Chapter Text
The first sound after the blast was not a scream.
It was silence.
This vast, stunned silence that seemed to swallow the Oval Office whole.
The room had been chaos seconds before - lasers, shouting, screaming, furniture breaking. A camera mounted upon a tripod recorded the whole thing, broadcasting it across the world to millions.
Homelander gasped awake. When the haze left his eyes, his body immediately alerted him to the multiple injuries that littered his skin and deeper. He gasped again, and his lungs burned with this feeling he had never felt before. Like he couldn't catch his breath. Like he was winded, of all things.
He looked down at himself where he lay on the floor, upon which he didn't remember falling.
A faint ash-grey dust clung to his suit where the beam had hit him square in the chest - the same area where Ryan had lasered him minutes before. The fabric was charred through. Beneath it, his skin was burnt red and raw. The pain behind it was surprising.
He blinked. Then blinked again.
Everything had a blur to it, like the normal resolution of his eyes had been switched to something lower. Audio too - things felt muted and faint. He couldn't hear the heartbeats of those around him. He couldn't even hear his own.
Ryan lay face-down to his right. The woman was somewhere he couldn't see anymore. But from across the room, he could see Butcher standing upright and staring. Just staring. His own face was streaked with blood. His shirt was torn. He looked half-dead himself, but there was something awful waking behind his eyes. Curiosity, as he watched Homelander with the same cautious intrigue you’d watch an animal at a zoo.
Homelander got up slowly, despite the warning signs his body was now giving him. He took in four more wheezing breaths before he closed his mouth. If Butcher saw the weakness, he would pounce on it… but the burning in his chest and throat said breathing was more important. His mouth opened again on its own accord to take in more air.
That was immediately bad. His body was doing things he wasn't telling it to do and behaving in ways that he hadn't expected it to. He needed to leave. Now.
Homelander leaned forward and tried to laser the only other man left standing in the room. To end this and get out of here before things got even worse. Butcher flinched automatically, bringing up a hand to shield his face from the blast…
But… nothing happened. No heat behind his eyes, no red splitting the air around them. Nothing.
Well fuck… New plan.
He jumped, hands making the motion as if to propel himself upwards. To shoot off into the sky like a missile… but again, nothing. He jumped a foot off the ground and came right back down.
So he tried again. Same thing.
A faint 'oh fuck' escaped his mouth before he could swallow it back down. He stared up at the ceiling as if he were begging it to pick him up and save him from this mess. The ceiling stayed infuriatingly neutral.
When Homelander looked back at Butcher, the man was smiling. It was the cruel, sadistic smile of a man who had waited years to see God flinch.
Homelander looked beyond Butcher, to the exit. He needed to run. He needed to get the fuck out of here, because something was seriously wrong with him.
His powers weren't gone. That was impossible. No, they were just… temporarily disabled. That was all. If he could get through the next ten minutes, he could sort it out.
He always sorted it out in the end. This time would be no different. He knew that. He knew that despite his heart pounding like it didn’t believe him.
He quickly stepped to the right, intending to run by Butcher, but the other man took a single step and blocked his path. Homelander immediately froze in place. His hands clenched. He couldn't bring himself to look Butcher in the eyes.
“Shock and awe, my son,” Butcher said softly. “Blood and fuckin' bone.”
He needed to leave, he needed to leave, he needed to fucking leave right now.
But Butcher was there, standing right in the way.
There was only one other option.
He directed his eyes to the ground first. Put his hands on his hips. Plotted his next move and hoped to God or Madelyn or Jesus or whoever the fuck else was listening that Butcher would be distracted enough not to see the next thing coming.
Homelander then took a lunging step forward and aimed a punch square at Butcher's head, putting the full force of his body behind it.
It should have been terrifying. It should have split Butcher’s skull open and painted the wall behind him.
Instead, it was clumsy.
Butcher caught his fist easily, like he wasn't even trying. Like a kid had just aimed a punch at him.
And Homelander froze. Didn’t counter, or aim a punch with his left hand, or try to kick - no, he fucking froze. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He could barely even breathe with the way his lungs were burning. All he could do was look at Butcher in the eyes and silently beg him to let him go.
It didn't work.
With Homelander's fist still caught in his hand, Butcher drove his other arm up into the bend of his elbow, snapping it in the exact direction it was not meant to bend. The elbow gave with a wet, sudden pop.
Homelander screamed. Not the polished rage of a man destroying his own room for the third time in a month because something inconvenient happened, but pain. Actual fucking agony, because holy shit that hurt.
He lurched backward, clutching his now useless dominant arm.
Butcher didn’t let the moment stand still; oh no, he hit him again. A solid right hook to the jaw that snapped Homelander’s head sideways and sent him stumbling into the edge of the Resolute Desk.
His left hand slapping down against the polished wood to keep himself upright. His eyes were wide now, not with fury, but with panic collapsing into raw terror like a dying star.
He didn’t try to swing again. His brain wasn’t processing any sort of fight commands, nor did it command him to run. He was frozen in place because, for the first time in a very long time, he had no idea what the fuck to do.
His body was well-built, manufactured perfectly, but it had never needed skill. It had never learned economy. Never learned defense. Never learned how to take a hit and answer with anything except apocalypse. He won with brute force and unrelenting power - two things that he no longer had.
Underneath that? There was nothing.
That was the thing - the gap that Vought had never needed to fill, that forty years of invulnerability had never required him to address. He had always been the weapon, and weapons did not need to know technique. The weapon pointed itself at the problem, and the problem simply resolved. Homelander could be the strongest thing in the room, and the laziest thing in the room at the same time. To him, they were not mutually exclusive.
But Butcher knew. Butcher knew how to fight dirty, close, and ugly. He grew up doing it. Getting beaten down and beating other people down. He knew how to read shoulders before a punch came. Knew how to step inside a swing and make a man regret having arms.
Butcher went through Homelander’s guard like it was decorative, because in essence, it was. A guard required muscle memory and drilling, and the forty years that could have built those things had been spent on something else entirely.
An uppercut went under his attempted block and connected with his jaw so cleanly that he nearly bit all the way through his tongue.
Butcher grabbed him by the collar. Pulled him in. Punched him in the face.
Once.
Twice.
The third broke Homelander’s nose at the bridge.
The fourth split the skin over his cheekbone.
The fifth loosened teeth.
The sixth dropped him.
Homelander collapsed onto his knees in front of the Resolute Desk. For a second, the whole world seemed to hold its breath with him.
The camera caught the angle in a gorgeous cinematic shot - the great Homelander, blood dripping steadily from his face onto the presidential seal, kneeling like a dog.
Butcher stood above him, breathing hard through his nose, then cracked him across the mouth so hard his head snapped sideways and he fell sideways.
Homelander caught himself with his good hand against the carpet.
And then it happened.
The mask broke.
Not cracked. Broke.
His breathing hitched. His eyes flicked from Butcher’s face to the camera, to Ryan lying near the edge of the room, to the broken door, to his own blood on the floor in such quantity that it made him dizzy to look at.
There was nowhere to go. No sky to vanish into. No lasers to burn the room clean. Nothing. Just Butcher.
He looked back up at Butcher.
And he began to beg.
“Wait- wait, wait, stop,” he said. “Just listen. I- I can get you anything you want. I’ll do it. Just- just name it. Anything.”
Butcher stared.
Homelander shifted on his knees, almost crawling closer before pain stopped him. His ruined arm trembled against his side. Blood slicked his lips red and continued to pour down in an unbroken stream.
“I’ll give you Vought,” he said. “All of it. You can do whatever you want with it — burn it, dismantle it, I don't care. You can do whatever you want with it. It’s yours, okay? The company, the tower, the labs, all of it. It’s yours. Y-you want money? I can move money right now, I know every account, I know everything.”
Butcher’s expression did not change.
That made Homelander worse.
“I uh- uh… Becca!” he said as if he had just discovered the key to ending this all. “I can give you Becca. You want your wife back? I- I'll have a shapeshifter be her! Is that what you want?”
He truly thought that one would work. It worked with Madelyn; why wouldn’t it work with Becca?
But Butcher just kept looking at him with that look he couldn’t place. Was it disgust? Disappointment?
Was it pity?
“I’ll eat your shit,” he blurted out. “I’ll eat your shit on live TV.”
Butcher’s jaw clenched once. Just this small tick in his jaw, but it was something. Something other than that look. Some flicker. Some hesitation. Homelander lunged for it like a drowning man.
“I will,” he said, voice cracking. “I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want. You want me to suck your dick? I'll suck your fucking dick. Right now. On camera. Just — please. Please stop...”
Butcher room seemed to recoil around the words as he looked down at him, because for one strange, hideous second, he did not see Homelander.
Not really.
He saw a man on his knees, bleeding from the mouth, trembling so hard he could barely keep himself upright. He saw dignity stripped from flesh so cleanly and so thoroughly that only desperation remained. He saw a cornered animal offering anything, anything at all, so long as the pain would stop.
And he hated it.
Fuck, he hated that Homelander sounded human. He hated that there was a body under the suit and the flag. He hated that the thing he had chased for years could be reduced to this.
Because this was not killing a god. This was beating a broken dog while it rolled onto its belly and begged.
…had Frenchie begged when Homelander killed him?
No, probably not. Frenchie wasn’t the type.
Had Becca begged? When he took her into his office and kept her there for hours doing god knows what to her, had his beautiful Becca begged?
…
Butcher looked away. As he did so, his eyes snagged on the crowbar lying half under a collapsed chair.
Homelander followed his gaze. His face changed instantly.
“No,” he whispered.
Butcher walked to it.
“No, no, no, wait—”
Butcher bent down and picked it up.
Homelander tried to stand. His legs buckled before he made it halfway. He fell forward onto one hand, panting, dizzy from the blows to the head.
“William,” he said. “Butcher. Billy, listen- listen to me—”
Butcher turned. He weighed the crowbar in his hand and adjusted his grip.
Homelander shook his head frantically, blood stringing from his mouth.
“Wait, please just wait a second. You've made your point, I-”
Butcher swung.
The crowbar caught Homelander in the dip of his skull between his right eye socket and his temple. Something vital cracked. The bone gave in and his eye went wrong immediately. There was this pressure change, a feeling of wrongness, and his vision on the right fractured into something else entirely.
Homelander collapsed onto his side and immediately curled. His scream cracked halfway through and broke into a sob. The hand he raised to clutch at his face became the next target of the crowbar.
He felt the bones in his left hand splinter under the impact.
Another swing.
Shoulder.
Another.
Back.
Another.
Ribs.
The first part had been a fight.
This was not.
Butcher was not angry - that was the thing Homelander registered in the one working eye. Butcher was not driven by fury or a blackout rage that he wouldn’t remember later.
He was calm.
The years of rage and anger had burned away every other emotion in his soul with a fire so pure that the only thing left inside of him was hate.
And that was so much worse than anger.
Homelander tried to crawl. Butcher hooked a hand onto his ankle and dragged him across the carpet like a sack of meat. Homelander screamed again, or tried to, but his breathing had begun to sound wet through his crackling breaths.
“Where you going?” Butcher snarled. “Come on, now. Thought you liked cameras.”
Butcher flipped him over onto his back and then brought the crowbar down on his knee. The kneecap shattered like a dropped puzzle.
Homelander’s scream became soundless for one second, mouth open wide, face gone blank with a pain too large for noise.
He curled around the ruined joint, sobbing now. Actually sobbing. "Stop! Stop, please! Fuck!"
The camera kept rolling.
Butcher hit his hands when he tried to shield himself again.
The first strike broke more fingers. The second bent his right wrist at an angle it had no business taking.
Homelander cried out and tucked both ruined hands close to his chest, but that left his face exposed.
Butcher smashed the crowbar across his mouth. Teeth scattered across the Oval Office carpet. Premolars, molars, half a canine - the works.
Homelander made a choking noise and spat blood, trying to say something through the ruin of his mouth. It came out garbled.
Butcher grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head up.
“What was that?” Butcher asked. “Got something to say, do you?”
Homelander’s eye rolled toward him, unfocused. “I’m sorry,” he slurred. Blood and fragments of teeth bubbled from his mouth.
Butcher’s face went still.
Homelander saw the reaction and grabbed for it. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”
“No, you’re not.”
Butcher slammed his face into the wood of the desk. Homelander’s brow burst open against it.
“You’re sorry you’re bleeding.”
He struck him again.
“You’re sorry it hurts.”
Again.
“You’re sorry everyone can see you like this.”
Again.
Butcher dropped his head and raised the crowbar again, bringing it down into Homelander’s side. Something deep inside him gave. His body jerked around it, breath leaving in a wet wheeze.
After that, the sounds changed. Less screaming. More choking.
Homelander tried to breathe and failed to do it cleanly. Each inhale hitched when his lung pressed against something sharp in his chest, like his ribs had turned inwards, or Butcher had stuck a knife into his side when he wasn't paying attention. Eventually, that lung seemed to give up entirely.
He was shaking continuously now, not from strategy or performance or rage, but from shock.
Butcher stood over him and kept going.
The crowbar caught his back hard enough to make his spine flex inward. One of his legs went numb, and it drew another thin, ruined cry from his throat.
His body had become a catalogue of consequences.
Butcher lifted the crowbar again. Homelander flinched before the blow came.
That stopped him more effectively than any plea had. The flinch. That small, helpless shrinking away as he tried and failed to cover his head with deformed and shattered hands.
Butcher froze with the crowbar raised.
Homelander lay on the carpet beneath him, trembling, one eye already swollen shut, the other barely open. Blood pooled under his cheek and spread into the fibers of the presidential seal. His breathing was thin, wet, and frantic.
Butcher stared down at him.
The hate was still there, and it had not lessened. If anything, it had become clearer.
But under it, something else arrived. Recognition.
Homelander was dying.
Right there. Right now. A few more minutes, maybe less, and the bastard would blissfully slip out of this world and into the next. Or into the endless darkness, who the fuck knew.
But wherever he went next, there would be no trial. No prison. No mornings waking powerless. No mirrors to show him the smashed mess of his face. No helplessness, or pain of broken bones and nerve damage. No fear.
There would be no living long enough to understand, deep down, how worthless he was without the power. That underneath the suit and underneath the strength, he was truly nothing at all.
Just death. Clean in the end. Sweet, even.
Butcher’s breathing slowed. He lowered the crowbar.
Homelander’s good eye tracked it weakly, unable to understand why the next blow had not landed.
Butcher crouched beside him.
Homelander tried to recoil, but his body barely managed a twitch. His broken fingers dragged through his own blood.
Butcher leaned in close. Close enough that Homelander could hear him over the failing rhythm of his own breath. Close enough that the cameras were unaware of the conversation about to take place.
“Nah,” Butcher said, whispering. “A quick death’s too good a mercy for something like you.”
Homelander blinked his one watery eye at him, and a tear slipped out.
Butcher’s mouth twisted. “You don’t get to die a God. You don’t get to die clean. You don’t get to skip this part.”
Butcher looked toward the nearest camera. The red recording light still burned.
Somewhere, or rather everywhere, the whole world watched.
Butcher stepped over Homelander’s body and walked toward it.
Behind him, Homelander lay twitching faintly on the ruined seal, breathing in wet, broken little gurgling pulls that sounded more akin to agony prolonged than survival.
Butcher stopped in front of the lens. He gave the world a smirk. Then he lifted one boot and crushed the camera under his heel.
The image shattered. The screen went black.
Ashley watched God die on a phone screen beneath the halls of the White House.
Her hand had clamped over her mouth sometime during the crowbar beating and had not moved since.
The service tunnel smelled like dust, concrete, old wiring, and her own panicked sweat. Emergency lights strobed red along the curved walls. Somewhere above her, staffers were crying. Someone was vomiting into a trash can. Phones rang unanswered.
Ashley heard none of it clearly.
She stood with her back pressed against cold concrete, one hand over her mouth, the other holding her phone so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
The livestream stood still for thirty seconds as Butcher leaned over Homelander’s body. She didn’t want to think ‘corpse’ just yet. She wasn’t sure what he was doing. Talking to him, taunting him, slitting his throat with a pocket knife, she wasn’t sure. Butcher’s back was to the camera. What he was doing was between them and them alone.
After half a minute had passed, Butcher stood. He turned around and approached the camera.
He smiled.
That cocky, self-assured smile that came to him all too easily.
His boot rose, filled the camera’s frame, and then stomped down.
The screen went black, and then blue when it displayed the words “Signal Lost” and the words “Homelander addresses the nation” beneath it.
Ashley kept staring. Her reflection stared back from the dead blue screen - pale face, blown pupils, lipstick smudged.
She had done this. She had let them in. Not in any way that would appear on a clean audit trail, but she had opened the door. Literally, she had opened the door.
She had told herself, very clearly, that this was what had to happen. That when she opened the door and saved their lives; this was the ultimate goal. Homelander had to be stopped. Homelander had to be removed. Homelander could not be allowed to walk out of that office still wearing the country like a cape.
And then Butcher had gotten the crowbar.
She could still hear the sound even though the feed was gone.
Metal on bone.
She inhaled sharply through her nose. “Fuck,” she whispered.
It was one thing to sign off on the fall of a monster from a room away. It was another thing entirely to watch him reduced to something that could not lift its own head.
At the back of her skull, Bashley stirred.
'You knew what he’d do,' she said.
She had. She had, yes. She had known Butcher would kill him. Or try to, at least.
"I didn’t think it would look like that," she said back.
Ashley lowered the phone.
The halls above her seemed to lurch back into focus all at once. People were moving. Running. Shouting. Fleeing from the impossible center of the building.
Nobody was going toward the Oval Office.
Of course they weren’t. There was a terrorist inside, and the one person who could've stopped him had just been beaten to a lifeless pulp on live TV.
Ashley looked down the tunnel toward the access stairwell.
She should leave.
She should get in the evac convoy. She should disappear into whatever bunker remained available to whatever version of the government survived the next twenty-four hours. She should call legal. She should call crisis comms. She should call absolutely no one, throw her phone into the Potomac, and live out the rest of her life as a mountain man.
Instead, she started walking. Then walking faster.
Then running.
'If you do this, you aren't going to like what you see,' Bashley said again.
Ashley ignored her. Her heels hit the concrete in sharp, frantic clicks.
By the time she reached the upper corridor, she was breathing hard and sweating under her blazer. The building had emptied itself in terror. The halls were wrecked in ways that made no sense at first glance: torn carpet, shattered glass, overturned chairs, streaks of blood dragged across polished floors. Somewhere, an evacuation alarm continued to ring uselessly.
The closer she got, the quieter everything became.
The Oval Office doors hung open and askew, one of them a breath away from collapsing entirely. Ashley stopped on the threshold.
For several seconds, she could not make herself step inside.
Even Bashley was silent. That's how she knew it was bad. She always had something to say about things like this. Something judgmental or sort of moral indictment, but now?
Now, at the threshold of the Oval Office, even Bashley was still.
The room was not a room anymore. It was an aftermath.
The Resolute Desk sat fractured near the center of the room like a prop abandoned after a shitty stage play. Broken glass glittered across the floor. The walls were scorched by laser burns from both Homelander and Ryan. And there were teeth.
Ashley fixated on those for some reason. Tiny white fragments scattered across the rug, not all of them whole.
Her stomach turned over violently. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
Then she saw him. Only him. The others had gone; Butcher, Kimiko, and Ryan had disappeared into whatever oblivion they had come from.
Homelander lay exactly where Butcher had left him.
At first, her brain refused to identify the shape on the floor as him. It was just a corpse in blue fabric. A ruined heap lying on its back, one leg twisted wrong and one arm bent close to his chest in a way that suggested he had tried to protect himself long after protection had become impossible.
He was alive.
…sort of.
His visibly broken hands were shaking. His chest rose unevenly - one side barely moved. Blood slid from the corner of his mouth, gathering at the back of his throat and occasionally bubbling out as he choked because he could not turn himself far enough to clear it. It was a wet, gurgling rasp dragged out of a body that could not get air correctly.
And he was going to drown like that. On the floor. In his own blood.
Ashley stepped inside.
Her shoe landed on broken glass and crunched.
Homelander’s body twitched.
His one visible eye moved. The other was swollen shut, split and bleeding, the skin around it already darkening into a grotesque mask of injury. The open eye wandered unfocused for a moment before finding her.
Recognition came slowly. Then fear.
It was so obvious that Ashley felt it like a hand closing around her spine.
He was afraid. Of her.
Not annoyed. Not enraged. Not calculating the quickest way to make her cry.
Afraid.
Bashley confirmed it despite her already knowing. 'He thinks you’re going to finish it.'
Ashley’s stomach tightened. Good, some part of her thought.
Bashley heard that too. 'Jesus, Ashley.'
Ashley stopped beside him. She stepped around Homelander’s body, careful not to slip in the blood.
For the first time in her entire life, she stood over Homelander and did not feel small.
He could not rise. He could not fly. He could not laser her in half because she breathed wrong.
He could not even lift his head from the carpet.
His visible eye tracked her with horrible effort, glassy and unfocused, but aware enough. Aware that she was there. Aware that he was helpless.
Ashley looked down at him.
The shape of his face was wrong. Butcher had taken the future of being on a billboard from him. Taken the jawline, the smile, the smug invulnerability. What remained was bleeding and would've been unrecognizable if it weren’t for the suit.
And then there was this recognition of opportunity so intense it nearly made her dizzy.
He was broken. Powerless. Defenseless. His life was entirely in her hands.
Ashley slowly crouched beside him.
Homelander flinched. It was tiny. A twitch of his broken hand and a tremor through his shoulder. But she saw it.
Oh, she saw it.
His eye moved over her face, frantic and wet. He tried to speak.
The attempt became a wet gurgle that sent fresh blood spilling from his mouth.
Ashley watched him struggle. She could end it.
That thought arrived with terrifying calm.
There were heavy objects everywhere. A large shard of glass sat near her shoe. Homelander had no strength left to stop her. No leverage. No threat. If Ashley walked out and did nothing, that would probably be enough. If she simply stood here and watched, he would likely die within the next five minutes.
No one would blame her.
She had spent years fantasizing about it without ever admitting it honestly, even to herself. Not sex. Not romance. Not forgiveness.
Power over him. Pure power.
For once, he needed her. For once, he could not leave. For once, he could not loom over her desk and smile like he owned the oxygen in the room and she was just borrowing it. For once, she could decide what happened to his body, and he would have to endure the decision.
He tried to swallow and choked. Ashley watched him fight for air for two seconds longer than she needed to.
Then, with visible reluctance, she reached down, gripped his shoulder and hip as carefully as she could manage, and rolled him just enough onto his side that the blood in his mouth could run out instead of down. He coughed, and the contents that he had been choking on sprayed from his mouth in a mix of bright red blood and tooth shards.
The sound he made was awful. A broken, wet gasp as he took in air through what sounded like only one lung. He gasped a few more times until his breaths collapsed into a strangled groan. Ashley’s own stomach lurched, but she held him there.
“Yeah,” she muttered. “I know. Everything hurts.”
Homelander coughed again, spilling more blood onto the carpet. Air dragged into him a little easier afterward. Not cleanly, but enough that he wasn't going to drown in the next five minutes anymore.
'Oh my God,' Bashley's voice came again.
'What?' Ashley thought back to her. 'Are you… are you reading him?'
Bashley hadn't dared touch his mind when they worked under him. He made it very clear that if he ever found out, he would separate the two and turn Bashley into a skin-lamp. And nobody wanted that for very obvious reasons.
But that was yesterday. That was an hour ago.
Now?
'Yeah,' Bashley said.
'What's he saying?'
Bashley let her in.
In the wet, ruined static of Homelander's mind, one thought surfaced again and again with humiliating clarity.
'Thank you.'
'Thank you thank you thank you.'
'Thank you.'
Bashley’s voice came softer this time. 'He means it.'
Ashley’s grip tightened on his shoulder.
No. Absolutely fucking not.
He did not get to mean it. He did not get to lie there in pieces and be grateful like some stupid wounded thing she had found in the middle of the street and rescued from traffic. He did not get to make her feel that.
But the thought kept coming.
Not elegant or articulate or even fucking coherent. Nothing like the Homelander she knew. It was just panic, pain, and gratitude on repeat because there was nothing else left in him capable of forming.
"Fuck," Ashley said out loud.
She hated him with a purity that had gotten her through entire fiscal quarters. She hated the way he said her name when he wanted something. She hated the way his smile could turn a room into a hostage situation. She hated every morning she woke up and checked her e-mail to see if she was going to survive the day, or be turned into wall-paste by his laser.
And now he was thanking her. It wasn't performative or manipulative. He probably didn't even understand the word itself, and yet it was there on repeat because she had turned him over to breathe.
When Ashley refocused back into reality, Homelander was staring at her.
Or, trying to.
The one eye that still opened could barely focus. It wandered, caught on her face, slipped away, and came back. His pupil looked wrong, blown wide open with pain and shock. One side of his jaw sat at an angle that made her own ache just by looking at it.
Then, faintly, through blood and broken teeth: “…ash…l…y…”
The sentence died in his mouth halfway through.
He tried again.
“…help.”
The word left him so softly that if the room hadn't been empty, she'd have missed it entirely.
It wasn't a command. Not him telling her what to do, or intimidating her. No, he was pleading. Begging. His body was destroyed, and she was the only way he was getting out of this alive.
They both knew it. Bashley confirmed it a second later.
"Fuck," Ashley said again, softer this time.
The moment settled for one extra second before she pulled her hand from his shoulder, wiped blood onto her pants without thinking, and reached for her phone.
Her hands were shaking.
That irritated her more than anything.
She unlocked her phone and began to dial a number. As she did so, Bashley poked his mind again and recoiled.
‘He thinks you’re leaving.’
Ashley froze, then looked back at him. His eye had widened. He was spending every waking ounce of strength just to hold her in his sight.
“I’m not leaving," she said. "Jesus. I’m calling someone. Just hold on.”
Fuck, she hated how reassuring that sounded.
The call connected, and she held it up to her ear. It picked up on the first ring. A burst of panicked noise came through the other end.
Ashley cut it off. “No. Listen to me very carefully. I need a private trauma transport to the White House. Not Vought Medical.”
Her eyes lowered to Homelander.
“I need the facility in Bethesda opened under black protocol. Yes, that one. Surgical team only. No interns. No residents. And get… me Dr. Patel.”
A pause.
“Because I said so. And every person you bring signs an NDA before they enter the vehicle. Not after. Before. Confiscate phones. Strip metadata. No personal devices past the first checkpoint.”
Another pause. Ashley smiled faintly.
“No,” she said. “Vought does not know. And Vought is not going to know. Now send a team to the Oval Office within the next five minutes. Two paramedics and a stretcher. And make sure they know that if they speak a word of this to anyone, I will bury them in litigation so deep their great-grandchildren come out owing me money.”
Ashley ended the call.
His fear had changed now. It was still fear, but confusion had joined it. ‘He doesn’t understand,’ Bashley helpfully informed her.
Well of course he didn’t understand; he was Homelander. He understood violence, worship, obedience, and terror. He did not understand being saved by someone who hated him.
For a moment, she simply stood there in the wreckage of the Oval Office with the most dangerous man in the world bleeding at her feet.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she said softly. “You are dead.”
His face tightened.
“Not actually,” Ashley said. “Don’t flatter yourself. But officially? Publicly? Operationally? Dead. End of story.”
His eye fluttered.
“Hey, don’t pass out,” Ashley snapped. "I'm telling you something important here."
The eye opened again.
Ashley leaned closer. “You are going to live,” she said. “Okay? You are going to be quiet. You are going to be hidden. You are going to be very, very grateful that the only person in this building with the balls to save your life is me.”
A faint tremor moved across his face. Maybe fear. Maybe pain. Maybe the beginning of comprehension.
‘This is dangerous,’ Bashley said.
Ashley almost laughed. 'Really? You think?'
There was no time to continue the conversation. Footsteps sounded in the hall.
Fast. Controlled. Not panicked civilians. Her paramedics, hopefully.
Ashley stood immediately, mask snapping back into place so fast it almost hurt. Her knees protested. Blood had soaked into one side of her pant leg. Her hands were red.
She straightened her blazer anyway.
Two people entered carrying trauma bags and a collapsible stretcher. They looked from Ashley, to Homelander, back to Ashley.
Bashley caught their thoughts in flashes.
Is that him?
Jesus Christ, that’s him.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
We are so fucking dead.
Ashley pointed down at Homelander. “He is not here,” she said.
The older medic blinked. “Ma’am-”
“He is not here. You did not see him. You are not treating him. This is not White House footage. This is not Vought business. This is not government business. This is a private medical extraction of an unidentified male trauma patient under executive confidentiality. Do you understand me?”
One of the contractors looked like he might be sick.
Ashley snapped her fingers in his face.
“Do you understand me?”
He nodded quickly.
“Good. Now move. You're on a time limit.”
Professional instinct cut through the horror. The older medic dropped beside Homelander, fingers going to his neck, then his chest, then hovering over the wreckage of his face with visible alarm.
“Pulse is thready. Respirations compromised. He’s aspirating.” The medic looked toward the other. “Suction. Now. Get the airway kit ready.”
The second medic knelt hard enough that glass crunched under his knee pads. He opened the trauma bag with shaking hands that became steady the second they touched the equipment.
Homelander’s eye rolled toward them. Fear hit again, white-hot.
Bashley swore inside the back of Ashley’s skull. ‘He thinks they’re going to hurt him.’
'They’re trying to save him.'
‘He doesn’t know the difference right now.’
Ashley crouched again near his head, close enough for him to see her. “Hey. Look at me.”
His gaze wandered, hazy.
She waved a hand in front of his face. “Look at me.”
It found her.
The medics worked around her, cutting away parts of the suit, checking his breathing, saying words that she only recognized from a procedural hospital show.
Homelander’s breathing hitched when one of them touched his ribs. The sound he made was too weak to be a scream, too pained to be the attempt at anything else.
Ashley did not look away. “You want to live?” she asked.
His eye fixed on her.
Bashley heard the answer before his mouth could fail at forming it.
Yes.
Yes.
Please.
“Then let them work,” Ashley said.
The medic at his head swore under his breath. “He needs an airway now. We can manage until transport, but we need to move now."
“Well what are we fucking waiting for?” Ashley said. "Move!"
“He may not survive transport.”
Ashley looked down at Homelander.
His eye was focused on her again. Only her, like she was the only thing in the world that mattered right now.
And maybe, partially, that was true.
Ashley held his gaze. “He’ll survive,” she said. “He’s motivated.”
But in the back of her mind, Bashley whispered, 'This is going to ruin you.'