had bent around him effortlessly then. Producers, reporters, strangers, paparazzi, everyone wanting something, everyone offering more in return. Money without limits. Power without consequence. A face printed across movie posters.
The entire world once waited for him to speak… Now there was only silence. Silence and this farmhouse rotting quietly beneath the stars.
His gaze drifted toward the driveway where the twin scorch marks ended abruptly at the gravel’s edge. Beyond them, faint beneath layers of dust and weather, old tire marks still scarred the earth. Burnt black rubber from an old Cadillac stretched crookedly where the gravel met pavement, fossilized into the road itself.
The tire marks looked almost pathetic beside the impossible violence of the scorched earth, yet somehow they disturbed him more. They were human. Understandable. Someone slamming the accelerator hard enough to spit gravel into the winter night. Someone trying to leave.
The road beyond the driveway disappeared into darkness between the rolling hills, telephone poles stretching endlessly beside it like thin wooden crosses. No headlights had passed there in months. Vought had stopped sending anyone after spring.
People in nearby towns still talked, maybe, maybe about the celebrity superhero who vanished from the world overnight and was rumored to be dead, institutionalized, or hiding somewhere overseas beneath another name. Sometimes teenagers drove out here after midnight hoping for ghosts or stories. They never stayed long. The silence frightened them. The stars frightened them more. Someone died after throwing rocks at the old house, they’d heard. None of them dared to try.
The supe lowered his eyes again.
His hands rested loosely between his knees, scarred knuckles pale in the starlight. Once those hands had signed contracts worth millions. Once they had waved from red carpets while strangers wept at the sight of him. Once they had held crystal glasses beneath chandeliers while executives promised him forever.
Forever…
He could barely remember what his own voice sounded like in interviews… Could barely remember the heat of stage lights.
Forever…
The applause was gone first. Then the headlines. Then the phone calls stopped altogether. The world moved on with startling speed once it realized he would never come back. He was fine with that, once. None of that hurt as much as it should have.
Forever had turned out to be very short when it was promised by love.
The thought came to him quietly now, stripped of bitterness by exhaustion. It settled into his chest with the same dull ache as old injuries and crusted blood.
Love had once felt invincible.
Not gentle, not safe… God, it never was that, but with him it was for the first time. With him it burned bright enough to outshine consequence. The sort of love that made destruction feel survivable while it was happening. Two men standing too close together in kitchens at three in the morning with sleepy kisses. Bloody knuckles wrapped by careful hands afterward. Kisses exchanged beside shattered furniture as though violence itself were only another language between them. The kind of love the world would call toxic because the world had no better word for devotion molded from obsession.
He could still remember that winter night with unbearable clarity.
The farmhouse glowing gold from its windows against miles of snow-covered dark… like one of those little plugin porcelain Christmas village homes they had on display in the Vought lobby for the holidays. Instead it was anything but with a little white bulldog barking frantically somewhere beneath the kitchen table while a boy cried upstairs.
The Homelander, furious enough to mistake fear for anger.
The fight had begun in the hallway and spread through the house like gasoline finding flame. Screaming voices. Splintering wood… A lamp hurled hard enough to burst against the wall. They had circled each other through room after room, beautiful and monstrous both, neither willing to surrender first.
Love had always been closest to violence with them.
Then came the sound he remembered most clearly: The front door slamming open against the wall.
Winter air rushing inside with snow following. The bulldog scrambling wildly across the porch steps, nails skittering against old wood. The little boy wrapped in a trenchcoat far too large for him, crying so hard he could barely breathe as he stumbled toward the driveway.
Then beyond them; the Cadillac. Black paint gleaming beneath starlight, engine roaring to life and headlights blinding through the heavy snow.
He remembered the other man standing beside the open driver’s door, chest heaving, eyes burning bright with fury and heartbreak and something almost terrified beneath both. Snowflakes melted instantly against overheated skin.
“Get in the car, Ryan,” not shouted, but pleaded. The bulldog had already climbed into the front seat, whining anxiously against the leather. The boy scrambled into the back clutching the coat around his shoulders, face wet with tears.
Everything after that blurred together…
Another shouted accusation.
Another step forward.
A fist thrown.
Bone splitting against bone.
Then… red light. Not fire… Not exactly. Something hotter.
The twin scorch marks tore through the porch from the doorway with a sound like the sky itself splitting open. Wood vaporized instantly beneath impossible heat. Snow vanished in explosions of steam. The earth blackened and peeled apart all the way to the driveway as laser-bright destruction carved its path through the farm.
The Cadillac swerved violently sideways at the edge of the gravel, tires burning black into the frozen ground as it fishtailed onto the pavement. Red taillights reflected across the icy road behind it like blood spreading through water.
For one impossible moment, he saw everything perfectly illuminated: The bulldog barking hysterically from the front seat.
His little boy screaming.
Billy Butcher gripping the wheel with blood running down his mouth.
His own eyes glowing red enough to rival the stars above them.
Then the car disappeared down the road into the winter dark.
Gone.
…Just gone.
Leaving only scorched earth behind.
Homelander closed his eyes hard now against the memory. Summer insects sang endlessly in the fields around him while the stars looked down with indifferent brilliance.
He had not seen them since… in a few days it’ll have been ten months.
No dog.
No son.
No love that meant ‘forever.’
He only sees the tire marks that have remained where the gravel ended and the pavement began, sees them fossilized in black in the road like the final sentence of a story no one survived long enough to finish.
The man on the broken front steps is what used to be Homelander. The Homelander. The number one superhero. The most powerful man in the world.
White T-shirt hanging off a body once built to be seen. Jeans dusted in ash, crusted in blood and dirty with Pennsylvania soil. Blonde hair grown out and self-cut into uneven, trembling lines, like someone trying to maintain himself and failing halfway through, and with it all, exhaustion so total it no longer looked like fatigue but permanence.
Homelander’s hands rested loosely between his knees, fingers barely twitching now and then as if remembering motion without permission. Once those hands had held the world’s attention in a grip so tight it mistook fear for devotion. Once he had been worshipped in stadium light, televised across continents, carried through airwaves like a promise no one thought could break.
Power. Fame. Control.
All of it had once felt like permanence.
Now it felt like weather, just passing through. Homelander exhaled slowly, not a sigh, not relief. Just air leaving a body that no longer knew what to do with it, no longer knew why it still had to breathe at all.
Above him, the stars kept burning, indifferent and endless, and he did not look like a god who rose above it all, but instead looked like someone who had fallen from the sky, looked like something that had landed too hard and realized there was no way back up. Homelander had made the mistake of falling in love with Billy Butcher. There was no way back up from that, either, at least not in the soft, forgiving way that stories and movies tried to sell love.
Billy Butcher had never been a man built for tenderness. He was grit and smoke and violent edges like a broken beer bottle in a pub fight, a voice like gravel dragged across glass. He spoke like every sentence was a threat he might follow through on… still, somehow, that had been the part that drew Homelander in most. Butcher never looked at him like a god. He looked at him like he was just the same as anyone else; that had been enough.
It started in violence, as everything between them always did. Arguments that turned into collisions. Words that turned into bruises. Anger that burned so hot it blurred the line between hate and devotion until neither of them could tell the difference anymore. Somewhere inside that chaos, something impossible had taken root. Sex, lust, desire and love. The kind that consumed and burned bright as the stars until it died.
Homelander had given him everything without being asked for it. The fame, the distance from Vought, the armor of being a supe, all of it began to fall away the closer Butcher got, the more in love they fell. It wasn’t a surrender that happened all at once. It was worse than that. It was gradual, letting pieces of himself fall away until the pieces gone felt like freedom, until the whole world had changed colour.
He stopped caring about the cameras. Stopped caring about the crowds. Stopped caring about the way the world used to worship him like sunlight given human shape.
None of it mattered if Billy Butcher wasn’t the one giving that affection, and Butcher never saw him the way the world did. That was the ruin of it. That was the mercy of it, the freedom.
Love became something private between explosions and autographs, something found in broken rooms and exhausted silence afterward, in the way Butcher would light a cigarette with shaking hands and refuse to look away even when Homelander was too close, too bright, too much.
It was the only place Homelander ever felt real.
…So he gave things up.
At first, small things. Appointments. Appearances here and there. Carefully curated pieces of himself.
Then larger things.
Control… Distance from Vought all together. Safety in stage lights, and then finally, the thing he never thought he would lose: certainty, because loving Butcher meant stepping into a world where nothing stayed stable. Where every moment of softness was surrounded by the threat of collapse. Where even happiness felt temporary, like it had to be stolen from somewhere else just to exist at all, still, he stayed. Still, he chose it, and would every time until there was nothing left to choose.
Now, sitting on the broken steps of a farmhouse split open by something too vile and too violent to be forgiven, Homelander could feel the shape of that love like an afterimage burned into his vision.
It lingered in the scorch marks that cut through the earth.
In the empty driveway where a Cadillac had once torn away into winter night.
In the silence where a voice used to be telling him, over and over, that love wasn’t supposed to feel like this; but neither of them had ever learned how to stop.
Above him, the stars shimmered in their impossible distance, cold and patient and eternal, and for a moment, he wondered if even they had ever fallen for something they could not survive. He shudders, shaking it off quickly.
Homelander knew what his mind was doing.
It was a trick, a small mercy his thoughts offered when the silence became too sharp to bear. If he could turn the memory into something jagged edged like that pub beer bottle, any argument, the violence, the collapse, maybe it would hurt in a way he could survive. Maybe it would feel like something he could pin down and kill, name, contain, but it wasn’t honest… Not really, he knows that, because the truth of it sat deeper than all the wreckage around him.
Billy Butcher had not only been fire and teeth and ruin. That was only one language he spoke. There had been another version of him, rarer and almost secret, that only Homelander had ever been allowed to see clearly enough to believe, one they allowed each other to have when they thought it impossible to feel that way for another person.
It came in small moments. A hand resting at the back of his neck after a fight, not pushing, not controlling or rough, just there. A touch that didn’t demand anything from him. A silence that didn’t judge the noise inside his head when he put his fist through a mirror or turned a weapon on himself in a fit of delusional rage. The way Butcher would look at him when no one else was watching, like he wasn’t a weapon or a mistake or a god pretending to be human, but just… a man who had gotten lost somewhere along the way, and he blamed Vought instead of what they called Homelander and who he called ‘John.’
There had been nights when the world outside felt like it was collapsing into itself, when everything he was supposed to be had fallen away and there was nothing left but the hollow echo of what people expected him to be: The Homelander. Nights when he didn’t know what version of himself was real anymore.
Butcher had stayed anyway. Not afraid of him, never had been, never would be, he’d say that too, like it was the simplest thing in the world.
There had been laughter too, though Homelander almost never let himself remember that part because it felt like betrayal to the version of the story where everything ended in ash. Butcher laughing loud, rough and startled, like it annoyed him that it happened at all. The kind of laughter that didn’t belong in the same rooms as violence but somehow did anyway, tangled up in it, inseparable. Then the tenderness… God, the tenderness. Not always spoken in words, but there was tenderness in the way Butcher would pull him close after everything fell apart, like he was furious at the world for making it necessary but refusing to let him go anyway. Like holding him was both punishment and confession. Like he didn’t know how to be gentle, but he kept trying in spite of that fact, over and over, as if repetition alone could turn instinctive hatred into devotion.
Homelander had mistaken it for something else at first. Or maybe he hadn’t mistaken it at all.
Maybe he had simply never believed he was allowed to have it.
That was the thought that hurt most now, sitting on the broken steps with the summer wind moving through the grass and the stars burning indifferent above him; the love had been real. He knows that.
Homelander had just… given his life all up for it. Not in one clean, cinematic moment, not a heroic exit or a dramatic fall from grace, he hadn’t walked into the CEO’s office and said ‘Fuck you, fuck you for everything you did to me,’ and quit on the spot, but something quieter and far more devastating than that. It had been a slow peeling away of everything he had once been made of.
Homelander had walked away from Vought like a man stepping out of a superhero suit that no longer fit.
The city had tried to keep him. It always did. Lights that once bent toward him, cameras that once followed his every breath, towers of glass that had reflected him back to himself as something larger than any human; they all called out in their own language of power and noise, but he left it behind anyway.
He left the noise.
He left the worship.
He left the version of himself that could never sleep without being remembered by millions.
Then he followed something smaller. Something warmer when his hand was being held by another. Something impossibly fragile that made his heart ache for more.
Billy Butcher had taken him somewhere no one would think to look for him. Not a city, not a penthouse, not a place where history would notice. Just distance. Just quiet. An old house that creaked in the wind and smelled like old wood and new beginnings that weren’t quite strong enough yet.
At first, the silence had been unbearable.
No crowds.
No commands from Vought.
No fear disguised as admiration.
Just mornings with burnt pancakes and nights with pizza that turned cold, nights that stretched too long, as if the world itself had forgotten how to acknowledge him, and every night, it had hit him the same way… The absence of it all.
The absence of being something; someone. He would sit in that unfamiliar quiet and feel the weight of everything he had walked away from pressing against his ribs like a weight that didn’t belong to this place. Fame wasn’t just gone, it echoed. Power wasn’t just missing, it phantom-limbed itself into his thoughts. Ryan would ask to watch a Seven movie and his suddenly weeping dad just didn’t know how to react. He would wake sometimes in the dark convinced, for half a second, that he could still hear it all waiting for him if he just reached far enough; but there was nothing to reach for anymore.
Only the farmhouse.
Only the wind through fields.
Only Butcher.
Billy Butcher, for all the violence the world knew him by, had been something else entirely there. He had not mocked the fear, had not rushed the adjustment. He had not tried to fix Homelander like he was broken machinery. Instead, he had simply stayed.
When Homelander sat awake at three in the morning, staring at hands that no longer had anything to hold except emptiness, Butcher would come down the hallway barefoot and sit beside him without a word. Sometimes he would light a cigarette and they’d just breathe in the same silence. Other times he would reach out first; not hesitant, not careful, but certain, and pull him in like it was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged together, and Homelander, who had spent his entire life being either feared or worshipped, would fall apart in that quiet in ways no one had ever been allowed to see.
Butcher never flinched from it.
Never turned away from it.
He would just hold him.
Firm. Steady. Real.
A hand wrapped in his when the world felt too far away. A thumb brushing slowly over his knuckles when his thoughts got too loud. A presence that didn’t demand he be anything other than what he was in that moment, not a symbol, not a weapon, not a god pretending to be human, just a man trying, for the first time, to exist without armour, and in those moments, something in Homelander had finally softened.
Not broken.
He had wanted that life so badly it hurt. Not the fame. Not the power, fuck power, what had it ever gotten him? It wasn’t even the endless sky-high emptiness of being untouchable.
He had wanted mornings where someone’s voice waking up next to him mattered more than the world’s applause. He had wanted a hand to reach for that wasn’t afraid of what it might find. He had wanted to be looked at like he could be loved, not used. Butcher had given him that.
Now, sitting on the broken steps of a farmhouse split open by something too violent to belong to any one memory, Homelander could feel the weight of that choice like a second sky above him.
He had given everything up for it, somewhere inside the silence between the scorch marks and the empty driveway, that truth still lingered, and so did the one of an old farmhouse not feeling like a home anymore. It felt like a waiting room for something that had already decided not to arrive.
Homelander stayed outside most days through any kind of weather. Not because he couldn’t go inside, but because going inside made the absence too precise. Outside, the air was wide enough to hold the ache without giving it weapons. Inside, it became rooms. Corners. Echoes that knew his name too well. Butcher took their son, his dog and the clothes on their backs when they left. Nothing more.
So he sat on the steps instead.
Day after day… Night after night like the burnt imprint of tires that had fused into the road itself, permanent as his regret. He had watched them fade from being covered in winter snow, then into summer without ever truly changing, and he didn’t either; he had not moved with the seasons. He had stayed exactly where he was when everything ended.
At first, he had told himself it was temporary. That this was what people did when they lost something. They waited. They watched. They stood at the edge of the place it disappeared and convinced themselves that stillness counted as loyalty… time had not agreed. Time had only kept going.
The farmhouse around him aged forward while he stayed frozen in the backward direction. Snow had come and melted. Spring had risen green and loud. Summer had arrived with its unbearable abundance of life; cicadas screaming into the night like the world was trying to drown out his memory.
Somewhere deep inside him, deeper than intelligence, deeper than pride, deeper than the part of him that had once believed he was untouchable, there was a stubborn, humiliating certainty: ‘William might come back. We can be a family again. Nothing has changed.’ Like love hadn’t torn itself open and bled into the earth.
It was irrational. It was cruel.
Homelander knew what he had done, not just what had happened that night; not just the fight, not just the Cadillac screaming into winter dark, not just his son and their dog vanishing down a road that felt too long to be real; but the choice behind it all.
He had given up everything.
Not just Vought. Not just the city. Not just the endless, suffocating throne of being seen by everyone and known by no one.
He had given up himself.
He had traded the only life he had ever known; power, fear, control, fame, for something that he did not know how to survive without. He had followed Butcher into a life that asked him to be ordinary, and for a while, he had tried.
God, he had tried.
Through the nights when withdrawal from his own life felt like skin being peeled away. Through the mornings when silence felt louder than any crowd ever had. Through the moments when he shook without understanding why he had ever believed he could be anything other than what he was made to be.
Butcher had been there.
Rough hands made gentle when they had to be. A voice that didn’t flinch when Homelander broke apart in the quiet. Affection that arrived in small, almost accidental ways; a shoulder pressed against his in the kitchen, a warm flannel blanket thrown over him without a word, fingers lingering at his wrist just long enough to remind him he was still here, still real.
It had been the first time love hadn’t felt like worship. It had felt like belonging; that was what made it unbearable now, he had survived long enough to watch it be taken from him without being able to stop it.
Every day, he sat on the steps and told himself it had meaning. That waiting was something. That staying put was devotion. That if he held the shape of that life tightly enough, it might eventually form itself again in front of him.
Every night, the farmhouse answered with the same truth.
Nothing came up that road anymore… Only wind… Only stars. Only the long, empty stretch of Pennsylvania darkness where even sound seemed reluctant to travel; still, he stayed, because the alternative was admitting the worst thing of all: that he had loved something real, given up everything for it, and might have already lived through the last time it ever loved him back.
In a few months, it would be a year. Winter would be coming again in four short months. A full circle of seasons turning over the farmhouse like pages in a book no one was reading anymore, even if he was on the cover.
He knew now that William wasn’t coming back, knew just enough to make denial feel almost reasonable right up until it wasn’t.
Homelander stood up from the broken steps, the wood beneath him creaked softly, as if relieved. For a long moment, he just stayed there; upright and a little dizzy after so many months of folding himself into stillness. His legs felt unfamiliar with the shape of standing. His shoulders adjusted to the absence of the familiar downward weight, the posture of waiting, the posture of someone who had turned patience into a form of devotion.
A breeze moved through the fields. Light. Cool. September would be rolling in early, you could feel it in the air, like the year itself was already leaning forward toward winter and eager to leave summer behind. It slipped through the tall grass in slow waves, brushing against the wild edges of the yard, threading through the old fence posts that leaned like tired bones. It carried the scent of dry leaves beginning to think about falling, of earth warming one last time before the cold remembered it.
Homelander exhaled slowly and stepped off the porch at the first hints of dawn and birds beginning to sing in the dark. For the first time in a long time, he did not look back immediately, because he finally understood the shape of what remained: not arrival, not return,
just the quiet, endless space after love has already left the field and the earth keeps growing anyway.
The house greeted him with silence as he entered. Not empty silence, not the hollow kind abandoned places usually carried, but a lived-in silence, thick with the weight of paused things. The sort of quiet that still remembered footsteps and laughter and the summer sound of slamming screen doors somewhere down the hall long after nobody remained to make the sounds themselves.
Homelander stepped inside and didn’t bother to shut the front door behind him. Dust floated through bits of light slanting across the kitchen. A teacup still sat beside the sink where someone had forgotten to wash it nearly a year ago. Ryan’s rain boots remained by the back door, tipped onto one side as though he might come running back for them after playing in the fields. A dish towel hung folded over the oven handle, faded sunflowers stitched into the fabric by hands that believed domestic things mattered.
The whole farmhouse felt suspended… Like time had stopped out of fear of Homelander’s reaction. The stairs creaked beneath his weight as he climbed them slowly. He never came up here anymore. There was nothing upstairs except ghosts gentle enough to pretend they were memories.
Ryan’s bedroom door stood half-open. Inside, everything remained untouched.
Small sweaters folded carefully over the computer chair. Fun drawings still taped crookedly against the walls. A toy Lego set lying on its side beside the bed as if dropped mid-adventure. Dust had settled softly over everything now, muting the bright childhood colours into something more fragile.
Homelander lingered only a moment before moving on.
Their bedroom waited at the end of the hallway.
The air inside smelled faintly of cedarwood, cigarette smoke buried deep into old fabric, and the wet and dry scent of summer dust and mildew. The curtains stirred gently from the open window above the fields, all kinds of weather had fluttered in over the year.
Nothing had been moved.
One of Butcher’s jackets still hung over the bedpost. One of his books remained facedown on the nightstand. A half-empty teacup sat forgotten beside it, clouded and turned thick with age and things that had made its way into it.
It looked less like abandonment than interruption.
As though life had simply stepped out for a moment and forgotten how to return, like so many have.
Homelander crossed the room quietly and opened the closet door.
The light inside barely reached the back anymore. Things had accumulated strangely, not through intention but regular domesticated life. Blankets shoved carelessly onto shelves. Laundry baskets half-filled with old flannel shirts. Boxes of winter clothes. Domestic clutter piled atop itself in the slow untidy way real homes gathered around real people.
Then beneath all of it, the life Butcher had tried to forget… Tucked behind stacks of ordinary things sat the uglier remnants of the man himself: guns wrapped in oilcloth, boxes of ammunition, homemade explosives sealed carefully in old tins, a ‘modest collection’ of knives lined in neat rows like silver bones sleeping in the dark.
Then behind those, a duffle bag. Plain black canvas… New with tags. Almost hidden well enough to disappear forever.
Homelander stared at it for a long moment before finally pulling it free. Dust rose softly around his hands. The bag felt heavier than it should have… Or maybe memory was what weighed so much.
He carried it to the bed and sat down carefully on the edge of the mattress. Springs groaned faintly beneath him. Dust shifted through beams of morning light while the house settled around him with old wooden sighs.
The duffle bag rested at his feet.
Homelander lowered his eyes toward the bag, body unmoving on the edge of the bed for a long time before finally leaning toward the nightstand.
The drawer resisted at first.
Old wood swelled by damp seasons dragged harshly against itself as he pulled it open, disturbing layers of dust and thin gray cobwebs stretched thick between the corners. The inside smelled faintly of cedar and age and forgotten papers. Receipts curled yellow at the edges. A dead pen. A loose bullet rolling softly against the wood, then beneath it all: the phone. An old Vought-issued cell phone, black screen dulled beneath months of dust. He stared at it without expression before lifting it carefully into his hands. It looked strangely small now. Harmless. Like some fossil from a previous version of existence. It feels out of date even when it’s not.
Once, that phone had never stopped vibrating.
Executives. Reporters. Assistants. Filmmakers and directors. Emergencies invented every hour simply because people could not bear the idea of being unable to reach him. Every second of his life had once demanded response. Attention. Presence.
Now the thing felt almost laughably dead.
He found the charger still plugged into the wall beside the bed, buried beneath dust thick enough to soften its shape. When he connected the phone, nothing happened at first. Then finally, after several long seconds, the screen blinked faintly to life… One percent, the pale little number glowed weakly in the darkened room.
Homelander set the phone beside him and waited, an absolute silence settled around the bedroom. Not peaceful silence, or heavy silence, just… nothing.
His mind did not race the way it used to. No spiraling panic. No clawing grief searching desperately for someplace to land. Even memory seemed too tired now to fully form itself. Thoughts drifted near him and dissolved before reaching shape.
The phone continued charging.
…Two percent.
…Three.
Homelander rested his forearms against his knees and stared blankly at the floorboards between his bare feet. Dust glimmered silver where the dim light still reached it. The duffle bag sat unopened at his feet like something waiting for permission to be opened
Then; a sound outside. Distant at first… Low.
An engine.
His head lifted instantly. Not hope, not quite, something that just somehow, some way, felt a whole lot older than hope.
He stood before he fully realized he was moving and crossed to the window in two silent steps. His eyes searched automatically down the driveway toward the road beyond the fields.
For one terrible heartbeat, the world held still enough for it to almost be true.
He could nearly picture it: The black Cadillac rolling slowly up the gravel.
Headlights cutting through tall grass and dawn. Butcher behind the wheel with one hand draped careless over it. The white bulldog barking in the passenger seat.
Ryan asleep in the back. Home returning all at once.
…It wasn’t the Cadillac. Just an old pickup truck passing far down the county road beyond the hills, its sound fading quickly back into distance.
Nothing coming here.
Nothing looking for him.
Homelander watched the empty road a moment longer anyway.
Then he sat back down on the dusty bed. The mattress sighed a plume of dust beneath his weight. The phone screen glowed faintly beside him now at five percent battery, casting pale artificial light across the room where evening shadows had begun gathering in the corners.
He looked at it without urgency.
The phone reached ten percent sometime after his attention to it had faded. For a while after, he simply stared at the screen in his hand, then, slowly, he entered the old passcode. His fingers remembered it instantly.
The phone unlocked with a pale glow, and suddenly the silence shattered beneath the weight of everything he had abandoned.
Notifications flooded the screen endlessly. Missed calls stacked one over another in impossible numbers. Voicemails. Emergency alerts. Messages from executives, handlers, assistants, politicians, news outlets. Demands. Pleas. Carefully worded concerns slowly decaying into panic over the months.
‘Where are you?’
‘Please call immediately.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We can fix this.’
‘Where are you?’
‘The board is asking questions.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Ryan’s missing too?’
‘Homelander, answer your fucking phone.’
‘Where are you?’
‘We need a statement.’
‘Please.’
The screen struggled to keep up with it all, icons freezing and reloading beneath the sheer backlog of a vanished life trying desperately to claw its way back into existence.
He ignored every word.
He sat motionless while the flood slowly cleared itself away, one notification after another disappearing into silence until only the faint glow of the wallpaper remained reflected against his tired face.
A photograph from years ago.
Him smiling beneath stadium lights with the American flag draped behind his shoulders like a pair of wings. He looked impossibly young in it.
Impossible in general, really.
Homelander lowered the phone slightly and glanced toward the duffle bag resting at his feet. For a moment, he didn’t move. Then he reached down and pulled the zipper open… the sound seemed louder than it should have.
Canvas folded back slowly, revealing fragments of the man he used to be buried beneath layers of dust and time. Pieces of the suit. Gold eagle trim dulled from neglect. Red gloves folded carefully together. The faint sterile scent of old fabric and machine-cleaning chemicals still clung stubbornly to it all, then: the cape. The American flag spilled from the bag in heavy folds across the floorboards and over his feet, stars and stripes muted in the dim bedroom light. Dust clung to the fabric where it had remained hidden away for nearly a year, but it still looked painfully grand… Homelander stared at it for a long time before finally lifting the phone again.
He dialed from the recent contacts, of course he would never remember the number.
The line rang once.
…Twice.
Outside, wind moved softly through the fields.
…Three times.
Then the call connected to Vought. Static hummed faintly between them and no greeting came from the other end at first. Only breathing. Careful breathing, as though whoever answered already knew exactly who it would be.
Homelander looked down at the cape pooled around his feet. At the dust covering his life. At the bedroom that still smelled faintly like cigarette smoke and cedarwood and a life gentle enough to ruin him forever.
His voice, when it finally came, sounded smaller than it ever had before: “I’m ready to come home.”