Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

April 5, 2026 - Easter Sunday

Ozone and melted copper burned the back of Annie's throat, the sickening sweetness of scorched hair hanging thick in the Oval Office.

She stopped at the threshold. The West Wing's surviving electrical grid vibrated through the floorboards, a jagged hum against the soles of her boots. Inside, plaster dust from Kimiko’s blast drifted like snow over the splintered wood of the Presidential seal. Up in the corner, a shattered camera hung by its wires, its red recording light blinking steadily through the gray haze.

Homelander knelt in the center of the wreckage.

His shoulders hunched, the star-spangled cape lying flat in the debris like a heavy, dead skin. A line of bloody saliva stretched from his bottom lip to the floor. He gasped, his chest rattling with a wet, ragged wheeze as he stared at trembling hands that refused to clench into fists. The blast hadn't just burned the Compound V from his system; it had ripped the godhood right out of his veins.

Butcher was already moving. Stepping over a chunk of ruined mahogany without a word, he wore no triumphant smirk—just the dead, unblinking stare of a feral dog finally off the leash. He kept his eyes locked on Homelander's skull, letting the iron crowbar in his right hand drag hard against the shattered drywall, its high, metallic shriek carving through the quiet of the room.

“Please." Homelander's voice didn't boom; it cracked, thin and reedy in his throat. Bright, mortal red blood dripped from his nose, pooling on his pristine boots. "Please, I'll do anything. I’ll suck your dick. I’ll—I’ll eat your shit. I'll leave. I'll disappear. Just don't—"

Butcher’s jaw ticked. The tumor-blackened veins crawling up his neck pulsed violently. "Bit late for negotiations, you daft cunt. This is for my Becca.”

A shift in the periphery caught Annie’s eye: Ryan.

The teen stood rigidly beside the Resolute desk. His knuckles strained bone-white at his sides, his chin tilted up in a forced, trembling mask of defiance. He was trying to play the hardened soldier—the willing accomplice standing by his father's execution. But as Butcher planted his boots, shifting his weight to swing the iron bar, Ryan's breath hitched. His shoulders flinched inward. In the final fraction of a second before the strike, the stoic facade dissolved, leaving nothing but a terrified kid bracing for the sound of breaking bone.

In that split second, the Oval Office fell away. Annie didn't see the ruined seal or the bleeding man on the floor. She saw the leaked Vought files Maeve had shoved into her hands. A grainy photograph of a three-year-old boy in a sterile, windowless room, sitting completely alone in the dark. She looked at Ryan's trembling shoulders, then at the iron bar rising in Butcher's fist. The truth was terrifyingly simple: if this kid watched his father's skull cave in, the boy in the white room wouldn't die. He would just take a new name.

Annie pulled.

The West Wing's surviving current ripped through the floorboards and slammed into her chest. It was a violent, jagged surge that flared her irises blinding white. Above them, the remaining overhead bulbs blew out in a synchronized hail of hot glass. Up in the corner, the camera’s red eye popped in a brief shower of sparks, plunging the room into absolute, suffocating black.

The dark erupted. Secret Service radios hissed and shrieked over the panicked shouts of blinded agents. Cutting through the chaos, Butcher let out a raw, wordless roar, followed instantly by the heavy, displaced whoosh of iron cleaving violently through empty air.

Shattered glass crunched under Annie's boots. She lunged through the blacked-out room, grabbed a handful of the scorched suit collar, and hauled upward. Without his powers to buoy his mass, he was dead, uncoordinated weight. He stumbled blindly, his heavy boots tangling in the fabric of his own cape. She shoved him hard toward the service corridor, hooking an arm under his armpit the second his knees buckled. His breathing was a ragged, pathetic rattle in the dark.

"Move," she hissed..

She dragged him down the service stairs. Above them, the rhythmic, heavy thud of Butcher’s boots hammered violently against the floorboards. Erratic beams from Secret Service flashlights swept the upper landing, slicing through the dust just as Annie threw her weight against the exit door's push-bar.

The stolen sedan was tucked exactly where she’d left it three days ago. Untraceable plates. Full tank. A desperate contingency plan built for her own survival, now being used to save a monster. She shoved him into the passenger side. He folded like a ragdoll, his temple bouncing with a hollow thud against the window glass. Annie threw herself behind the wheel, slammed her boot on the gas, and tore into the street, swallowed instantly by the shrieking chaos of arriving sirens.

In the passenger seat, he ignored the blur of escaping streetlights. His eyes were locked on his own trembling hands. Slowly, he reached up, pressing his fingertips to a deep, jagged tear along his cheekbone. When he pulled them away, they came back wet and crimson. He stared at the blood smearing his skin as if it were an alien substance.

"Why?" he whispered. The commanding baritone was completely gone, replaced by a breathless scrape against the waning dusk.

Annie didn't answer. Her grip on the steering wheel was tight enough to strain the tendons in her forearms, her eyes burning as she kept them dead-locked on the asphalt.

They tore blindly through the night. Every strobing headlight in the oncoming lane snagged the breath in her throat. Beside her, the silence stretched. He didn't speak again. He just bled quietly into the cheap nylon upholstery, and sometime around two in the morning, his teeth began to chatter. He curled inward, wrapping his arms around his ribs, shivering uncontrollably as the cold cabin air leached the heat right out of his skin. A god, catching a chill.

By afternoon, the tires crunched onto the overgrown gravel of a dirt road in rural Maryland.

Her great-uncle’s farmhouse was a rotting, sagging testament to abandonment. Tall weeds choked the porch stairs, and the air smelled heavily of damp earth and pine.

She had to physically pry him out of the car. Leaning most of his dead mass on her shoulder, his breathing shallow, she hauled him up the rotting wooden steps. She kicked the front door open, hitting a wall of stale, dust-thickened air. She didn't have the strength left to be gentle. Dragging him into the parlor, she let go and dumped him onto a faded floral sofa. He groaned—a profoundly human sound of pain—and curled inward, clutching his ribs.

Annie dug a dusty plastic first aid kit from beneath the bathroom sink. Kneeling beside the sofa, she twisted the cap off a bottle of rubbing alcohol, soaked a cotton pad, and pressed it to the deep split in his eyebrow.

He flinched, jerking his head away. "Watch it, you stupid cunt," he spat. “Or I’ll rip your tits off.” The words were vicious— all teeth, no fire.

Annie’s eyes narrowed. Without a word, her hand shot out, her fingers locking around his jaw like a steel vise to slam his head back into the cushions. Pinned flat against the upholstery, he could only choke as she ground the soaked cotton directly into the raw, open flesh. A wet, desperate gasp tore out of him. Tears sprang to his eyes in an involuntary flood as both of his hands flew up to claw at her forearm. His fingers strained and dragged against her skin.

“Get the fuck off of me,” he growled. But it was like trying to move a mountain. He couldn't budge her a single inch, and she didn't ease the pressure until the gash ran clean.

“Or what?” Annie hissed. She leaned in close, keeping him pinned. “In case it’s escaped your notice, you don’t have any powers anymore. So I suggest you sit down and shut the fuck up, or I’ll call Butcher to finish what he started.”

The threat hung heavy in the stale air. For a moment, his eyes flared with pure, reflexive hatred, but he had nothing left to back it up. Slowly, the fight drained out of him. Annie held his stare for one long, suffocating second before releasing his chin. She tossed the bloody cotton pad onto the floorboards, letting the quiet of the empty farmhouse rush back into the room.

Leaving him to stare blankly at the peeling wallpaper, she walked into the kitchen and pulled her burner phone from her pocket. She opened a text thread to Hughie. The screen showed months of polite, stilted check-ins—a quiet graveyard of what they used to be—but the primal urge to keep him safe from her blast radius remained.

I’m sorry. I'm safe. Please don't look for me. I love you.

Her thumb hovered over the screen for just a moment before hitting send. Before the delivery receipt could even register, she set the phone flat on the linoleum floor and brought the heavy heel of her boot down on the screen. The glass gave with a sharp crunch. She drove her heel down twice more, grinding it until the screen into glass dust and the plastic casing buckled.

April 7, 2026

Two days later, she stood in the living room, watching the flickering screen of the farmhouse’s ancient TV.

HOMELANDER DEAD.

The chyron crawled across the bottom of the screen in stark, block letters. Killed in a desperate, final stand by William Butcher. According to the polished military spokesman standing at the press podium, the body had already been cremated by executive order to prevent mass hysteria and secure Compound V samples.

Annie hit the power button, killing the broadcast. Through the grime-streaked glass of the parlor window, she watched the man who used to be Homelander trying to navigate the front porch. He misjudged the height of the bottom riser. His left knee buckled. He pitched forward, slamming into the rotting wood hard enough to tear the skin off his palms.

He didn't get back up. He just stayed down in the weeds, pulling his knees to his chest, clutching a bruised shin with trembling hands.

Annie leaned her forehead against the cool windowpane. The rest of the world was busy mourning and celebrating a dead god. But looking out at the bleeding, shivering man in the dirt, the truth was much… more. He wasn’t a god anymore. He was just another mess she had to clean up.

April 8, 2026

On the third day, the shock finally wore off, leaving only the pain. And the rage.

He tried to swing his legs off the floral sofa, expecting the usual weightless, effortless glide. Instead, gravity dragged him down like a lead anchor. His ribs screamed—a sharp, unfamiliar agony that tore a pathetic grunt from his throat.

"Where the fuck are we?" he spat, his voice raspy from disuse. He glared at the peeling wallpaper, then at Annie, who was leaning against the doorframe with a steaming mug of coffee. "And what the hell is this? You think you can kidnap me, sweetheart?"

Annie took a slow sip from her mug. "Kidnapping. That's rich."

"I am The Homelander," he snarled. He planted his hands on the cushions, trying to push himself to his feet, but his trembling arms buckled halfway. He collapsed back into the couch, his chest heaving. "I don't belong in a shithole like this. I don't—"

"You were The Homelander," Annie cut in. Her voice was entirely flat, stripped of the fear he was so desperately waiting to hear. "Now, you're just dead man named John—”

“That’s not my name,” he seethed.

“That’s what I heard Maeve—”

“That’s not my name. I don’t have a name. I am The Homelander.”

"No, you’re not. Not anymore. Get it through your thick skull," Annie said coldly. "And I need to call you something."

"‘Sir’ has a nice ring to it. Or how about ‘Daddy’?" A cruel, mocking smile twisted his bruised mouth. "You look like someone with daddy issues."

"Cut that shit out. You know John is your name."

"Don’t call me that."

"Fine," Annie said, her expression deadpan. "I’ll call you Farm Boy."

"And why the fuck would you call me that?"

"Because you're going to be shoveling a lot of shit," she replied, her voice practically bored. "And because the real Homelander “died” on live television. The whole world watched Butcher beat his ass. If you walk out that door, if anyone recognizes you without the cape and the laser eyes, they won't run. They'll just tear you apart."

He didn't say anything. He just glared at her, a muscle working furiously under the purple, bruised skin of his jaw.

"My great-uncle's farm," she said, answering his unasked question. "It's entirely off the grid. The deed is buried under two shell companies. Nobody is looking for us here."

Homelander let out a sharp, barking laugh. "Us?" he mocked, the venom slipping easily back into his tone. "What exactly is the plan, Annie? We just play house? You and me, living happily ever after?"

"I don't trust you, and I'm not leaving you here by yourself," she said coldly. "Besides, I’m a fugitive now, too. But if we're going to survive out here, we have to actually live off this land. The locals won't ask questions if we keep to ourselves, but this place is rotting. It needs a roof. It needs fences. It needs a functioning garden."

The barking laugh returned, instantly dissolving into a violent coughing fit as his bruised ribs seized. He hunched over, wiping a fleck of spit from his bottom lip with a trembling hand.

"Work?" he wheezed, his eyes flashing with pure, incredulous disgust. "You expect me to fix your roof? Manual labor—like the mud people? Are you out of your fucking mind? I don't think so."

Annie pushed off the doorframe, turning back toward the kitchen. “Newsflash,” she said over her shoulder. “You are one of the mud people now. And if you don’t work, you don’t eat.”

She walked out, leaving the former supe staring furiously at the empty doorway.

Chapter Text

April 11, 2026

That first week was utter hell.

Homelander Farm Boy refused to work. He spent two full days sitting on the sagging porch, wrapping his scorched cape around his shivering shoulders, waiting for her to bend.

By the sixth day, his newly mortal metabolism began to cannibalize itself. It was a sensation he had never experienced—an incessant gnawing in his gut that made his hands shake and his vision swim. Normal people called it hunger. To him, it felt like dying.

He finally dragged himself off the porch, following his nose. The smell of frying grease and black coffee hit him at the kitchen threshold like a physical blow, making his mouth water so violently he almost choked.

"Bring me food," he demanded, leaning heavily against the doorframe to hide his shaking legs.

Annie didn't even look up from the cast-iron skillet.

"I'm hungry," he snapped, though his voice lacking its usual thunder.

"I'm not your servant," Annie said, flipping a strip of bacon. The sizzle was deafening in the quiet house. "You want to eat, you ask like a human being."

He glared at her back, his jaw tight enough to crack his teeth. In the suffocating silence of the kitchen, his empty stomach let out a loud, humiliating growl.

"Starlight—"

"Annie."

"Annie," he forced out, the name tasting like ash in his mouth. "Can you... get me something to eat?"

She finally turned the burner down. "Sit."

He trudged to the rusted dinette table, collapsing into a vinyl chair. She dropped a chipped ceramic plate in front of him: scrambled eggs, bacon, and a stack of uneven pancakes.

He stared at it, his lip curling in reflexive disgust. "I can't eat this crap."

"This 'crap'," Annie snapped, pointing the greasy spatula directly at his chest, "is the only thing keeping you upright. The eggs are from the hens I bought in town, and the bacon is from the butcher. You’re going to need carbs and protein now that your body is bound by the laws of physics."

He muttered something venomous under his breath, picking up a fork with trembling fingers. He took a hesitant, cynical bite of the eggs.

Then, his body took over. Against his own will, he started shoveling the food into his mouth, eating with the desperate, sloppy urgency of a starving animal.

Annie watched him from the stove, her expression unreadable.

"I need clothes, too," he mumbled around a mouthful of pancake. He plucked at the scorched, stiff fabric of his suit. It reeked of dried blood, stale ozone, and three days of cold sweat.

Annie wiped her hands on a dish towel, her gaze cold and transactional. "I’m running into town this afternoon. You’ll stay here. And when I get back, you're going to start earning your keep."

Annie returned just before dusk, kicking the heavy front door open with her boot. She tossed a thin plastic shopping bag onto the floral sofa next to him.

"Put these on," she said.

He peered into the bag, his lip curling. He pulled out a pair of stiff, dark denim work pants, a cheap thermal undershirt, and a heavy flannel button-down. They smelled like warehouse dust and cheap dye. "You've got to be kidding me," he scoffed, holding the flannel up by two fingers as if it were contaminated. "I am not wearing this scratchy, clearance-rack garbage. I look like a fucking lumberjack."

"Good," Annie said, walking past him toward the kitchen to unpack the groceries. "Because the furnace in this place is dead, the temperature is going to drop to forty degrees tonight, and you need to chop wood."

He dropped the flannel. "Fine. What do you want me to do?"

"Put the clothes on. Then go out back."

Ten minutes later, he pushed through the back screen door. The stiff denim chafed his thighs, and the heavy boots she’d bought him felt like concrete blocks on his feet. He walked to the side of the barn where Annie was standing next to a massive, scarred oak stump surrounded by scattered, uncut logs.

She reached down, picked up a heavy, rusted splitting maul, and shoved the wooden handle against his chest.

He stared at it like she'd handed him a dead rat. "You're joking."

"Do I look like I'm joking?"

"Why don't you chop the fucking wood?" he snapped, tossing the heavy axe onto the dirt. "You've got the glowing eyes. Blast it or punch it or whatever it is you do."

"Because I'm going to cook dinner, asshole," Annie said, her voice ice-cold. "Are you capable of cooking dinner?"

He clenched his jaw, staring at the dirt.

"Right," she said. "The pile is there. Chop."

Annie turned on her heel and walked back toward the house.

He stood alone in the cooling air. Swearing under his breath, he bent down and picked up the axe. It was awkwardly heavy, the weight entirely unbalanced in his grip. He dragged a thick log onto the chopping block, squared his shoulders, and swung. He expected the log to splinter into perfect halves. Instead, the dull blade hit the wood at an angle and violently bounced off. The kinetic shockwave rebounded straight down the hickory handle and slammed into his hands. It felt like grabbing a live wire. He dropped the axe with a sharp gasp, his wrists throbbing with a deep, stinging ache. "Fuck!" he hissed, shaking his hands out.

He picked it up again and swung harder. This time, the blade bit into a knot in the wood and stuck fast. He had to put his boot on the log and awkwardly wrench the axe free, panting with exertion. He didn't know the technique. He didn't know how to let the weight of the axe head do the work. He was just using raw, mortal force, and his body wasn't built for it. His hands—soft, pristine, and entirely uncalloused from a lifetime of floating above the world—began to burn.

Within ten minutes, the friction of the rough wooden handle raised angry, fluid-filled blisters across his palms. Within twenty minutes, the blisters popped.

He swung the axe down, and the raw, exposed skin underneath tore open against the wood. A wet, agonizing sting flared across his palms. He looked down. Bright red blood was smeared across the handle of the axe.

"This is ridiculous," he gasped, chest heaving. He threw the axe into the dirt, cradling his bleeding hands against his chest. He turned toward the open kitchen window. "I'm not doing this!"

Annie didn't even look up from the stove. The smell of beef stew was already drifting out into the cold yard. "Then you freeze tonight. And you don't eat."

"You can't—"

"I can," she interrupted, her voice slicing clearly through the evening air. "And I will."

He stood in the yard, shivering in the cheap flannel, his hands throbbing with a sharp, pathetic pain. He looked at the window, then down at the blood on the axe handle. The smell of the stew made his empty stomach cramp violently.

Slowly, painfully, he bent down and picked up the axe.

He kept swinging. Every impact sent a fresh wave of agony through his torn palms, his shoulders screaming with lactic acid he’d never felt before. By nightfall, he had only managed to splinter a meager, misshapen pile of wood—barely a quarter of a cord—but he physically couldn't lift his arms anymore.

When he finally dragged himself into the kitchen, he collapsed into the dinette chair. Annie set a steaming bowl of stew and a chunk of bread in front of him. He didn't complain. His bloody, trembling hands could barely grip the spoon, but he ducked his head and ate it like he had never tasted anything better in his life. When he finally scraped the bottom of the bowl clean, Annie walked over to clear the table. She paused, glancing out the dark kitchen window at the haphazard pile of splintered logs in the yard.

"It's enough to keep the furnace going tonight," she said, offering the barest crumb of positive reinforcement. "Good job."

He froze, slowly lifting his head. His face was pale and drawn from exhaustion, but his eyes locked onto hers with a flicker of his old, venomous malice. "Don't patronize me. The only reason I kept swinging that axe was because I was imagining the wood was your stupid blonde head."

Annie reached down and picked up his empty bowl, her gaze dropping briefly to his ruined, trembling palms. "Whatever gets you through it," she said dryly, turning her back on him to walk to the sink. "Because you're chopping the rest of it tomorrow."

The rest of the month settled into a grueling, antagonistic rhythm. Every morning started the same way: with a string of vitriol. He complained about the cold floors. He complained about the stiffness in his joints. He called her a bitch, a cunt, a sanctimonious little hypocrite wasting her life playing farmer.

Annie never rose to it. She treated his insults like weather—annoying, but ultimately powerless to stop her from going about her day.

"You missed a spot on the western fence line," she said one Tuesday, leaning against the barn door with a mug of coffee. She watched him struggle to drag a forty-pound bale of hay across the dirt. He was sweating through his thermal shirt, his face flushed, chest heaving.

He dropped the bale, gasping for air. "I swear to God," he panted, glaring daggers at her, "the second I get my powers back, I am going to laser your ass in half. Slowly."

Annie took a slow sip of her coffee. "You're going to need to fix that fence post first, Farm Boy. Unless you want the coyotes getting the hens tonight."

He wiped the sweat from his forehead, his lip curling as he caught the flat, authoritative tone of her voice. "Right away, Warden."

Annie’s jaw tightened just a fraction of an inch. It was barely a twitch, but he caught it. A slow, cruel smirk spread across his bruised face.

Ah, he thought. She hates that.

"Whatever you say, Warden," he repeated, dragging the syllables out. "Wouldn't want to upset the Warden."

Annie just turned on her heel and walked back to the house. But his smugness evaporated twenty minutes later when he was standing in the mud with a wooden post, a hammer, and a pair of post-hole diggers. He stared at the heavy iron diggers. He had spent his entire life breaking things; he had absolutely no idea how to build something.

He tried brute-forcing it, stabbing the iron blades into the packed earth over and over until his shoulders burned, but he only managed to carve out a shallow, messy crater. When he tried to hold the post steady and hammer the crossbeam, the nail bent sideways, and the hammer head slipped, smashing directly into his already-blistered thumb.

He roared, throwing the hammer into the tall grass. He stood there for a long time, chest heaving, staring at the ruined fence. He realized with a sickening, sinking feeling that he couldn't do it. He didn't know how.

Swallowing his pride felt like swallowing broken glass. He trudged back to the house, his boots heavy with mud, and pushed the kitchen door open. Annie was chopping vegetables.

"I need..." The words stuck in his throat. He glared at the linoleum. "I need you to show me how the stupid iron claw thing works."

Annie stopped chopping. She looked at his muddy clothes, his smashed thumb, and the furious humiliation burning in his eyes. She didn't gloat. She just wiped her hands on a towel, walked out to the field, and showed him how to use his body weight for leverage instead of just his arms. The physical indignity of having a woman he used to command teach him how to dig a hole kept him silent for the rest of the afternoon.

The chickens, however, were an entirely different kind of humiliation. They were, to Annie's deep and secret amusement, his Achilles' heel. He could handle the dead weight of the wood, the mindless repetition of hauling water, but the hens required something he had never possessed: patience.

The coop was tight, reeking of ammonia and damp straw. The first time Annie sent him in to collect the eggs, she stood on the porch and listened to the chaos: squawking, a heavy thud, and a string of vicious, breathless cursing. He burst out of the coop door, slamming it behind him. He was covered in stray feathers, his chest heaving, clutching his left hand. A bright line of blood trickled down his thumb.

"Goddamnit. Motherfucker! I'm killing it!" he announced, his eyes wide with a mixture of rage and genuine, ridiculous panic. "I am snapping its fucking neck and roasting it over a fucking spit!"

Annie leaned over the porch railing. "Which one?"

"The big red one! The demon!" He held up his bleeding thumb as if presenting a mortal wound. "It fucking attacked me! I reached under it, and the little dinosaur piece of shit took a chunk out of my hand!"

Annie bit the inside of her cheek to keep her expression flat. "That's a Rhode Island Red. And she's broody. You can't just shove your hand under her like you own the place."

"I do own the place!" he yelled, pacing the dirt. "I used to be a god! I could vaporize that feathered rat with a single thought! I let planes fall out of the sky, Starlight!"

"But you can't now," she said, ringing clear and cold across the yard. "Now, you're just a man who wants an omelet. So either you learn how to move slowly, or we don't eat."

He stared at her, his chest rising and falling. The instinct to intimidate her flared in his eyes, but it died almost instantly against the reality of his bleeding thumb and his empty stomach.

The next morning, Annie watched from the kitchen window as he approached the coop. He didn't stomp—he walked softly, opening the wire door with agonizing slowness, slipping his hand under the red hen with a hesitant, trembling caution that The Homelander had never once exhibited in his entire life. He emerged three minutes later, unbitten, clutching three brown eggs to his chest like they were made of gold.

At night, the farm went pitch black, and the silence was suffocating. To survive it, Annie built a fire in the parlor. She bought a bottle of cheap rye whiskey from the town liquor store, poured two glasses, and forced him to sit across from her.

This was the real work.

"Flight 37," Annie said softly one night. The only light in the room came from the flickering hearth, casting long, dancing shadows over his bruised face. “Tell me about it. What really happened?”

He took a long swallow of the whiskey. It burned his throat—another mortal sensation he was learning to tolerate. He stared at the amber liquid, swirling it in the glass. "You already know. The controls were fried. There was nothing I could do."

"You could have flown them out. One by one."

"I didn't have the time!" he snapped, leaning forward, his defensive reflex automatic. "There were over a hundred people! And even if I tried to save the whole plane, the physics don't work, Annie! If I tried to lift it from the outside, my hands would have punched right through the hull. It's a plane, not a toy. It was physically impossible to save them."

"So you just left them.”

"I panicked!" The confession ripped out of his throat before he could stop it. The raw, ugly truth hung in the air between them. He stared at his trembling hands, his chest heaving. "I panicked," he repeated, quieter this time. "I fucked up, and the plane was going down, and there was no way to fix it without looking weak. So I made a PR calculation."

"They weren't a calculation. They were people. There were children on that plane. There was a little girl in the front row. Do you remember her face?"

He clenched his jaw, looking away from her, staring rigidly into the fire.

"Do you remember her face, John?" she pressed, her voice a quiet command in the dark.

“Don’t… Don’t call me that.”

His fingers tightened around the glass until his knuckles turned white. The silence stretched for two full minutes, broken only by the popping of the wood he had chopped with his own bleeding hands. He had admitted his panic, but facing the actual human cost was entirely different.

Finally, a muscle feathered in his cheek. His throat bobbed as he swallowed hard.

"She had a pink backpack," he whispered to the flames. "It had a cartoon dog on it."

Annie didn't praise him or offer any comfort. She just took a sip of her whiskey, letting the ghost of the little girl sit in the room with them. It was a brutal, agonizing process, peeling back the layers of a monster to find the rotting, buried conscience underneath.

But for the first time, he wasn't fighting her. He was just sitting in the dark, feeling the weight of what he had done.

"Hold still," Annie instructed, a command that had become entirely routine by their third week on the farm. The kitchen smelled sharply of rubbing alcohol and copper as they sat opposite each other at the rusted dinette. The blisters from the axe handle had burst, wept, scabbed over, and torn open again. His palms were a ruin of raw flesh.

He didn’t complain, though the iodine burned like a lit match against his exposed nerves. Instead, he sat perfectly, rigidly still, his eyes locked on her hands.

He watched her hands. Her thumbs braced his wrists, holding him steady against the rusted table. When she brought the soaked cotton to his torn skin, the pressure let up. She was working with a quiet, deliberate caution, adjusting her grip so the tape wouldn't pull at his raw skin.

It scrambled his mind. He had spent his entire life in a world of absolute, binary power: you were either the boot, or you were the neck. He knew what cruelty looked like, and he knew what sycophantic terror looked like. But this quiet, unforced restraint from a woman who had every right to grind salt into his open wounds was entirely alien to him.

"Why do you bother?" he asked quietly.

Annie didn't look up from his palm. "Bother with what?"

"This." He nodded toward the gauze. "You could wrap it tight. You could pour the iodine right into the cuts. It would hurt like a bitch, and I couldn't stop you. But you don't."

Annie taped the end of the bandage down, her face a carefully constructed mask of apathy. "Because if you get infected and die of sepsis, then all of this was for nothing. You're no good to me if you can't work."

It was a cold, pragmatic answer. But as she released his hand, her thumbs brushed lightly, instinctively, against his knuckles. The touch was undeniably tender—and he noticed.

Early June 2026

By month two, the venom in his system began to thin, and his body began to adapt to his new mortality. He figured out the geometry of the axe, letting the heavy iron head do the work, finding a mindless, rhythmic meditation in splitting the wood. Eventually, his palms hardened into thick, yellow calluses and his shoulders broadened—the artificial Vought musculature giving way to the dense, earned muscle of manual labor. As he submitted to the rhythm of the work, his mind finally had the space to process his burgeoning reality.

He started asking questions. They weren't really interrogations but sudden, frustrated outbursts bleeding through the quiet of the farm.

"Why didn't you let Butcher kill me?" he asked one afternoon. He was leaning heavily on the axe handle, sweat cutting tracks through the sawdust on his face, as she carried a bucket of feed past the woodpile.

"Because Butcher is a butcher," Annie breathed, not breaking her stride.

"What do you want from me, Annie?" he called after her, genuine frustration bleeding into his voice. "If you're not going to kill me, what is the point of this?"

She stopped, setting the heavy bucket in the dirt, and turned back to look at him—this sweating, filthy, exhausted man standing on her farm. "I want you to look at the world from the ground. I want you to feel what it costs to live in it."

Two weeks later, the late-spring heat finally broke.

The storm rolled in over the Maryland hills just after midnight. It wasn't a normal rainstorm; it was a violent atmospheric collision. The barometric pressure plummeted so fast it made Annie’s ears pop in the quiet kitchen. Then, the sky tore open.

A crack of thunder slammed into the valley, vibrating up through the floorboards and rattling the teacups in the cupboards. Annie flinched, pulling her cardigan tighter. She looked toward the parlor. The floral sofa was empty, the quilt thrown haphazardly onto the floor.

"John?" she called out.

Another crack of thunder detonated directly overhead—a concussive boom that sounded like artillery fire. Lightning strobed in jagged, blinding flashes through the windows.

She found the back door hanging wide open, banging violently against the siding in the wind. Annie grabbed a heavy flashlight and ran out into the deluge. The rain soaked her instantly, flattening her hair against her skull as she fought her way through the mud toward the barn.

She hauled the heavy wooden door open, sweeping the flashlight beam through the cavernous, dust-filled dark. "John! Farm Boy!"

She found him in the furthest, darkest corner, wedged tightly between a stack of hay bales and the rotting wood of the wall. He was curled into a tight ball, his knees pulled to his chest. His hands were clamped brutally hard over his ears, his fingers digging into his own scalp. He was hyperventilating, rocking back and forth.

"Hey," Annie murmured gently, dropping the flashlight. She fell to her knees beside him. "Hey, it's just a storm—"

"Make it stop," he gasped. His eyes were squeezed shut, his face pale and slick with cold sweat. He wasn't looking at her. He wasn't even in the barn. "Turn the speakers off. Please. Tell them I'm sorry, just turn them off."

Annie's breath caught in her throat. The Vought files. The sensory deprivation room.

Another clap of thunder rocked the barn roof. He screamed—a raw, guttural sound of pure, childish terror—and curled tighter, making himself as small as physically possible.

"John, look at me," Annie said urgently. "There are no speakers."

She didn't think about the risk. The warden armor she had worn so carefully shattered. She reached out and placed both of her hands firmly on his shoulders, gripping the wet flannel of his shirt.

He flinched violently at the contact, a full-body shudder, but she didn't let go. She squeezed hard, grounding him him to the physical reality of the barn.

Slowly, agonizingly, his eyes opened. They were bloodshot, dilated, and wild with panic. He stared at her, his chest heaving, the realization of where he was slowly bleeding back into his mind.

"It's just thunder," she whispered, her voice steady against the drumming rain.

He dropped his hands from his ears, his arms shaking uncontrollably. "The Bad Room," he choked out, his voice cracking. "They'd play it for days. White walls. No light. Just... just the speakers. Thunder and alarms. Just my breathing and the noise."

Annie felt something cold and heavy twist in her gut. She wasn't looking at the monster who had dropped Flight 37. She was looking directly at Subject Zero.

"How old were you?"

"Three," he answered hollowly, staring blindly at the dirt between her boots. "Four. It was... I didn't know how to tell time in there."

Annie’s hands were still on his shoulders; she couldn't bring herself to pull them away.

“Why… why’d they do it?”

"Punishment. When I didn't perform well enough," he kept going, the confession spilling out like blood from a newly opened wound, “or when I cried… or showed fear or sadness. They called it 'biological weakness.' They had to rip it out of me."

"What did they want you to be?"

"Perfect," he whispered, staring at his scarred, calloused palms. "Invincible. Not human." He let out a wet, broken laugh. "Guess I failed."

Annie looked at his face in the dim, ambient light of the storm. Stripped of the suit, the powers, and the terrifying ego, all that was left was a raw, devastating vulnerability. “No. They failed.”

He looked up at her then— really looked at her—and allowed the words to wash over him, rewriting decades of Vought programming in real-time.

Annie didn't leave. She slid down the wall, sitting in the dirt and the hay next to him, her shoulder pressed firmly against his. She sat there in the dark, keeping the ghosts of the white room at bay, until the thunder finally passed.

September 2026

By the time the Maryland oaks began to drop their dead leaves, the perfect Vought blonde had become a glaring liability. The harsh, artificial gold was growing out, revealing a thick half-inch of dark, mousy roots that looked strange and unkempt against his sun-darkened skin.

Annie dumped the heavy canvas grocery bags on the kitchen counter and walked down the hall, stopping short in the bathroom doorway.

He was standing shirtless in front of the sink, staring at his reflection. The grueling, relentless manual labor of the past five months had fundamentally rewritten his anatomy. The cosmetically perfect, hyper-inflated musculature engineered by Vought had slowly melted away, replaced by the dense, roped, functional muscle of a man who spent his days swinging an axe and hauling feed. A rough, dark shadow of a beard had grown in, obscuring the sharp, recognizable angles of the Homelander jawline, and the late-summer sun had baked his pale skin to a weathered bronze.

Annie’s gaze dragged down the heavy, solid line of his shoulders, tracing the rigid tension in his back down to the low slung waistband of his denim work pants. Her throat went inexplicably dry. A sudden, sharp jolt of heat spiked between her legs.

It was a terrifying, intrusive reality: the monster she had dragged out of the Oval Office was slowly, undeniably, becoming a ruggedly handsome man. She ruthlessly shoved the thought down, forcing her expression into a mask of total apathy before she cleared her throat.

He turned. Sitting on the porcelain counter next to him was a cheap, crushed cardboard box.

Annie crossed her arms, her eyes darting to the label. "Revlon 'Sensuous Mocha'?"

He didn't rise to the bait. He just looked at the box, then back at her in the fogged mirror. "I want to look… different. Do you know how to do this?" He picked up the tiny plastic bottle of developer, his thick, calloused thumb dwarfing the cap. "I've never done this before. Vought... they always maintained it."

Annie sighed, stepping fully into the bathroom. “Sit on the edge of the tub.”

He obeyed without a word. Annie ripped the box open, mixed the chemical developer, and snapped on a pair of flimsy plastic gloves. The sharp, acrid smell of ammonia quickly filled the tight space.

"Lean back," she instructed.

She sectioned his hair with her fingers, working the thick, dark paste into his roots. They fell into a heavy, suffocating silence. The bathroom was too small, the physical proximity too close. As Annie thoroughly massaged the dye into his scalp, his shoulders slowly began to drop. He closed his eyes, his breathing evening out, leaning the heavy weight of his head into the pressure of her hands. It was a staggering display of physical trust—or, at the very least, a desperate, unconscious surrender to the first gentle touch he had felt in months.

When the timer finally went off, she turned on the faucet and guided his head under the warm water. They watched in silence as the last physical vestige of Vought's golden god swirled down the porcelain drain in a dark, muddy spiral.

He grabbed a towel, dried his hair roughly, and stood back up to face the mirror.

He stared at his reflection for a long, unbroken minute. The dark, damp strands fell haphazardly across his forehead, casting shadows over his dark, unkempt beard. The Homelander was completely gone.

"I look..." He reached up, his calloused fingers tentatively grazing the dark hair at his temple. "I look like nobody. Just some guy."

"You look human.”

Their eyes met in the reflection of the fogged glass. The air in the bathroom suddenly felt impossibly thick. The dangerous, quiet chemistry that had been simmering under the surface of their daily hostility suddenly spiked, hovering right in the space between them.

Annie swallowed hard, taking a deliberate step backward toward the safety of the hallway. "It'll fade to a lighter brown as it dries."

He turned away from the mirror, looking down at her. His blue eyes were piercing, stripped of the manic laser-glare, leaving only a striking, grounded intensity. "Thank you."

Annie just nodded sharply. She turned and walked back to the kitchen, moving quickly before she was forced to examine exactly why her hands were shaking.

Later that night, Annie stood by the dark kitchen sink, holding a half-empty glass of water. Through the open doorway, the parlor was lit only by the fading embers in the hearth. He sat on the sofa, staring at his own reflection in the rain-streaked windowpane.

He lifted a hand, brushing a dark, unfamiliar lock of hair out of his eyes. And then, slowly, the permanent knot in his jaw gave way. The corner of his mouth ticked upward.

It wasn't the blinding, terrifying grin that used to stretch across Times Square billboards. It was small. Private. The quiet, exhausted relief of a man discovering he was allowed to just exist.

In the shadows of the kitchen, Annie's breath caught. Her grip tightened on the cold glass. The clinical, warden-like armor she had worn so carefully for five months felt suddenly, entirely useless, and a single, terrifying thought surfaced in the dark: I want to see him do that again.

A week later, the nightly routine broke.

They were sitting by the fire. Annie poured the cheap rye, sliding the second glass across the rusted table. He took it, his calloused fingers wrapping around the thick glass, and looked at her. His shoulders hitched up, bracing for the interrogation.

"What?" he asked softly, a defensive edge creeping back into his voice.

"Nothing," she said.

She didn't ask a question. She didn't demand a confession. For the first time in months, she just took a sip of her whiskey, listened to the wood popping in the hearth, and let the silence between them stay quiet.

The quiet routine held. For nearly a week, the nightly interrogations were gone, replaced entirely by the crackle of the hearth and the slow clink of ice against cheap glass. But without Annie actively forcing the reckonings, his mind was finally left alone with its own ghosts. The silence gave them room to get loud.

On the sixth night, he sat leaning forward, his elbows resting heavily on his knees. He was staring directly into the flames, the amber light reflecting in his eyes, tracking the violent shift of the embers.

"I can still see her face," he murmured. His voice was rough, barely audible over the popping wood.

Annie paused, her whiskey glass hovering inches from her mouth. She carefully set it back down on the rusted table. "Whose face?"

"Madelyn's."

He didn't look away from the fire. His calloused thumb traced the rim of his glass over and over in a slow, rhythmic circle.

"I grew up in a white room, Annie," he said, the words slipping out like a slow bleed. "Doctors. Scientists. Clipboards. Nobody ever touched me unless they were drawing blood or testing my pain tolerance. I didn't have a mother. I didn't know what a relationship was. I only knew what a test subject was."

He let out a short, hollow laugh.

"Madelyn was the first person who didn't wear a lab coat. She'd put my head in her lap. Stroke my hair. Tell me I was a good boy. Tell me she was proud of me." His jaw ticked, a muscle jumping under his weathered skin. "And then she'd unbutton her blouse. She weaponized the fact that I didn't know the difference between a mother and a fuck. She built the entire dynamic to keep me on a leash."

Annie remained completely silent, listening to the horrifying, clinical reality of a Vought-engineered sociopath realizing he had been groomed.

"She lied to me," he continued, his grip tightening around the glass. "About Ryan. About Soldier Boy. She looked me right in the eyes, playing the only person in the world who loved me, and lied to my face. She wasn't loving me. She was managing a product."

"So you killed her," Annie prompted softly.

"I burned her eyes out," he answered, his voice dropping to a brutal, factual monotone. "Pushed my lasers straight through her skull. I wanted to see if anything inside her head was real, or if it was all just corporate fuckery."

He stopped. The fire crackled in the grate, casting long, dancing shadows across the peeling wallpaper.

"Her kid was in the next room," he whispered, the defensive edge completely gone from his tone. "Teddy. Right down the hall."

Annie offered no platitudes or lectures. She allowed the absolute ugliness of the confession to linger in the room, letting him bear the full, crushing weight of it himself.

Eventually, he turned his gaze away from the hearth, looking across the small space at her. He studied her face in the dim light—the lack of makeup, the tired lines around her mouth, the complete absence of a Vought-mandated smile.

"She spent my whole life telling me I was a god so I would do whatever she wanted," he said. "You dragged me out here, handed me an axe, and called me a piece of shit."

He lifted his glass, swallowing the last of the rye. "Turns out, you're one of the few people who ever had the balls to tell me the truth."

Annie met his eyes. The delivery held no plea for pity or attempt at profundity; it was simply a statement of fact. Slowly, she nodded. It wasn't forgiveness, but it was the quiet, undeniable beginning of an understanding.

The quiet, undeniable beginning of an understanding hung in the air for exactly thirty seconds before his defense mechanisms violently kicked back in. He had exposed too much. The vulnerability was an open wound, and his immediate, lifelong instinct was to deflect by finding a weakness in whoever was sitting across from him. A familiar, cynical smirk slowly crept onto his face. He leaned back against the worn floral cushions, crossing one ankle over his knee.

"So, let's talk about you, Saint Anne," he said, his voice regaining a fraction of its old, arrogant bite.

Annie took a slow sip of her rye, watching him over the rim of the glass. "What about me?"

"I've been wondering," he mused, gesturing vaguely around the peeling wallpaper of the parlor. "Does your boy-toy know you're out here in the woods shacking up with the antichrist? Or did you leave the poor kid on read? I bet he's miserable. Probably crying into his asthma inhaler right now, wondering why his girlfriend abandoned him after the big victory."

Annie set her glass down. "Hughie thinks you're dead. Along with the rest of the world. It’s safer for him that way."

"Safer," he mocked, rolling his eyes dramatically. "Right. So noble. And what about mommy dearest? Donna must be losing her absolute mind. Her little pageant queen, trading stadium tours for chicken shit. No cameras. No endorsement deals. She must be absolutely devastated that her golden goose wandered off the farm."

"My mother is alive because you're no longer in charge," Annie replied smoothly. "That's all that matters."

He studied her face, looking for a crack, a flinch, any sign that he had drawn blood. When he found none, the cynical smirk on his lips hardened into something much meaner. He uncrossed his legs and stood up. Without the padded suit, his movements were grounded, pulling the gravity in the small parlor toward him. He closed the distance between them, stopping just inches from where she sat.

"Or maybe," he dropped his voice to a low, crude gravel, staring down at her, "little Hughie just couldn't keep up. Maybe you realized playing the sweet, virginal girl next door was a bore, and you wanted to see what it was like to actually have a man's hands on you."

Annie's breath hitched. She tried to maintain her flat glare, but the proximity of him—the smell of woodsmoke, sweat, and cheap dye, the sheer, solid breadth of his chest—betrayed her. A furious, involuntary heat flooded her cheeks. She hated it. She hated that he noticed it even more.

His eyes locked onto the sudden flush of color in her face. The smirk faltered. He had intended it as a cheap way to humiliate her, expecting her to recoil in disgust. Instead, she was looking up at him, flushed and completely rooted to the spot. The silence stretched, taut and uncomfortable. For the first time, he was the one to look away. He took a half-step back, the defensive cruelty bleeding out of his posture, replaced by genuine confusion.

"You won, Annie," he said, his voice dropping the sarcasm. "You and William—you bested me. The whole world—they threw a parade. You could have walked out of the Oval Office a hero. You could be sitting in a penthouse in Manhattan right now, soaking up all that sweet, pathetic adoration you people crave."

He pointed a calloused finger at the floorboards. "Instead, you threw it all away to come to the middle of nowhere. To chop wood and babysit the man who made your life a living hell. It makes absolutely no sense. Why are you actually here?"

Annie stood up abruptly, breaking the spell. She stepped directly into his space, forcing him to meet her gaze. "I stood in that office," she said, her voice shaking slightly, but hard as iron, "and I watched Butcher stand over a bleeding man with a crowbar. He was going to cave your skull in while you couldn't fight back."

She held his striking blue eyes, refusing to let him see how fast her pulse was racing.

"If I let him slaughter someone who was already beaten, I wouldn't be a hero. I'd be you. And I refuse to let Vought turn me into a monster."

He stared at her, his jaw tight. He processed the answer, searching for the hypocrisy in it, the hidden corporate angle, the selfish motive.

"So it's an ego trip," he concluded, his voice low and defensive. "You're out here suffering in the dirt just to keep your own halo shiny. You want to feel morally superior."

Annie didn't argue. She didn't raise her voice or try to convince him of her empathy. She simply picked up her empty glass and turned toward the kitchen. "Think whatever you want, Farm Boy. But I sleep fine at night."

Chapter Text

Mid September 2026

Annie had seen the writing on the wall long before things actually fell apart. During her last six months at Vought, she had quietly started converting her endorsement payouts and salary into untraceable cash. That stash now sat in a heavy iron lockbox under her bed, and she had recently used a small fraction of it to buy another flock of chickens, two Jersey cows, and some pigs from an estate auction two towns over.

When she walked into the barn just after dawn with a tin bucket, she found him standing perfectly still in the center aisle. He was staring at the cows.

He didn't look angry, just deeply and uncomfortably confused by the massive animals shifting placidly in their stalls.

"I need to teach you how to milk them," Annie said.

He looked away from the cows and down at his hands, a genuine look of uncertainty crossing his face. "I don't... I've never done that."

"Come here."

She walked him through it. The rhythm: pull, squeeze, pull, squeeze. The steady, metallic ping of milk hitting the tin bucket. He watched her hands intently, then took her place on the low wooden stool. His massive, calloused fingers were surprisingly gentle against the udder. The cow shifted her weight but didn't kick.

A strange, intense focus settled over his features as he watched the white stream hit the tin.

"What?" Annie asked.

"Nothing." He didn't look up. "Just... milk. I was raised on formula in the lab. Everything was measured in milliliters. Caloric intake. Supplements. I never had actual milk until I was given to Vought." He reached out with his free hand, his knuckles brushing the cow's flank. "It's warm."

He sat there for nearly an hour, long past what was necessary, methodically working until the bucket was full. When he finally stood, he lifted the tin carefully.

"Can I..." He hesitated, looking at the bucket, then at her. "Can I have a glass?"

Annie poured the milk, sliding the cold glass across the counter. Leaning back against the edge of the sink, she watched him drink. He took it slow, his eyes fluttering shut, his heavy shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch. The manic, defensive energy that usually radiated off him was completely absent. He looked entirely peaceful. Safe.

A sudden, painful tightness gripped her throat. She spun away, grabbing a dish towel and focusing entirely on scrubbing the already-clean cutting board before he could open his eyes and catch her staring. After that, the morning milking became his unspoken chore.

That evening, he appeared in the kitchen while she was stirring a pot of soup on the stove. He didn't say anything at first. He just walked over, set a cold, sweating glass of fresh milk on the counter beside her, and took a half-step back.

"I thought... you might want some," he muttered.

Glancing from the glass to his face, she waited. He refused to meet her gaze. His weight shifted uncomfortably from one heavy boot to the other, bracing himself as though he expected a reprimand.

"Thank you," she said softly.

He blinked, glancing up at her. For a fraction of a second, pure, unadulterated relief washed over his features. He nodded quickly, shoved his hands into his denim pockets, and practically fled the kitchen. Left alone in the quiet room, Annie stood perfectly still with the wooden spoon in her hand, letting a sudden, unfamiliar warmth bloom in her chest.

That night, lying in the dark on his narrow mattress, he stared up at the ceiling. His mind kept replaying the scene in the kitchen. The way she had looked at him. The complete lack of hostility in her eyes. The genuine warmth in her smile when she thanked him.

The memory sent a sudden, unexpected rush of blood straight to his cock.

He shifted under the thin quilt, gritting his teeth as a hard, throbbing ache took hold. He squeezed his eyes shut, his pulse hammering in his ears. It was intensely frustrating. He didn't know what to do with the fact that a simple, kind look from a woman who hated him was enough to make his body react with such violent, desperate need.

After three grueling hours of mucking out the back stalls, Annie retreated to the shadow of the empty tack room. Slick with sweat and dust, she pulled her grimy T-shirt over her head, tossing it aside on a wooden crate, and reached for the clean flannel hanging on a nail.

She almost didn’t hear the heavy barn door creaked open. Footsteps crunched on the dirt floor, halting abruptly at the threshold.

Annie spun around, pinning the flannel to her stomach. She stood exposed in the stifling air, her skin glistening. He froze in the doorway, a bucket of feed forgotten in his grip. His mouth parted slightly, his bright blue eyes widening as they locked onto the bare curve of her breasts and the tight, rosy peaks responding to the sudden rush of air.

“I—” The word died on his lips. The bucket slipped from his limp grip, hitting the dirt with a dull thud and scattering grain across the floor. He didn’t look away; he couldn’t. Annie stood frozen, a furious, burning flush creeping up from her collarbone and racing across her bare skin. She braced herself, waiting for the crude remark or the trademark Homelander smirk she knew was coming.

Instead, he swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “I never looked,” he blurted out.

Annie blinked, her brow furrowing in deep confusion. “What?”

“When I had the chance... before.” He gestured vaguely toward his own face, a dark, boyish crimson flooding his cheeks. “The X-ray vision. You were around me in the Tower for over a year. I could have looked through your suit whenever I wanted. But I never did.”

Annie stared at him, utterly derailed. The silence stretched between them, heavy and bizarre, before she finally managed a weak, “O…kay?”

His eyes tracked the red flush blooming across her chest, a look of genuine awe washing over his features before panic finally set in. "I'm sorry. I'm leaving. I didn't mean to—"

He stumbled backward, the toe of his heavy boot catching on the spilled bucket. He awkwardly caught his balance against the doorframe, his face completely scarlet now, and practically sprinted back out into the blinding sun. Annie slowly pulled the clean flannel over her head, her hands shaking slightly. Her face was burning, but as she lined up the buttons, the corners of her mouth twitched. The terrifying, former invincible face of Vought had just tripped over a bucket because he saw her breasts. It was entirely, hopelessly endearing.

When she walked out into the yard ten minutes later, he was standing by the chicken coop, aggressively staring at a piece of wire fencing as if it held the secrets to the universe.

"It's fine," Annie offered a small smile, walking past him. "You can look at me, you know."

His head snapped up. He met her gaze for half a second before his eyes darted away, the red flush returning to his neck. "Yeah. Sorry. I wasn't... I didn't mean to intrude."

"It's fine," she repeated, turning toward the house.

The dynamic between them shifted again, dropping the hostility and replacing it with a quiet magnetism. Annie started catching him looking at her. Not the predatory, leering stare of the Homelander, but a quiet, observational focus. He watched her face when she concentrated on a book. He watched the way she moved through the yard with purpose.

And, much to her own horror, Annie caught herself looking back.

While clearing out the upper barn loft, she stood near the trapdoor, ostensibly sorting old rigging, but her attention kept drifting. He was hauling fifty-pound bales of alfalfa two at a time. The heat had molded his thermal shirt to the dense muscle of his back, but it was the worn work pants that held her focus. Every time he bent and hoisted a heavy bale, the denim pulled taut across his thighs and the solid, heavy curve of his ass. She caught herself staring, swallowing dryly, quickly turning back to the ropes whenever he glanced over his shoulder.

It wasn't just the physical reality of him that kept catching her off guard, either.

She walked into the barn one morning and found him sitting cross-legged in the dirt. He was holding a newborn, runt piglet he had found shivering in the far corner of the pen, wrapped entirely in his own flannel shirt. He held a small syringe of milk in his right hand, slowly, meticulously letting the tiny animal nurse from the plastic tip.

Annie stood in the shadows, her breath catching. Those hands had ripped people apart. They had crushed bone and bent steel. And right now, those massive, lethal fingers were cradling a dying, squirming piglet with an infinite, heartbreaking gentleness. He was murmuring something to it—a low, off-key, rumbling hum that vibrated in his chest.

She backed away slowly, stepping out of the barn before he could notice her. She walked straight to her bedroom, sat on the edge of the mattress, and buried her face in her hands. She was deeply, physically attracted to him.

"That wasn't Homelander," she whispered to the empty room. "That's someone else."

The piglet survived. He named her Maisie.

"You named it?" Annie asked a few days later, leaning against the wooden railing.

"She needed a name," he countered staunchly, stroking the piglet's coarse hair with his thumb. He treated the animal as if it were incredibly precious.

Early October 2026

By the time the month bled into the next, his artificial dye had grown out, leaving a harsh line of two inches of mousy brown roots against the rich coffee. He kept running his hands through it, catching his reflection in the windows with clear annoyance.

"We should fix that," Annie suggested over tea.

Relief immediately washed over his face. "Please. It looks ridiculous."

She dyed it again that night. The bathroom felt much smaller this time. When she worked the dark paste into his scalp, his eyes fluttered shut, and he leaned back into the pressure of her fingers. The trust was no longer a forced surrender; it was something earned, blooming quietly between them.

The fragile tension finally shattered over a rusted hinge.

They were replacing the latch on the chicken coop when the rusted hinge gave way entirely. The wire door swung open, and three hens immediately bolted into the yard.

What followed was twenty minutes of pure, unadulterated chaos. He tried to herd the big Rhode Island Red back toward the pen, lunging left, then right. His boot caught on a slick patch of mud, and the former leader of the Seven went down hard, landing flat on his back in the wet dirt. The hen hopped directly onto his chest, let out an indignant squawk, and pecked him squarely on the forehead.

Annie couldn't help it. A short, sharp laugh escaped her throat.

He froze in the mud, looking up at her, water dripping from his chin.

Annie clapped a hand over her mouth. "I'm sorry, it's just—"

She couldn't finish the sentence. The absolute absurdity of the situation—the world's most dangerous man being bested by a farm bird—broke through the last remaining wall of her grief. She started laughing. Real, deep, breathless laughter that shook her shoulders.

Slowly, the irritation on his face melted away. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and then he laughed, too—a rich, booming, genuine sound that echoed across the empty fields. They stayed there in the mud for a long time, laughing until their ribs ached.

The easy warmth carried over into the following morning. They knelt side-by-side in the dirt, tying up overgrown tomato vines before the heavy stalks could collapse under their own weight. The mid-morning sun caught the loose, wild strands of Annie's hair, turning them to spun gold. He paused, a spool of twine forgotten in his grip, mesmerized by the way her nose crinkled. A bright, residual giggle escaped her lips when a fat bumblebee clumsily bumped into her shoulder. The sheer, unforced joy of the moment—and the way the sunlight illuminated her face—made a strange, heavy ache take root behind his ribs.

He leaned forward to grab a wooden stake, and his dark, overgrown hair fell directly into his eyes, leaving a streak of mud across his forehead as he tried to blow it out of the way. Without thinking, Annie reached across the vines and gently brushed the hair back, tucking it securely behind his ear.

They both stopped dead.

Her fingers were still lingering against the warm skin of his temple. His blue eyes locked onto hers, wide and entirely stunned. The air in the garden seemed to instantly evaporate.

"Sorry," Annie breathed, pulling her hand back as if she had touched a hot stove. "It was just... in your face."

"It's okay," he murmured, his voice dropping to a rough, low gravel. He turned back to the tomatoes, picking up his twine, but Annie noticed the distinct, uncontrollable tremor in his hands.

The shift in the air followed them into the weekend. He had insisted on taking the heaviest grocery bags from her truck, carrying them all in one trip. He set them on the counter and stood there for a moment, staring at the canvas handles.

"My name was John," he stated quietly.

Annie stopped unpacking the frozen goods. She turned to look at him.

"Before they called me... him," he continued, still refusing to meet her eyes. "The scientists in the lab. They called me John."

Annie nodded. “I know. But you told me not to call you that.”

“Right,” he said quickly, as though embarrassed. “It’s just weird for me to hear anyone call me by that name. It feels strange.”

"Do you like it?" she asked softly. "'John'?" He gave a small, noncommittal shrug.

"We could call you something else," she offered, leaning against the counter. "Pick a different name."

A familiar smirk touched his lips. "What, 'Farm Boy'?"

"No," Annie smiled. "A real name."

The smirk faded. He finally looked up, meeting her gaze with a vulnerability that was almost painful to witness. "I like 'John.' I like the way you say it. But you don't have to use it if you don't want to. ‘Farm Boy’ works fine."

"John," she repeated, her tone dropping to a quiet, definitive register. A small, genuine smile broke across his face.

That night, the sticky autumn heat clung to the inside of the farmhouse. Annie lay in her bed, the sheets kicked down to her waist, staring up at the dark ceiling. Her body was wired, buzzing with a restless, physical energy she hadn't felt in months.

She closed her eyes, and the reel of the last few weeks immediately started playing behind her eyelids. His massive, calloused hands cradling the piglet. The heavy muscles of his thighs as he lifted the hay. The rough gravel of his voice when she tucked the hair behind his ear.

Sliding her hand down her stomach, her fingers slipped past the waistband of her cotton underwear. She let out a shaky exhale, entirely giving in to the fantasy. Reaching blindly into the drawer of her nightstand, her fingers closed around a small, silicone vibrator. She clicked it on, the low, mechanical hum instantly vibrating against her palm, and pressed it directly against her slick folds.

She imagined the slide of his rough, calloused palms gripping her hips, the crushing weight of his chest pressing her deep into the mattress. In her mind, his overgrown dark hair fell into his eyes as he ground down against her. Her breathing fractured into shallow pants. Parting her legs wider, she rocked her hips upward against the buzzing toy as liquid heat pooled low in her stomach. She could almost feel the bruising grip of his hands contrasted against that sudden, absolute gentleness, pulling a wet gasp from her throat. The tension coiled, wiring every nerve tight, until the climax finally broke over her in a sharp, violent wave.

John lay rigid on his narrow mattress, his pulse roaring a deafening beat in his ears. For ten agonizing minutes, the faint, mechanical hum of her toy had vibrated against the adjoining wall, vibrating straight into his bones. His jaw locked tight, his heavy, throbbing erection trapped in a punishing fist as he tried desperately to tune it out. Staring blankly at the dark ceiling, he fought the urge to move, his body aching with the agonizing knowledge of exactly what she was doing on the other side of the plaster.

But hearing his name—gasped like a desperate, breathless prayer over the hum of the vibrator—snapped the last thread of his control.

A ragged, trembling exhale escaped him as he stroked himself hard, his mind instantly flooding with a blinding, visceral fantasy. He pictured her kneeling between his thighs, looking up at him with those striking eyes as she took his thick length into her warm, wet mouth. In his mind, he felt the slick slide of her lips, hearing the wet, desperate friction of it until the tight suction pulled a guttural moan from the deep recesses of his throat.

With a sharp whine of rusted springs in the dark, his hips drove down as the fantasy took complete hold. Every stroke grew faster, the friction burning against his skin, his breathing fracturing into shallow, animalistic pants. In his mind, his calloused hands tangled deep into her golden hair, pinning her in place as the pressure built to a breaking point.

“Please, John,” he imagined her whimpering against his thighs, her voice a sweet, broken wreck of submission that existed only for him.

The illusion shattered what little restraint he had left. With a low, ragged growl, his body convulsed as he came hard into his own hand, spilling thick ropes across his knuckles and chest—even as his mind super-imposed the image onto her, painting her perfect tits and beautiful, flushed face in hot white.

In the adjoining room, Annie’s breath caught. She froze, the vibrator still humming against her wet core. She held her breath, listening to the dark house. Creak. Creak. Creak. Then came the heavy, desperate slide of skin on skin, followed by a low, guttural exhale that vibrated straight through the floorboards. He wasn't just tossing and turning. He had heard her. He was touching himself.

The realization should have flooded her with shame. Instead, a reckless, agonizing spike of heat flared in her blood. Closing her eyes, Annie pressed the vibrator harder against her swollen clitoris, sliding two fingers deep inside her own slick heat. The wet friction of her rhythm echoed shamelessly in the quiet room. Tilting her head back into the pillow, she let out a louder, deliberate moan, sending the sound straight through the wall.

Instantly, the bedframe in the next room answered, groaning in rapid, violent synchronization with her hips. Thud, thud, thud went his headboard against the shared drywall. Completely lost to the friction, she whined his name again, and a ragged, desperate groan tore through the plaster in response.

Through the vibrating wood, she caught the muffled, breathless wreck of his voice. “…oh fuck… so fucking tight…”

The cadence escalated into a frantic, shared madness. Her back bowed high off the mattress as she shattered for a second time, a long, keening sound tearing from her throat that perfectly overlapped with the heavy, shuddering climax on the other side of the wall.

Breakfast the next morning was stifling. The only sound in the kitchen was the sharp, rhythmic scrape of her spoon against a ceramic bowl. John sat rigidly in the vinyl chair opposite her, his gaze locked entirely on the dark surface of his coffee. Every time he shifted his weight, the scuff of his heavy boot against the linoleum sounded like a gunshot.

A dark, residual flush still stained the tips of his ears. But when Annie reached for the pitcher of juice, thinking his guard was up, she glanced up and caught him. He wasn't looking at his coffee anymore. He was staring straight at her, his eyes carrying a shameless, wicked heat that burned right through the morning light before he abruptly snapped his gaze back down.

Chapter Text

Mid October 2026

The stretch of unseasonably warm weather and bright autumn sun brought a new, heavy bounty to the farm. 

The overgrown tomato vines bowed under the weight of the harvest, the hens were laying consistently, and the runt piglet, Maisie, had grown thick and relentlessly healthy. The grueling, day-to-day survival that had defined their first few months had slowly morphed into a steady, shared rhythm.

Annie was in the barn late one afternoon, wrestling with a warped iron hinge on the tack room door. The humidity had swollen the wood, and no matter how hard she drove the screwdriver, the rusted screws refused to catch. Muttering a sharp string of curses under her breath, she wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, blowing a loose, sweat-dampened strand of hair out of her eyes.

She didn't hear him approach. The heavy thud of his boots was completely masked by her own frustration until a shadow fell over the doorway, boxing her in.

Before she could step back, his hand reached past her. His large, calloused palm effortlessly pressed the heavy wooden door flush against the frame, holding it perfectly steady.

"Try it now," he murmured, his voice a low rumble right beside her ear.

Annie’s breath hitched. She blindly drove the screwdriver forward, the metal finally biting into the wood and catching. As she lowered her hands, the suffocating proximity of him registered all at once. He was standing close enough that she could feel the ambient heat radiating off his chest, smelling of cut hay and clean sweat.

When she turned her head, she found him already looking down at her. His striking blue eyes were dark, tracking the erratic pulse fluttering at the base of her throat.

Slowly, deliberately, he lifted his free hand. His rough, calloused fingers grazed the sensitive skin of her temple, gently catching the stray lock of hair she had been fighting and tucking it securely behind her ear. It was the exact gesture she had offered him in the garden weeks ago, returned now with an agonizing, breathless gravity.

The air in the tack room seemed to completely evaporate. His fingers lingered against her jawline for a fraction of a second longer than necessary, his gaze dropping involuntarily to her mouth. The undeniable, electric pull between them flared so hot it made her dizzy.

"Sorry," he breathed, his voice thick with a restraint that looked physically painful. He pulled his hand back, stepping out of her space. "It was just... in your face."

"John—"

"I'll go check the feed troughs," he cut in abruptly, turning on his heel. He practically fled the barn, leaving Annie standing alone in the dim light, her hand pressed flat against her own chest to keep her heart from cracking her ribs apart.

Later that night, John sat on the edge of his narrow mattress, staring blankly at his scarred hands. His chest physically ached, a deep, hollow pressure expanding behind his sternum.

He didn't think of it as love. Love was the sterilized, transactional word Madelyn had used to keep him on a leash. Love was the violent, supremacist worship Stormfront had offered him. What he felt for Annie was something entirely different. It was a desperate, terrifying gravity. She was the only thing in his entire, blood-soaked existence that felt clean, and the realization that he needed her—that he craved the quiet safety of her presence more than he had ever craved the adoration of millions—made him feel violently ill.

Because he knew exactly what he was. He ruined everything he touched. He had murdered, he had destroyed, and he was permanently stained by a lifetime of atrocities. He could never cross that hall and pull her into his bed, because she didn't deserve to be dragged down into the dark with him.

By late October, the dropping temperatures forced a conversation Annie had been dreading. They were critically low on winter supplies—kerosene, heavy rock salt, and feed that couldn't be bought from the neighboring farms.

She stood by the front door, slipping her keys into her jacket pocket. "I'll be back before dark. Make sure the water lines are—"

"I want to go with you."

Annie froze, her hand on the doorknob. She turned to look at him. "John, no. Absolutely not."

"I'll stay in the truck," he promised, stepping into the hallway.

"If someone recognizes you, it's over," she argued, her voice rising with panic. "Vought has facial recognition everywhere. Butcher could still be out there. We don't even know who is running the country right now. You stepping foot in a public town is a massive risk."

"Annie, please." The total lack of demand in his voice stopped her cold. "I haven't left this property in half a year. I just... I want to... Just for an hour. Please."

Annie stared at him, biting the inside of her cheek. She knew it was a reckless, terrible idea. But looking at the quiet desperation in his eyes, she found she couldn't deny him.

An hour later, they were parked outside a sprawling hardware store in a neighboring county. John sat in the passenger seat with a faded ballcap pulled low over his overgrown hair, the collar of his heavy flannel turned up against the autumn wind. They were loading the last fifty-pound bag of rock salt into the truck bed when shouting erupted from the adjacent aisle of parked cars.

A man and a woman were arguing violently. The woman was backing away, her shoulders hunched, trying to reach the handle of her sedan. The man stepped into her space, his face red, and grabbed her upper arm with a bruising, aggressive grip.

John went completely rigid. The bag of salt in his hands hit the asphalt with a heavy thud. Annie followed his gaze, her blood running cold. Every heroic instinct in her body screamed to march over there and throw the man across the parking lot, but the reality of their situation clamped down on her like a vice.

"John, get in the truck," she hissed, grabbing his elbow.

He didn't move. His blue eyes were locked onto the couple, his jaw ticking violently. "He's hurting her."

"I know," Annie said, her voice shaking with the effort it took to hold herself back. "But we can't. If either of us uses our abilities, the cameras catch it, and Vought brings an army to our front door. Get in the truck."

The woman finally wrenched her arm free, scrambling into her car and locking the doors. The man slapped the hood, shouting a final string of curses before turning and stalking off toward the store. John let Annie push him into the passenger seat, but the tension radiating off him was nuclear. As they merged onto the empty country highway, the silence in the cab was suffocating. John stared out the window, his knuckles white where he gripped his knees.

"She was showing all the physical markers of prey," he said suddenly, his voice a flat, hollow monotone. "Hunched shoulders. Shallow breathing. She was looking everywhere for an exit."

Annie kept her eyes on the road. "She was terrified."

"Yes," John muttered. "But he didn't care. He could see that she was trapped, and he just kept pushing."

He swallowed hard, a visible shudder running through his heavy shoulders. Annie glanced at him, gripping the steering wheel tighter. She could tell he wasn't just talking about the man in the parking lot. "Who are you talking about, John?"

He went dead still. Six months ago, the question would have earned her a terrifying, laser-eyed threat. Now, he just looked out the window, his face pale.

"Tell me about Becca Butcher," Annie pushed gently.

"It wasn't like that," he deflected immediately, though his voice lacked any of its usual conviction. "It wasn't like what that guy just did. She wanted it."

"She was Butcher's wife," Annie countered, keeping her tone completely neutral. "Why would she want it?"

“I just pulled her aside to talk about work,” he said, the words spilling out of him in a rushed, defensive panic. “That’s all it was. And she came with me willingly. I didn't drag her, Annie—she walked right into the private lounge with me.”

He stopped, his chest heaving as his memory violently collided with his past abilities. “And when I touched her... her heart rate spiked. Her skin flushed. She was wet. I could hear it. I could smell it.”

Annie pulled the truck onto the gravel shoulder of the highway, slamming the shifter into park. She turned in her seat, facing him fully.

"Did she ask you to stop?"

"She didn't push me away," he insisted, his breathing turning shallow. "She kissed me back. She moaned."

"If she had pushed you, what would you have done?"

John opened his mouth to answer, then stopped.

"You were The Homelander," Annie reminded him quietly. "You were an invincible god. If she said no, if she fought you, what did she think you would do to her?"

John looked down at his trembling hands. The defensive walls in his mind were violently fracturing in real time. "I thought she was aroused. The adrenaline, the spiked pulse... I thought she wanted me."

"Her body was reacting to survive," Annie said, refusing to soften the blow. "She was terrified. She fawned so you wouldn't tear her in half. Was she shaking, John? Like the woman in the parking lot?"

His face went completely ashen. "Yes."

The silence in the truck cab was deafening. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his broad shoulders shaking as the reality of his own corrupted senses finally caught up to him.

"In the lab," he choked out, his voice cracking into a ragged, broken wreck, "they only taught us how to read threats. Dominance. Submission. Predator and prey. They never taught me the difference between fear and desire. I didn't know. I didn’t understand." He dragged his hands down his face, staring at her with wide, devastated eyes.

"The fact that the lab broke your compass doesn't change what you did to her," Annie said softly, holding his gaze. "To Becca, you were a monster. And nothing changes that. But understanding why you misread her—understanding that you never learned what consent actually is—that matters for who you are now."

He wiped his eyes roughly with the sleeve of his flannel, his chest heaving. "How do I fix it?"

"You can't," Annie replied honestly. "All you can do is carry the weight of it, and make sure you never do it again. To anyone."

"I won't," he whispered, staring blindly at the dashboard. "I swear to God—I swear to you—I won't."

“Good,” Annie breathed. “Because if you do, I’ll kill you.”

November 2026

By month seven, John's dark hair had grown past his collar, wild and completely untamed. Sometimes he tied it back with a piece of rough twine while he chopped wood; other times it fell loose around his face. Stripped of the synthetic suit and the blinding, terrifying Vought smile, he simply looked like a man who belonged to the land.

They sat on the porch steps together as the November sun dipped below the tree line, nursing mugs of hot tea. The silence between them was no longer fraught with unspoken tension; it was a comfortable, cozy blanket.

Annie watched him from the corner of her eye. She watched the way he studied the horizon, the relaxed slope of his heavy shoulders, the quiet dignity he had slowly carved out of the dirt.

"Do you miss it?" she asked suddenly, her voice cutting through the chill in the air. "The power?"

John didn't answer immediately. He took a slow sip of his tea, watching the sky bleed from orange to a deep, bruised purple.

"Sometimes," he admitted quietly. "When the physical work feels like it's breaking my spine. When I wonder if any of this actually matters." He turned his head, his striking blue eyes meeting hers in the fading light. "But then I remember what I used that power for.”

He looked back at the sunset, his jaw setting into a firm, resolute line. "I'd rather be tired. I'd rather be nobody. I'd rather just be... this."

Annie's throat closed up.

She wanted to reach across the wooden steps. She wanted to thread her fingers through his and tell him that he wasn't nobody. But the physical reality of the man sitting beside her—the man who sang to dying piglets, who wept over his own atrocities, who had carefully memorized how she took her coffee—was suddenly, overwhelmingly terrifying.

Later that night, alone in her bedroom, Annie stared at the ceiling and finally admitted the truth she had been ruthlessly outrunning for months. It wasn't a sudden, romantic epiphany. It was a slow, horrifying realization that the compass she used to navigate right and wrong had permanently shattered. She didn't just care about him. She didn't just feel a reckless, dangerous physical attraction to him. She felt safe with him.

She was falling in love with a man who had murdered thousands of people. Both things were true. Both things would always be true. And as she pulled the quilt up to her chin, listening to the steady rhythm of his soft snores through the thin drywall, she realized with a sickening drop in her stomach that she had no idea how to stop it.

Chapter Text

Early March 2027

The fragile peace they had built shattered just after the winter thaw, right as the muddy, bitter earth was finally heralding the arrival of spring. Annie was at the clothesline, her hands freezing as she pinned up damp sheets in the crisp morning air, when she heard the sudden, sharp hitch of John's breath behind her.

Soldier Boy was marching casually up the long gravel driveway. He moved with an arrogant swagger, entirely carefree, walking onto the property as if he owned the very earth beneath his boots. Even without his shield and tactical gear, Ben was unmistakable. He and John shared the same striking, angular jawline, but the similarities ended there.

Ben was thick, unbreakable brawn, radiating a violent, lethal power. John, by contrast, had leaned out over the harsh winter; his body was built on rough, practical farm-boy strength now, completely stripped of its previous invulnerability.

Before Annie could even drop the wet sheet, John moved. He stepped directly in front of her, his broad shoulders squaring as he positioned his body as a physical shield between Annie and his father. He had absolutely no powers left, but the protective instinct was instantaneous and absolute.

Ben stopped ten feet away, letting out a low whistle.

"Well, fuck me sideways," Ben drawled, his lips curling into a vicious smirk. He tilted his head, taking in the rusted tractor, the chicken coop, and finally, his son. "The whole damn world thinks the great Homelander is dead. And here I find you. Hiding in the mud, playing house like a pathetic fucking pussy."

John's jaw tightened, the muscles ticking violently. "What are you doing here?"

"Vought cut a deal," Ben said easily, fishing a silver lighter out of his pocket and sparking a blunt. "Popped me out of the freezer with one simple condition: track down America's missing sweethearts. Said you two went off the grid together. I thought it was corporate bullshit. But look at this." He blew a thick cloud of smoke into the cold air. "Domestic as hell."

Annie stepped out from behind John’s heavy arm, her eyes narrowing as power surged to her hands. The air around her crackled with golden light. "Leave."

Ben’s gaze slid lazily to her, his smirk widening into something hot and deliberately predatory. He immediately clocked the way John tensed, practically vibrating with the urge to keep her hidden, and Ben leaned right into it.

"Starlight. Goddamn," Ben purred, looking her slowly up and down, making a show of undressing her with his eyes. "We tangled back at the Tower, didn't we? You were throwing all those cute little sparks."

He clicked his tongue, his gaze dragging agonizingly down her sweat-dampened torso before snapping back up to her eyes, flashing with a dark, violent heat.

"I was too busy knocking this disappointment unconscious to really get a good look at you then," he continued, a cruel smirk cutting across his face. "But gotta say... you look a hell of a lot better covered in sweat and mud than you ever did in that spandex. Those tits are completely wasted on a farm."

"I said leave," Annie warned, the light in her palms flaring brighter, humming with a lethal frequency.

Ben laughed. It was a cold, grating sound. "Or what? You'll blast me? Sweetheart, we both know that won't do shit except piss me off."

He took a slow, menacing step forward, the casual swagger dropping away to reveal the absolute psychopath underneath.

"Let's get the facts straight," Ben said, his voice dropping to a deadly, cold baritone.

He took another step, closing the distance until he was chest-to-chest with John, blowing a thick stream of smoke directly into his son's face. But his eyes slid past John's shoulder, locking dead onto Annie with a dark, sickening heat.

"I could shatter both of his kneecaps before he even takes a breath. Leave him completely paralyzed, choking on his own blood in the dirt." Ben tilted his head, his eyes tracking the curves of her hips. "Then I could bend you over the hood of that rusted truck, rip those little jeans right off you, and fuck you raw until you're sobbing. And this powerless, pathetic sack of shit wouldn't be able to do a damn thing except lay there in the mud and watch his daddy take his girl."

The threat hung over the yard, thick and vile. John didn't flinch, his jaw locked so tight the bone looked ready to snap, but Annie saw his heavy fists trembling at his sides. The absolute, agonizing reality of his mortal helplessness—the crushing knowledge that he could no longer protect her—was crashing down on him in real time.

"What do you want?" John forced out, his voice a low, ragged gravel.

Ben took a final, long drag, his eyes dancing with cruel amusement. "Vought expects me to bring back two heads in a duffel bag. But honestly? Watching the great Homelander carry feed buckets and playing farmer is the best entertainment I've had in decades."

He flicked the burning butt into the mud, stepping it out with the heel of his heavy boot. His grin returned, sharp and deeply ugly.

"I think I'll stick around. Keep you two as my own personal pets," Ben decided casually. "You can keep doing the chores. And whenever I get the urge to wet my dick, I'll just take her. On the kitchen table, out in the dirt, in your own fucking bed—doesn't matter. I'll use her whenever I want, and you're gonna sit there like a good boy and listen to her take it."

He walked right past them, intentionally bumping his heavy shoulder hard against John’s as he sauntered toward the outbuildings.

"I'll take the barn," Ben called over his shoulder, not bothering to look back. "Have sugar tits bring me a pot of coffee in ten minutes. Black. And tell her to lose the flannel before she comes out."

And just like that, the fragile, quiet sanctuary they had built was gone.

The first week, he was absolutely insufferable.

Ben treated the farm like his own personal kingdom, lounging on the porch with a cigarette while John broke his back doing the manual labor. He took every available opportunity to psychologically torture his son, his crude, deep voice carrying across the yard.

"Christ, you handle those teats like you're trying to coax a virgin into the backseat, son," Ben mocked from the barn doorway as John milked the Jersey cow. "Pathetic. When's the last time you actually emptied your balls, kid? This whole setup is sadder than a goddamn country song."

Worse than the taunts aimed at John was the way Ben hounded Annie. It was constant: lingering compliments, standing entirely too close in the kitchen, a heavy hand sliding down to rest intimately on her lower back whenever he brushed past her.

"You know, I bet you're wound tighter than a cheap watch out here," Ben murmured one afternoon, trapping her against the counter. "When's the last time a real man laid you out properly and made you scream, sweetheart?"

Annie didn't bow to it though. The third time he cornered her, she dropped her polite facade entirely, her eyes glowing blinding white. She leveled a kinetic blast of golden light square into his chest, throwing his heavy frame backward through the rusted screen door. It didn't leave a scratch on him. Ben simply sat up in the dirt, dusted off his denim jacket, and flashed a dark, wolfish grin. "Goddamn, I love a spitfire."

Her feistiness only entertained him, making him pursue her harder, which in turn drove John into a silent, white-knuckled fury.

Annie hated Ben's suffocating sexism. She hated the cruel, effortless way he degraded John. It was the only thing that gave her the strength to resist him. Because beneath her disgust, Annie was not immune to the raw, magnetic gravity of his sex appeal. Ben possessed a dark, commanding confidence—the allure of a man who had never been broken, who had never learned humility, and who simply took whatever he wanted. It was a terrifying, intoxicating contrast to the careful, fragile restraint she shared with John.

By the second week of his occupation, the tension in the farmhouse had become a physical weight. John was out in the back pasture repairing the fence line. Annie was alone in the house. Desperate for a release from the complicated, suffocating mess of her feelings, she had retreated to her bedroom. She lay on her back, her jeans discarded, the soft mechanical hum of her vibrator pressed firmly against her slick folds as she chased a much-needed oblivion.

She didn't hear the door hinges give way. Before she could even gasp, a large, calloused hand clamped down hard over her mouth, pinning her head to the mattress. Annie's eyes snapped open in sheer panic. Ben loomed over her, his broad chest blocking out the afternoon light.

"Shh," Ben commanded, his voice a deadly, velvet rumble next to her ear. "Wouldn't want the boy to hear us, would we? Be a real shame if he came running in here trying to play hero and got himself paralyzed."

Annie froze, her heart hammering against her ribs. Ben’s free hand slid down her stomach, his thick fingers wrapping over hers and effortlessly prying the buzzing toy from her grip. He didn't turn it off. Instead, he pressed the vibrating silicone directly back against her swollen clit, his thumb pressing down hard to increase the pressure. Annie bucked against the mattress, a muffled whine tearing at her throat, but Ben’s hand remained an iron vice over her mouth.

"I got this, sweetheart," he murmured.

He dropped the toy onto the sheets and replaced it with his hand, sliding two thick, rough fingers deep inside her wet heat. He worked her with a brutal, practiced ease, his thumb simultaneously rolling over her clit. Annie’s nails dug into the bedsheets. It felt good. It felt impossibly, agonizingly good. It was raw and uncomplicated, completely stripping away her overthinking.

Ben shifted lower, his hand still clamped over her mouth. He buried his face between her thighs, his tongue lashing out to taste her, eating her out with a wet, greedy intensity. At the same time, his free hand reached up, roughly shoving her bra down to palm her bare breast, his fingers mercilessly pinching and rolling her nipple.

The sensory overload was absolute. Between his mouth, the heavy thrust of his fingers, and the rough manipulation of her breasts, Annie was completely rewired.

"Come on," Ben challenged against her slick skin, his breath hot. "Show me."

She shattered. Her back bowed entirely off the mattress, her hips rolling violently against his mouth as she came with a strangled, muffled cry trapped perfectly beneath his palm.

Ben pulled back, looking as proud and wicked as the devil himself, his lips shining with her wetness. He shifted his weight upward, the heavy metal buckle of his belt clinking loudly in the quiet room as he unzipped his pants. He freed himself, the thick, heavy head of his cock brushing deliberately against her entrance. Annie's eyes widened. She shook her head frantically, mumbling a desperate "No" against his palm.

Ben paused, a dark, mocking satisfaction sharpening his gaze. He didn't force entry. Instead, he smoothly shifted his weight, pinning her down by the jaw as he pulled his cock back, gripping his own thick length.

"Fine," Ben growled, his jaw setting as he began to jack himself off right above her face, his hips snapping in a brutal, rapid rhythm. "But you're taking this."

Annie watched, completely paralyzed by the sheer dominance radiating off him, until a low grunt tore from his chest.

"Open up," he ordered. The command left no room for defiance. She parted her lips, and Ben came hard, thick, hot ropes spilling across her cheeks and directly into her mouth.

“Swallow.” He stood over her, chest heaving, waiting until she swallowed the thick, metallic taste of him.

Ben smirked, gently patting her flushed cheek with a condescending finality. "Good girl.”

He tucked himself away, buckled his belt, and walked out of the bedroom as if he had just finished a casual glass of water, leaving Annie trembling on the ruined sheets.

For the next few days, Annie actively avoided him. Distance became her shield, an armored boundary drawn across the property as she drove herself through chores on the far edge of the dirt and retreated to the farmhouse the moment Ben’s shadow lengthened across the yard. She convinced herself the bedroom had been a one-time lapse, a secret she would take to her grave.

But Ben was always watching.

Perched on the porch rail, the cherry of his joint glowing a faint, steady orange in the dusk, his sharp gaze tracked her every move. More than that, he mapped her gravity around John. From his vantage point, he dissected the quiet, easy affection blooming between them—the way John handed her a mug of coffee in the pale morning light, knuckles deliberately grazing hers; the way her features softened into devotion whenever she looked at his son.

It grated on him, a dark, ugly knot of jealousy tightening behind his ribs. How the hell had his pathetic, depowered disappointment of a son managed to land a woman like that? More infuriatingly, how had he earned that kind of unadulterated loyalty?

Slowly, Ben’s tactics shifted. The aggressive insults died away, replaced by a quiet, predatory hunt. He stopped treating her like a victim to be bullied and began treating her like a woman drowning under the weight of her own morality. In place of judgment, he offered a dark, unapologetic confidence. An escape.

Three in the morning arrived in a haze of bruised, dark purple sky. Inside the farmhouse, John was fast asleep, his soft, rhythmic snores filtering faintly through the drywall. Unable to quiet the chaotic racing of her mind, Annie had thrown on her boots and fled to the barn, desperate for the mindless, numbing distraction of physical labor.

She was scooping grain into a tin bucket when a shadow detached itself from the stalls. "You're up early."

Annie jumped, her heart leaping into her throat. Leaning casually against a wooden support post was Ben, wearing nothing but a pair of unbuttoned, low-slung denim jeans. He slept out here in the loft, a fact she had momentarily, stupidly forgotten.

“Couldn't sleep,” she muttered, keeping her back to him as she focused on the grain.

Moving with a quiet, lethal grace, Ben stepped directly into her space. He boxed her in against the heavy feed bins, entirely invading her personal boundaries without ever laying a hand on her. He simply loomed, looking down with heavy, knowing eyes that stripped her bare in the dark.

“You’re tense as hell,” he murmured, his voice a low, velvet rumble that vibrated against her skin. “I can help with that.”

Annie’s breath hitched, her lungs seizing. “Ben—”

"No strings," he interrupted softly, lifting a hand to brush a stray lock of blonde hair over her shoulder. "Just stress relief." He stepped a fraction of an inch closer, the heat of his broad chest radiating against her. "Bet I could make you scream so loud my pathetic son would hear it from the house."

"I don't want him to hear."

"Yes, you do."

She knew she should say no. Every moral instinct screamed at her to push him away and run back into the cold morning air. But her body was entirely, agonizingly wired—a live wire sparking in the dark—and he was holding out exactly what she craved: a complete, mindless obliteration of her feelings for John. Turning sharply, Annie tilted her chin up and captured his mouth.

It wasn't a gentle surrender; it was a violent snap. She bit down hard on his bottom lip, tasting the copper tang of blood, her fingers tangling desperately into his hair to yank him down to her level. Ben responded instantly with a low growl, his massive hands locking onto her hips and slamming her back hard against the rough wooden barn wall. His touch was everywhere at once—sliding roughly down her thighs, bruising her ass, shoving his hands up under her shirt. He kissed exactly the way he commanded a room: dominant, ruthless.

“Fuck, you’re responsive,” Ben groaned against her mouth, his breath hot and ragged. With one sharp, downward yank, he tore the neckline of her shirt and the cups of her bra away, exposing her to the cool air before his large, rough palm fully cupped her bare breast.

“I bet I could make you cum just from playing with these tits. You’re so goddamn pent up. Just dying for it”

His calloused thumb brushed heavily over her highly sensitive, swollen nipple. Annie gasped, a sharp spike of pleasure tearing through her as her hips involuntarily jerked forward, searching for his weight.

Ben grinned against her throat, his teeth grazing her pulse point until she shivered. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Bet I could get you off without even touching that pretty pussy. Gonna make you beg for my mouth on you”

Ducking his head, he clamped his mouth over her wet peak. He sucked hard, a punishing, greedy rhythm, while his free hand aggressively kneaded her opposite breast. Annie’s head slammed back against the barn wood, a helpless, unbidden moan ripping from her throat. He alternated between biting, rolling, and pulling the sensitive nerves between his calloused fingers, driving her rapidly up a steep, breathless cliff on pure upper-body sensation alone.

“Fuck,” Annie moaned, her fingers clawing at his bare shoulders. “Ben, fuck.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I intend to,” he growled, using his teeth to clamp down on the aching peak. She let out a louder, high-pitched whimper, her thighs trembling as the raw friction began to compromise her balance.

“Come on, darlin’,” Ben taunted, his breath burning against her wet, flushed skin. “Look at you. Shaking like a leaf for the bad guy. Give it to me. Let me hear how dirty you can be for me. Come for me just from this.”

Blinded by the pinpoint, overwhelming friction on her breasts, Annie fractured. She came with a strangled, breathless cry, her hips rolling desperately against the empty air between them as the climax convulsed through her upper body. Ben pulled back just enough to look down at her, smug as hell. “Told you. Fucking beautiful.”

He didn’t give her time to breathe. Before she could steady her shaking legs, his hands moved down to the waistband of her jeans, snapping the button and driving the heavy denim over the swell of her ass.

"But we're not done," he murmured.

Sliding past her cotton underwear, his thick fingers slipped into her slick, dripping heat. He worked her with a brutal, practiced ease. His thumb pressed hard and fast against her clit while two fingers thrust deeply inside her, stretching her tight walls. Annie’s head fell back against the wood again, her fingernails clawing into his broad, muscular shoulders to keep her knees from buckling under the onslaught.

"You've been dying for a real man to put his hands on you, haven't you?" Ben taunted softly against her ear, his internal rhythm turning relentless. "Tired of being treated like glass. Tell me the truth, sweetheart—he doesn't know what to do with a wet, needy cunt like this, does he? Too busy playing the farm boy while you're out here starving for it."

“Ah! No—” She cried out, her head shaking frantically, but her body was betraying every single word, her hips bucking shamelessly against his driving fingers. It felt horribly, undeniably, devastatingly good. This was the absolute escape from the suffocating restraint she had been living in.

“Say it,” he commanded, burying his fingers deeper until she gasped. “Tell me who’s making you soak my hand.”

“Ben,” she sobbed out, a wet, desperate sound as the pleasure crested over her mind. “Ben, I’m—oh god—”

“That’s it. Good girl,” Ben whispered filthily, right before his thumb hit her clit with a punishing friction that pushed her over the edge. Abandoning her pride entirely, she shrieked into the empty rafters, a heavy, uninhibited climax tearing through her core as she wept from the sheer intensity of it.

Ben pulled his hand away, bringing his wet, glistening fingers directly to his own mouth to suck them clean. His eyes never left her face. “Delicious. But we’re still not fucking done.”

Gripping her by the waist, he roughly spun her around, forcing her body forward over the edge of the wooden feed bin. Annie heard the metallic clink of his belt buckle, the sharp rustle of fabric, and then the heat of his bare skin was pressed against her spine. He stepped directly behind her, the head of his cock pressing right against her dripping, aching entrance.

Annie froze, the physical reality of the line she was about to cross finally crashing through the erotic haze. Ben’s heavy hands clamped onto her hip bones, pinning her firmly in place so she couldn't run. Leaning his entire weight over her back, his voice dropped to a dark, gravelly whisper right against her ear. “Last chance to tell me to fuck off, sweetheart.”

Annie’s mind spun into freefall. John was asleep less than a hundred yards away. If she let him do this, there was no going back. She opened her mouth to scream no, to fight him off, to sprint back to the safety of the house. But her blood was humming, her nerves were entirely wired, and for fatal second... she hesitated.

Ben didn’t need anything else. Taking full advantage of her surrender, he tightened his grip on her hips and drove forward with one hard thrust, sinking his entire length to the hilt.

Annie opened her mouth to muffle her cry against her wrist, but Ben’s hand shot forward, gripping her jaw firmly from behind, forcing her chin up. “No. Don’t you dare,” he growled, setting a punishing, primal pace. “Let him hear you. Let the whole fucking town hear how loud you scream for my cock.”

He was incredibly thick, filling her to the point of stretching pain, his heavy thighs slapping relentlessly against her backside as he pulled her back onto his length over and over again.

“Fuck, you feel good,” Ben grunted, his fingers bruising the skin of her hips as he anchored her for each deep impalement. “So goddamn tight. I don’t think I’ve ever had a pussy this tight. Tell me this is what you wanted, sweet thing. Say it. Tell me that fucking cum stain in the house could never stretch you out like this.”

It was raw. It was rough. It was exactly the dirty, thoughtless friction she had been desperate for. There was no emotion here, no careful, fragile tenderness, no complicated moral reckoning—just pure, animalistic release. Chasing the burning friction, Annie pushed her hips back against his stride, completely abandoning herself to the dark, wet rhythm.

"Yeah, take it," Ben commanded, his grip punishing. "Take every fucking inch."

She shattered a third time, her internal muscles fluttering and clenching around him in tight, desperate spasms. Ben followed a heartbeat later.

"Take my fucking load," he growled, a low, guttural sound tearing from his chest as his body convulsed, emptying his thick, hot weight deep inside her.

Afterward, the silence in the barn was deafening.

The adrenaline bled out of her in a rush, leaving the freezing morning air to bite ruthlessly at her flushed, sweat-dampened skin. As Annie fumbled with trembling fingers to adjust her torn shirt, the heavy scent of raw sex, copper, and cedar shavings hung in the dim light like a physical accusation. Her thighs were sticky, her muscles shaking. She had wanted to be hollowed out. She had wanted the terrifying, complicated mess in her head to be violently erased. But the void left behind didn't feel like peace; it felt like a cold, sickening freefall.

“No strings,” Annie whispered, her voice trembling as she refused to look at him, her shaking fingers struggling to button her jeans.

Zipping his pants, Ben leaned back against the wooden post, his features settling into a lazy, satisfied smirk. “No strings,” he agreed smoothly.

But when she finally forced her gaze upward, the dark, triumphant gleam in his eyes told an entirely different story. It hadn't just been a physical release for him. He had found the crack in her armor, and he fully intended to tear it wide open.

Chapter Text

Late March 2027

An overcast sky pressed low across the property, a heavy expanse that seemed to bleed any warmth out of the rising sun. It had only been three hours since the floorboards of the barn loft had stopped rattling beneath them. She had changed her clothes in a frantic, shaking panic and slipped back into the farmhouse while the sky was still the bloodless gray of false dawn. Now, a thin spring rain drummed against the windowpane, and Annie stood at the counter, pinned in place by the hollow quiet of the kitchen.

She had filled the percolator with water and dumped the grounds into the basket, but she hadn’t even turned the stove on yet. She was just staring at the black glass of the window, her mind trapped in a dizzying loop of denial.

The screen door hadn't squeaked on its rusted hinges. The scuff of heavy boots on the linoleum never registered over the drumming rain outside. The first sign of Ben's presence was the solid click of a ceramic mug being placed on the counter right next to her hand.

A cold spike drove into Annie's ribs as she looked down. Steam curled from the dark liquid. The smell gave it away immediately—a bitter, dark roast undercut by the sweet dairy scent of milk and sugar. A specific preference she had never once mentioned to him.

She braced herself, her jaw tightening. She expected a filthy, whispered callback to the way she had moaned into the rafters, or a crude reminder of who owned her now.

Instead, Ben simply pulled back.

"You looked tired," he said.

When she forced her eyes up, the mocking antagonist was absent. Ben stood there in his damp denim jacket, the harsh lines around his mouth relaxed. There was no cruel crinkle at the corners of his eyes, no smug victory in his posture. His voice lacked its usual gravelly swagger or chauvinistic bravado.

Before the weight of that expression could fully land, he turned on his heel and walked out. The door slapped shut. Through the glass, Annie watched his broad frame cross the muddy yard, retreating back toward the outbuildings without looking back.

Their animalistic rutting in the barn felt like a drug-induced daydream she could try to repress, but the hot ceramic burning against her palms was physical evidence she couldn't ignore.

She was still staring at the rising steam when John’s footsteps sounded down the hallway.

The rhythm of his stride sent a sickening, sudden wave of guilt straight to her stomach. John appeared in the doorway, awkwardly tucking his thermal shirt into his work pants. Stopping dead, his sharp blue eyes locked onto the steaming mug in her hand, then cut to the cold, unlit percolator on the stove.

The air in the kitchen abruptly felt too dense to breathe.

"Morning," Annie managed, her voice paper-thin.

"Morning." John crossed to the stove. His gaze tracked from her rigid posture to the dial on the gas range, putting the pieces together in quiet, unhurried observation. He grabbed a long wooden match, striking it against the box to ignite the pilot light. The blue flame flared to life, casting sharp shadows across his angular jawline. He shook the match out.

He didn't ask who had made the coffee, but the question hung heavily in the space between them.

"Ben was in here," Annie volunteered quickly, the omission tasting like ash. "He used the bathroom. Said he was heading out to secure the storm cellar doors before the rain picked up."

Turning around, John leaned his lower back against the counter. "So my father is brewing you coffee now." It wasn't a question. The delivery was level, but laced with a quiet, dangerous undercurrent.

"I didn't ask him to play barista," Annie said, setting the mug down sharply, unable to bear the heat of it anymore. "I think he's just getting bored. He mentioned yesterday that he was going into town for a drink."

His expression wasn't angry, but rather honed in with a raw, searching scrutiny that made her want to crawl out of her own skin. Shifting his weight, John noticed the defensive distance she kept between them and the way her gaze stayed fixed on the floorboards.

"Annie," John said softly. Stepping into her space, he moved with a careful hesitation, stopping just short of touching her arm to give her an out. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine. Just didn't sleep well."

"You're shaking," he murmured. A fierce, dark protectiveness pinched his brow—a flash of the old Homelander bleeding through his mortal exterior. He misread the trauma completely. "If he laid a hand on you while I was asleep... if he even looked at you wrong—"

"No," she interrupted, a desperate plea to cut him off. "No, he didn't do anything, John. Truly. It was just a cup of coffee."

John studied her for one more agonizing second. He could see the tremor in her fingers and the pale, bloodless line of her lips, but he also knew better than to push when she walled herself off. Dropping his hand, his jaw set hard.

"If he tries to corner you again," John warned, his voice dropping to a lethal, familiar pitch, "I don't care that I'm mortal. I'll take a fucking axe to his neck."

"I can handle Ben," she countered, her throat tight. "You don't have to fight my battles for me. I've got it."

"I know you do," he replied.

Annie looked at his broad, practical shoulders, her eyes burning. His blinding, unconditional loyalty was the very thing she had tried to protect by giving in to Ben. Hearing him offer up his own life now didn't feel like an anchor; it felt like a shovel digging her grave.

The third morning after the rainstorm, a sharp, steady thwack of metal driving into wood echoed through the farmhouse before the sun even breached the horizon.

Annie paused in the kitchen, a woven egg basket dangling from the crook of her arm. From her bedroom at the back of the house, the noise had sounded like a loose shutter banging in the wind, but here at the front sink, the rhythmic percussion was unmistakable. She stepped closer, wiping away the condensation on the windowpane to peer out.

In the bruised, lilac light of early morning, Ben was on his hands and knees at the sagging northwest corner of the barn roof. He was working a pry bar under the rotted fascia boards with a practiced, efficient force that said he had done this kind of work before, in another life, long before the serum and the shield and the decades of ice. An entire pallet of replacement timber sat stacked along the south wall below him—sourced from somewhere she hadn’t been told about, organized with an obsessive neatness that bordered on military.

A floorboard groaned in the hallway. John padded into the kitchen, his gait slow and heavy with sleep. He was still wearing the soft, charcoal henley and flannel sleep pants she had bought him from the general store in town, clothes that actually fit his muscled frame. His dark hair stuck up in a rumpled, chaotic mess—his jaw shadowed with morning stubble. Looking at him, heavy-lidded and incredibly domestic, a sudden, fierce ache flared in her chest.

John crossed the kitchen, wrapping his hands around the fresh mug of coffee she handed him, and came to stand beside her at the window. He blinked blearily at the glass for a long moment, the steam curling against his jaw.

"Please tell me you hired a very early, very loud contractor," John murmured, his voice a low, sleep-rough rasp that sent a warm shiver down her spine.

Annie let out a breathy, half-laugh, refusing to take her eyes off the roof. "I didn't."

John took a slow sip of his coffee, his brow furrowing as he watched the figure swinging the hammer. "Did he demand a sudden surge in rent?"

"Not a word."

“He ask you to suck his dick?”

“John!” Annie admonished with a roll of eyes, swatting him lightly against his chest as he chuckled. “No, of course not.”

John leaned his shoulder against the window frame, the playful sleepiness in his eyes sharpening into something more analytical. Up on the roof, Ben wrenched a warped board loose with a violent crack that echoed across the damp pasture. He tossed it aside, assessed the exposed rafter with a professional, calculating squint, and reached for the next timber without missing a beat.

"Huh," John muttered, the amusement fading into genuine, begrudging observation. "I'll be damned. The old man actually knows how to work for a living."

He finished his coffee in one long swallow, set the mug in the sink, and pulled on his boots.

Through the window, Annie watched him cross the muddy yard and stop at the base of the barn wall. He didn't yell up or demand an explanation. He just stood there, his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, watching the repair.

After a moment, Ben paused his hammering. He glanced down over the precipice. For a long, stretched-out second, the two men just looked at each other—a heavy, silent standoff between a deposed god and the ghost who haunted him. But then, Ben gave a short, single nod. It was the specific, wordless shorthand of men who understood physical labor, recognizing the difference between a job done right and a job done fast. John tipped his chin in return.

Yet, even from the kitchen window, Annie could see the subtle, dangerous shift in the atmosphere. Before returning to his hammer, Ben's sharp gaze deliberately bypassed John, lifting to lock eyes with Annie through the glass. A dark, possessive heat flashed across the distance—a quiet, arrogant reminder of what he had shared with her in the shadows.

John may not have had any powers, but his instincts were absolute. Sensing the shift in his father's attention, John subtly shifted his weight, squaring his broad shoulders to physically block Ben's line of sight to the farmhouse.

Up on the roof, Ben just grinned and drove another nail into the wood.

John was learning the hard way that a world that no longer bent to his will had to be studied. Closely. Stripped of his power, he realized people rarely told the truth out loud. Instead, they leaked it. It lived in the restless twitch of their fingers, the aversion of their eyes, the exact weight they placed on a single syllable, and the heavy, guilty quality of their silence when they thought nobody was looking.

Annie was leaking it now, and she didn’t even know it.

It was the slightly-too-fast answers to his evening questions—bright, cheerful, and completely rehearsed. It was the paperback novel held open to the exact same page for twenty fucking minutes. It was the way she suddenly found excuses to scrub the sink or check the pantry before he even finished his second cup of coffee. Just a few weeks ago, she would have lingered at the table, leaning into his space, arguing with him over the creeping rot in the irrigation ditch or the dying alternator on the pickup truck.

He knew a PR smile when he saw one. He recognized the polished, desperate routine of pretending everything was perfectly fine while the house burned down around you, because he had spent a lifetime weaponizing it himself. Every time the Vought cameras turned on. Every time a microphone went live. But Annie’s fake smile was better than his had ever been, and the fact that he could still see the cracks in her mask just proved how obsessively he was watching her.

The shape of her distraction always sharpened into pure, rigid panic whenever Ben’s shadow fell across the yard, or when his heavy boots thumped against the porch boards.

It ate at John. The old itch—the blinding, intoxicating urge to just flash his eyes and sever the old man's head from his shoulders—burned hot and heavy in the back of his skull. The very idea of his father, that outdated, chauvinistic piece of shit, putting his filthy hands on the woman John craved made his chest tight with an ugly, barbaric possessiveness. The Homelander would have ripped Ben's spine out through his throat just for breathing her air. He would have turned the entire barn to ash just to make a point.

But John was actively fighting to be better. He was trying to be a man, not a monster, and a good man didn't laser his problems away. He didn't treat Annie like property to be guarded in a tower. (Besides, he didn’t have lasers anymore. Nifty little fuckers, they were.)

So, he swallowed the white-hot rage, forcing it down deep into his gut. He chopped wood instead of melting bone. But the not-knowing—the helpless reality that Ben was doing something to terrify her while John was powerless to stop it—sat buried in his chest like a rusty nail he couldn’t pull out.

She was in the tack room, working neatsfoot oil into a heavy leather driving harness. The space finally had a real purpose. Now that Ben had secured the sagging roof, the barn was fit for livestock again, and they had gone to the county auction yesterday to buy two sturdy draft crosses and a territorial gray donkey to help survey and work the back forty acres. The animals took priority, which meant Ben was currently in the process of hauling his cot and his smuggled mini-fridge out of the loft and relocating to the drafty, rusted tractor shed on the edge of the property.

Annie worked the rag in slow, deliberate circles over the brass buckles, burning off an anxious energy she couldn’t quite name. The physical distance of Ben moving to the shed should have felt like a victory, but instead, it just felt like the board was being reset.

“He’s out.”

Annie didn’t jump, but the rag paused against the leather. John stood in the doorway, his broad shoulders filling the frame. He had a smudge of dirt across his jaw from hauling the mattress, but his blue eyes were sharp and entirely focused on her.

“Good,” Annie said, keeping her voice even as she resumed polishing. “The horses need the stall space.”

John didn't leave. He stepped over the threshold, closing the distance between them until he was close enough that she could smell the cedar shavings and sweat clinging to his thermal shirt.

“While we were moving his gear, he told me something,” John began, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous gravel. “He said you're a screamer, and how it was a tragedy that I’d never get to see you come.”

Annie’s stomach plummeted, but she kept her eyes glued to the brass buckle, rubbing the rag over the metal with unnecessary force. “He’s vulgar, John. We already knew that.”

“It’s not just the crude bullshit,” John countered, stepping directly into her line of sight, forcing her to look at him. “It’s the way he said it. He didn’t say it to piss me off. He said it like he knows a secret.”

John’s jaw ticked, the muscles jumping beneath his skin as he studied her face. “I know what a predator looks like when he’s sizing up prey, Annie. I practically invented the look. But that’s not how he watches you. He looks at you like he owns you.”

He reached out, his fingers hovering just an inch from the collar of her shirt, before he dropped his hand, a heavy restraint anchoring his movements. “Is he extorting you? Is he threatening to call Vought unless you give him something?”

“No,” Annie said, and it was technically the truth. “He’s just trying to bait you. He’s fucking with you, John.”

And John so desperately wanted to ask, Are you—fucking with him?

“Then why do you look at him like you’re waiting for a trap to snap shut?”

The question hung in the dusty air between them, sharp and agonizingly perceptive. She held his gaze, forcing her expression into a mask of absolute, unyielding stillness. It was a defense mechanism she had honed over years at Vought—the cold, flat composure that cost massive physical effort to maintain.

“I’m fine, John,” she said, her voice steady and definitive. “I’ve dealt with worse men than your father. I can handle him.”

John stared at her. The muscles in his neck tightened as he processed the wall she had just thrown up between them.

“Don't insult my intelligence, Annie,” John said softly, the edge of his voice lethally sharp. “I spent my entire life surrounded by professional liars. I know exactly what it looks like.” He held her gaze for one more agonizing second, reading the stubborn, panicked refusal in her eyes, before forcing himself to back down. Pushing her now would only make it worse. “But fine. Keep your secrets.”

He gave a single, stiff nod, turned on his heel, and walked out of the tack room.

His boots crunched on the wet dirt outside. Annie listened to the rhythm of his footsteps recede before she realized her fingers were cramping. The rag had bunched into a tight, white-knuckled knot in her fist. She dropped it onto the workbench, her hands shaking so badly she had to grip the edge of the wood to steady herself.

The hypocrisy of it all settled like a stone in her gut. For months, she had been his moral compass, dragging him inch by inch toward the light, guiding him to choose humanity. And now he was actually doing it. He was perceptive, he was restrained, and he was fiercely protective. John was finally becoming the good man she had always known he could be.

But she wasn't some martyr falling on her sword to protect him. Ben hadn't forced her into the barn. She had walked in on her own two feet and surrendered to the dark for a thoughtless escape from the complicated reality of falling in love with a monster trying to be a man. She had made this mess, dirtying her own hands while John’s stayed clean. And the closer John got to uncovering the truth of what she’d done, the more it threatened to burn the fragile sanctuary they’d built to the ground.

It happened without design, on a mild, sunny Thursday morning while Annie was at the feed store in the neighboring county, leaving the two of them alone on the property for the first time since Ben had swaggered up the driveway.

John was splitting the last of the ash rounds when Ben materialized at the edge of the woodpile. He had a lit blunt between his teeth and carried the arrogant, proprietary ease of a man who believed that simply standing somewhere conferred ownership of it.

"God, you really commit to the bit," Ben drawled, surveying the muddy yard, the patched fencing, and the rusted tractor with the theatrical appreciation of a man touring a disaster site. "Whole nine yards. I half-expected to find you strung up in the barn, crying over your approval ratings. But instead, you're out here playing Little House on the Prairie. Must be some world-class pussy to keep you tied to a chopping block. Not that you'd actually know. You're out here playing Charles Ingalls and ain’t even getting your dick wet. Makes a man wonder who she's really spreading her legs for."

John set the next round on the stump and brought the axe down, splitting the wood with a sharp crack. He didn't answer.

"No comeback?" Ben pulled the blunt from his lips and exhaled a thick stream of smoke into the damp spring air. "Homelander always had a quip ready. You used to run your mouth like a cheap whore at a press junket. Now look at you. Taking my shit. Letting me sleep on your land. Letting me look at your girl. You used to remind me of the guys in my unit who talked the most shit—the ones who cried for their mommies the second their guts spilled into the dirt."

"Homelander’s dead," John said, tossing the split halves aside and pulling another round. "You said so yourself."

Ben watched him work. He watched the dull, heavy thud of mortal muscle doing a job that heat vision used to vaporize in a microsecond. John's blistered hands were choking the axe handle, but he was letting the dead weight of the iron do the splitting. It was the grim, silent rhythm of a man who had been forced to learn how to bleed, how to ache, and how to shut the fuck up about it.

"You know Vought wants your head in a box," Ben offered, casually tapping ash off the blunt into the mud. "I could've brought it to them day one. Still might. But you're so goddamn pathetic now, it almost feels like charity letting you live. Though I gotta say, watching you rot out here is a hell of a lot better than basic cable."

“I’m fine here.”

"You’re chopping wood, son. In the mud," Ben sneered, his voice dripping with chauvinistic disgust. "I guess it wouldn't be so tragic if you were actually burying your face in that Starlight snatch every night. But we both know you don't know what the fuck to do with her. A woman like that needs a man who can break the bedframe, not a defanged lapdog."

John squared another log on the block, steadied it with his boot, and brought the axe down clean.

"You crawled out of whatever freezer Vought shoved you in," John said, his voice terrifyingly even, "tracked us down, threatened to paralyze me and fuck my girl, and then moved onto my property uninvited. You don't get to tell me what I should be fine with."

"Your girl? Your property?" Ben laughed, a dark, grating sound that scraped against the quiet morning. "Kid, you're living in a fantasy. You really think she looks at you and sees a man? You think she wants those soft, weak little farm-boy hands on her when she goes to sleep?"

John gripped the axe handle, his knuckles turning white. "I know she sure as fuck doesn't want yours."

Ben took a slow drag, his eyes going pitch black with cruel, predatory amusement. "You sure about that, son? Because from where I'm standing, she looks like a bitch in heat just waiting for a real dog to bite her neck."

John stopped cold.

He didn't yell. He didn't throw the axe. He just slowly lifted his head and looked at his father.

For a fraction of a second, Ben’s smirk faltered; the blunt paused halfway to his mouth. Because when John locked eyes with him, his stare was so violently absolute, that Ben’s combat instincts instantly flared. For one brief moment, Ben could have sworn he saw the ghost of a sick, neon-red glint bleeding into John's irises.

The smirk slowly returned to Ben's face, but the lazy swagger was entirely gone. He was measuring him now. "You’re really not scared of me anymore," Ben said, his voice dropping the theatrical taunt.

"No," John answered plainly. "Because I finally see exactly what you are. A sad, obsolete relic trying to prove he still matters. You can break my neck, Dad, but you still won't have a goddamn thing of your own. You're just a lonely old man haunting my yard."

Ben's jaw tightened, insulted by the sheer lack of fear. "You ought to be. I could snap your goddamn spine right now and sweet Annie wouldn't even hear the bone crack."

"Then do it." John tossed the heavy axe aside. It hit the mud with a dull thud. He stepped entirely away from the woodpile, leaving his chest wide open. "Do it. But if you don't kill me right now, keep her name out of your fucking filthy mouth."

They glared at each other across the woodpile. The father and the son. One unbreakable, and the other defiantly human.

Ben looked at the son he had called a disappointment, searching for the sniveling, desperate boy he remembered from Vought Tower. He couldn't find him. Without another word, Ben dropped the blunt, ground it out beneath his heavy heel, and walked back toward the outbuildings.

John watched him go. Then, he turned back to the woodpile, picked up the axe, and kept splitting. Two halves blew apart with a sharp, violent crack and tumbled into the wet grass a good six feet in opposite directions, leaving the axe blade buried an inch deep in the oak. John stood motionless, breathing hard, staring at the empty space where the log had been.

He pulled the blade free and turned his right hand over, studying his scarred palm. His pulse was still running hot from the confrontation, the adrenaline dumping through his forearms in heavy, trembling waves.

That was all it was: adrenaline and a lucky swing on a round that had probably been half-rotted through the center.

He flexed his fingers once, set another log on the stump, and brought the axe down again. The round split cleanly down the grain into two even halves. Perfectly normal.

John exhaled through his nose and kept going.

Chapter Text

Early April 2027

The following afternoon, the sky above the tree line swelled with the charcoal weight of a coming storm, pressing a wave of humidity down over the farm. John was in the open bay of the shed, elbow-deep in grease as he tried (and failed) to rebuild the rusted carburetor on the old Ford tractor—a necessary battle if they were going to mow the back forty before the rains hit—when a sound tore across the property.

It wasn't Maisie’s usual indignant, greedy grumbling at the pen wire, but a high-pitched, visceral shriek of pain.

John dropped a socket wrench into the dirt and was sprinting before his brain even finished translating the noise. His boots threw up wet clods of earth as he vaulted the paddock fence, his chest tight with panic.

Because the barn roof was finished, Ben had moved his aggressive remodeling campaign to the farmhouse itself, racing the weather to strip a section of rotted flashing above the porch. The speed, unfortunately, had cost him his precision, resulting in a bundled stack of slate tiles slipping from the makeshift pulley system as Maisie—who had nudged her way out through the pen latch that had been sticking all week—wandered directly into the drop zone.

John tore around the side of the porch to find her on her side in the mud, one rear leg trapped beneath the heavy slate, her small body convulsing with short, panicked squeals.

Ben had already dropped the two stories from the roof, landing in a practiced, knee-bending crouch that cratered the wet earth. He was hovering over the piglet, his large hand pressing down on her flank to keep her from thrashing.

"She's fine; leg's not broke," Ben grunted, looking up as John skidded into the mud. He sounded more annoyed than concerned, defensive against the accusation in his son’s eyes. "Rope gave out. Barely clipped her anyway. Calm down, it's just future bacon."

John didn't say a word. He dropped to his knees, his hands moving over the piglet with practiced, desperate care. He checked the joint, ran his thumbs gently along her ribs, and read the frantic, fluttering rhythm of her breathing against his palm. She was bruised and terrified, but intact.

As John scooped the trembling piglet into his chest, the simmering, white-hot rage that had been building inside him for days finally crystallized—a subzero clarity that froze the blood in his veins.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" John’s voice was a lethal, breathless rasp. "She's a goddamn baby."

"Oh, grow up," Ben scoffed, rolling his eyes as he stood up to his full, towering height. "I didn't do it on purpose. It's livestock, kid. Don't act like a bleeding heart over a fucking—"

John didn't think about the fact that he was mortal. He didn't think about the fact that he was striking indestructible bone. He just stood up, planted his boots, and swung.

His fist collided with Ben's jaw with the concussive crack of a rifle shot.

The physics of it were entirely wrong. John’s knuckles should have powdered on impact. His wrist should have shattered all the way up to the elbow. But it didn't. His hand flared with an electric, white-hot sprain, but the kinetic force of the blow transferred perfectly—and Ben's head snapped to the side. The Soldier Boy, an immovable object of Vought engineering, actually stumbled half a step backward in the mud.

For a split second, both men just stared at each other, struck by the impossibility of what had just happened. Then, Ben’s eyes went pitch black.

The surprise vanished, replaced instantly by the feral, overriding instinct of a soldier attacked. With a guttural snarl, Ben launched himself forward, his massive hands reaching out to tackle John into the dirt and crush the breath from his lungs.

He never made it.

The porch lights abruptly shattered in a shower of sparks. The humid air snapped with raw electricity, and a concussive wall of kinetic force slammed into Ben's chest, knocking him dead in his tracks.

Annie stood at the corner of the farmhouse, her fists clenched at her sides and her eyes blazing with furious gold light.

"Get away from him," Annie commanded.

Ben froze, his chest heaving as the combat adrenaline warred with the glowing threat of the woman standing between them. He slowly lowered his fists, the lethal tension draining out of his shoulders, though his eyes remained locked on John.

Annie let the light in her eyes fade, the sudden dimness leaving the yard feeling bleak. She looked down at John, checking the swelling in his wrist and the shivering piglet against his chest, before turning her gaze to Ben.

"What did you do?" she demanded, her voice vibrating with residual adrenaline.

"The rope slipped," Ben muttered, the indignant edge returning to his voice, though he kept his hands visible. "I was trying to beat the storm. The pig wandered under the drop. It was an accident."

Annie stared at the scattered slate, then at the heavy pulley swinging in the wind. She didn't doubt the logistics of it. She knew Ben well enough by now to know he didn't need to drop tiles on livestock to get his kicks. But as her eyes flicked from Ben’s bruised jaw to John’s trembling, defensive posture, her expression hardened into something cold and absolute.

"I don't care if it was an accident," Annie said, her voice dropping to a terrifyingly quiet register. "If you ever lunge at him again, Ben, I will blind you. Do you understand me?"

"He threw the first punch," Ben shot back, pointing a massive finger at John. "Your boy started it."

"And I am finishing it," she cut in, unwavering, though the disappointment on her face was clear. It was the look of a woman staring at a destructive child who broke things just by being in the room.

Annie just shook her head, turning her back on him completely. John carried Maisie into the house without a backward glance, leaving Ben standing alone in the scattered slate.

That night, long after the farmhouse windows went completely dark, the rusted pen latch finally stopped sticking.

Standing in the damp grass under the moonlight, Ben quietly drove a set of new, heavy-gauge screws flush into the wood. Setting the hardware perfectly, he lifted the gate so it swung true and silent on both hinges. The work was done with military precision, ensuring the repair was entirely flawless.

The memory of her face still gnawed at him.

Being hated was familiar territory. Terror, screaming, violent resistance—those were just the standard currencies of his century-long life. He could navigate a world that wanted him dead. But the cold, disgusted pity in Annie's eyes had burned like acid. He didn't give a shit about the pig, and John's swelling hand meant absolutely nothing to him. What twisted his gut into a knot of defensive fury was the unbearable realization that he desperately craved her validation.

For decades, women had been conquests, accessories, or collateral damage. All but one. And then came Annie. So pure, so sweet… so fierce when she needed to be. He wanted her to look at him the way she looked at John. Deep down in the cavern of his ego, Ben needed to prove that he wasn't just a blunt, obsolete instrument of war. He needed to prove he was the better man, the capable provider, the one who actually deserved the devotion his weak son was squandering.

Wiping down the new metal latch to leave no trace of his presence, the old soldier turned his back on the repaired pen and walked away into the dark.

The storm arrived just before midnight, a proper mid-Atlantic deluge that hammered the farmhouse roof for hours and turned the yard into a swamp of churned red clay. By morning, the property looked like it had been dragged through a river and wrung out.

Annie was in her bedroom, dragging a brush through her damp hair, when she heard him across the hall.

The noise bled through the old plaster: first as a bitten-off grunt and then as a sharp drag of air over clenched teeth. A dull thud followed—the sound of a heavy heel kicking the baseboard in sheer frustration—before a string of muffled, venomous swearing carried across the hall: "Motherfucking—absolute—goddamn it."

She set the brush on her dresser and crossed the hallway.

Nudging his half-open door wider, Annie stepped into the threshold. John stood in the center of the room, bare from the waist up, his thermal shirt balled in his left fist like he was trying to strangle the cotton. His right hand hung heavily at his side. The knuckles were split and weeping beneath the gauze she had applied yesterday, the swelling so severe it had entirely erased the shape of his tendons. A mottled, angry purple bruising had bloomed overnight, bleeding all the way down to his fingernails.

Attempting to feed the ruined hand into the tight sleeve, he was violently cramming his wrist forward. Every time the fabric snagged on the swollen tissue, his jaw clamped shut so hard the muscle jumped beneath his ear.

Catching her movement in the doorway, he didn't jump, but the sudden, rigid squaring of his shoulders gave him away—the hard, physical reflex of a man who would rather chew his own arm off than let anyone watch him struggle.

Shoving his injured knuckles at the sleeve again, the cotton caught on the edge of the gauze. He yanked it backward with a sharp, involuntary hiss of pain. “Motherfuck— Fuck my life!”

Annie pushed the door the rest of the way open and leaned against the frame. "How long have you been fighting that shirt?"

"I'm handling it." He didn't look at her, glaring a hole into the floorboards instead.

"You've been swearing at it for five minutes."

John paused, shooting her a dry, incredibly flat look. He opened his mouth to argue, but she was already crossing the rug, plucking the bunched fabric directly out of his left hand before he could mount a defense.

Annie stretched up on her toes, opening the collar and attempting to guide the right sleeve over his wrist. John hunched his shoulders, awkwardly ducking his head to try and meet her halfway, but the angle was impossible. Her balance shifted, his elbow caught the seam, and the shirt instantly twisted between them into a useless knot.

"Bend down more," she instructed, tugging the hem.

"I am bending."

"John, you're barely tilting your neck."

"I'm 6’3”. You're 5’6”. There's a logistical limit here, Annie."

Annie raised an eyebrow, entirely unfazed. "You were 6’3” in the lifted boots," she countered smoothly. "I've seen the Vought medical charts. You're 5’11” and change. Now get down."

John blinked, his argument dying in his throat as she casually stripped away his old PR illusions.. He looked at her, then down at the floor, his mouth pressing into a tight line as he calculated the lack of space between them if he actually tried to stoop to her level.

Annie sighed, feeling a flush of heat creeping up the back of her neck from the exertion and the humidity trapped in the room. She stepped backward, sitting heavily on the edge of the mattress. She parted her knees, flattening her bare feet against the rug, and looked up at him.

"Come here," she instructed softly, gesturing to the floorboard between her bare feet. "Kneel."

John went completely still. His gaze dropped to the space between her knees, and the muscles in his throat worked as he swallowed the remaining pride he had left. For a second, she didn't think he was going to do it. But then he stepped forward, the soft fleece of his sweatpants brushing against her bare knees, and lowered his large frame onto the rug.

Now, his face was perfectly level with her collarbone.

At Vought, dressing him had been an industrial process. For decades, an endless, rotating assembly line of anonymous hands had zipped, pinned, and adjusted him into his suit like he was a high-yield weapon being loaded into a silo. It was entirely sterile. He had stood completely dissociated through thousands of those interactions, feeling absolutely nothing beneath the latex gloves and measuring tapes.

Annie’s touch wasn't sterile.

Cradling his right wrist in her palm, she let her bare skin run searing hot against his pulse point. Carefully, she eased the sleeve over his fingertips, working the fabric up with an excruciating, deliberate slowness.

Where the cotton dragged over the bruised knuckles, John flinched, a low hiss escaping his lips. Annie instantly stopped moving. Her thumb stroked the unbruised, sensitive skin of his inner wrist, an unspoken apology that made every nerve ending in his body light up like a brushfire.

"Sorry," she murmured, navigating a particularly swollen knuckle. "Almost there."

He didn't trust his voice to respond. Instead, he just nodded once. His gaze had drifted downward, tracking the subtle rise and fall of her chest beneath her thin shirt, the heat in his eyes darkening as he watched the way her breathing was already starting to shallow out.

Once the sleeve cleared his elbow, she reached behind him to pull the body of the shirt across his back. Her fingers slipped beneath the fabric, the pads of her digits gliding slowly across the broad, heated expanse of his shoulder blades. The friction was entirely unnecessary for the task, a lingering drag of skin on skin that caused the rhythm of John's breathing to stutter.

She guided his good arm through the left sleeve, then gripped the collar in both hands. "Head down."

He dipped his chin, and she pulled the neck opening smoothly over his head. When his face broke through the collar, it seemed as though the lack of distance between them swallowed all the oxygen in the room.

He was just inches away, close enough for her to feel the faint warmth of his breath against her pulse. She could feel the weight of his gaze on her, his bright eyes tracking the rise and fall of her chest beneath a veil of dark lashes.

Without thinking, Annie reached up. Her fingers sank into the thick hair above his temple, gently combing the messy strands back from his face.

John had never known a touch like this. Any tender, unmercenary care he might have experienced as a child had been nothing but a clinical illusion, and whatever remnants he had managed to salvage were burned out of him just as quickly. But right here, kneeling on a frayed rug beneath her hands, he was finally allowed to be nothing more than skin, bone, and heat—allowed to want, to feel.

John’s eyes drifted shut. He leaned into her palm, a microscopic surrender, his chest expanding in a ragged inhale.

Her hand slid down, resting flat against the center of his chest to smooth the thermal fabric. Beneath her palm, his heart was hammering against his ribs in a frantic cadence that had absolutely nothing to do with fighting the shirt. She could feel the heat radiating off him, smell the rain and soap on his skin, and feel the taut, trembling restraint of a man holding himself perfectly still just so she wouldn't pull away.

"Your heart is racing," she whispered.

John slowly opened his eyes, his voice scraping out of his throat like torn velvet. "I'm out of shape."

A soft, breathless chuckle escaped her lips. "You split half a cord of oak yesterday without breaking a sweat."

John held her gaze, all of his usual arrogant defenses stripped down to the studs. His chest rose and fell heavily beneath her palm. A short, breathless huff of air pushed past his lips. "I'm down on my knees for you, Annie. If my heart wasn't racing right now, I think I'd be fucking dead."

For one suspended second, neither of them moved. The gravity in the room pulled so hard Annie felt her leaning forward, drawn helplessly toward the heat of his mouth.

Then, she dropped her hands.

The break in contact was jarring, a sudden invasion of cold air slipping into the space her palms had occupied. Annie stood up so fast a wave of lightheadedness washed over her, stepping out from between his knees before she could do something they couldn't undo. She didn't look back as she crossed the floor, slipping out into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her.

Nestled in the safety of her bedroom, Annie pressed her spine flat against the closed door, clamping both hands over her mouth to muffle her own ragged breathing. Her palms were still tingling.

On the other side of the wood, John remained exactly where she had left him: kneeling on the rug, his bruised hands flexing erratically against the edge of her quilt, staring at the empty air where she had just been.

By evening, the rain had softened into a steady, rhythmic drumming against the windowpanes, and John was parked at the kitchen table with a bag of frozen peas draped over his mangled right hand, pretending to read a water-stained copy of Popular Mechanics from 1987 while actually staring at the same diagram of a carburetor for the fourth consecutive minute.

The ibuprofen Annie had forced on him two hours ago was doing absolutely nothing. His knuckles throbbed in time with his pulse, a deep, hot ache that radiated all the way up to his elbow and reminded him, with every beat, that punching an iron soldier in the jaw was not a decision his skeleton had been consulted on.

Annie came down the attic stairs carrying a cardboard box that smelled like mothballs and dead mice, trailing cobwebs from her elbow.

“Found something,” she announced cheerily, dropping the box onto the table with a heavy thud that rattled his frozen peas. Inside, was a collection of VHS tapes—two or three dozen of them, their plastic cases yellowed and brittle, the handwritten labels faded to near-illegibility in her great-uncle's cramped, old-man cursive.

John peeled back the peas and looked at the box the way a man might look at a shipping crate that had arrived without a return address. "What am I looking at?"

"Movies." Annie was already pulling tapes out, sorting through titles with the focused, reverent excitement of an archaeologist cataloguing a dig site. "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Butch Cassidy. Cool Hand Luke— oh, he had taste. Roman Holiday. The Princess Bride—" She held up a battered white case with a faded castle on the cover, her face lighting up. "Oh my God. I watched this every single weekend at my grandmother's house until I was twelve."

John glanced at the cover art. A man in a black mask was holding a woman in a white dress while standing on what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. The entire aesthetic screamed low-budget fairy tale.

"No," he said.

"You haven't even heard what it's about."

"I can see the cover, Annie. There's a man in a mask rescuing a damsel from a cliff. I'm not watching that."

"It's not— Okay, it's partially about that, but it's also about sword fighting and revenge and a giant and a genius and a six-fingered villain—"

"A six-fingered villain."

"Just trust me."

John looked at her face—the unguarded, childlike enthusiasm that had suffused across her features—and felt the objection dissolve somewhere in his chest before it reached his mouth.

"Fine," he huffed, with the resigned air of a man being led to the firing squad. "But if it's terrible, I'm going back to the carburetor diagram."

"Your hand is the size of a grapefruit. You're not going anywhere near the carburetor."

Twenty minutes later, they were on the parlor couch—the ancient, sagging monstrosity with the springs that groaned every time either of them shifted weight—and the even more ancient television set was glowing with the grainy, washed-out warmth of a signal being fed through a VCR that had no business still functioning. The picture rolled twice before stabilizing, and the opening credits appeared over a grandfather reading to a sick kid in bed.

John had never watched a movie for the purpose of watching a movie.

At Vought, the media he consumed had been curated with surgical precision: every film, every clip, every thirty-second supercut selected and approved by the marketing division to reinforce his brand identity. He watched himself on screens. He watched focus-group footage of civilians reacting to himself on screens. He watched competitor analysis reels of other heroes, studying their weaknesses the way a boxer studies tape.

The concept of sitting in a dark room and surrendering control of his attention to someone else's story, for no strategic purpose—frivolous pointlessness of it—was so foreign that it took him a full ten minutes to stop analyzing the cinematography for messaging.

"You're doing it," Annie remarked wryly, though her eyes remained glued to the screen.

"Doing what?"

"That weird Vought thing where your eyes glaze over like you're calculating your Q-rating. Stop. Just watch the movie."

He made a conscious effort to stop analyzing; it was harder than it should have been.

The hero appeared on screen—blond, bland, and obedient—trailing after a beautiful woman who treated him like an unpaid intern. Every time she barked an order, he responded with the same two words: As you wish.

The complete deference of it made John's stomach twist and a hot flash of memory sear through his veins: powerless, kneeling in the Oval Office, spitting his own blood onto his boots as he looked up at William Butcher and offered to suck his dick. He had offered to do anything, submit to anything, just to survive.

"Pathetic," John sneered, trying to shove the memory back into its box.

"Not pathetic! He's in love."

"He's fetching her horse. She doesn't even know his name."

"She knows his name," Annie countered, resting her chin on her hand. "She just doesn't think she has to use it. She's the landowner's daughter, and he's just the hired farmhand. It's a power trip."

John frowned at the screen, unconvinced, but something in the dynamic—the woman's casual cruelty, the man's unshakable devotion beneath it—snagged in his chest like a barbed fishhook.

Westley supposedly died. In his place came the masked Dread Pirate Roberts, dangerous and devoid of any soft-eyed innocence. He had forged himself into a weapon. John leaned forward without realizing he was doing it, the frozen peas sliding forgotten off his hand and landing on the cushion between them with a wet thud.

"He killed the farm boy," John murmured, his rough voice barely carrying over the tinny television speaker. "Had to become a monster to get the job done."

Annie's eyes roved over his profile, the sharp planes of his face and dark beard backlit by the blue light of the television. There was an intense focus in his eyes that she had only ever seen directed at real things: the animals, his father… her. He was looking at the screen with the same unfiltered attention, and something about that—The Homelander, sitting on a busted couch in rural Maryland, completely absorbed by a fairy tale—made her throat ache.

"It was armor," she answered softly. "To survive. To get back to her."

"But he's still him. Underneath."

"Yeah," Annie said softly. "He's still him."

From the corner of her eye, Annie watched him lean forward during the sword fight on the cliff, tracking the choreography with an intensity that suggested he was mentally scoring both fighters on technique. When Westley collapsed in the fire swamp and Buttercup screamed his name, John's right hand—the mangled, swollen, purple mess of it—curled into a fist against his thigh.

Then came the ravine.

The scene shifted to the top of the steep incline. Buttercup, furious and grieving, shoved the masked pirate down the hill. As he tumbled violently toward the bottom, he shouted the only three words that mattered: As... you... wish!

The mask vanished, and the entire mythology of the Dread Pirate Roberts collapsed in a single sentence.

John went completely still.

His eyes cut to Annie. She was already looking at him, a deeply amused, knowing warmth playing at the corners of her mouth that she wasn't even trying to hide.

"Don't," he warned.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're thinking it very loudly."

"I'm just thinking about the plot," she said, pulling her knees up to her chest, the picture of theatrical innocence. "It's a good thing that Farm Boy is so resilient."

"Annie."

"Fetch me that remote, Farm Boy," she smiled, gesturing to the console.

"I will throw this entire television out the window."

"As you wish."

The laugh that escaped him was involuntary and full, a sound she had heard from him maybe four times in twelve months, each instance so rare that it felt like catching a glimpse of a mythical bird. He shook his head, the corner of his mouth still twitching, and turned back to the screen.

They watched the rest in comfortable silence. Annie's shoulder settled against his arm somewhere during the battle of wits scene, her warmth bleeding through his sleeve; neither of them moved to correct it.

The film reached its quiet conclusion—the lovers reunited on horseback, the grandfather closing the book, and the sick kid finally admitting he didn't mind a story about romance after all. As the credits rolled in a wash of pale light, the VCR clicked and hummed, filling the parlor with the soft, static fuzz of a dead signal.

John sat perfectly still, the silence stretching between them.

He was staring at the screen long after Annie had turned it off. At Vought, stories had endings that served a purpose: the hero won, the product sold, the brand was reinforced. The concept that a story could exist purely to say love is worth the suffering, the good man survives, the ending is kind—it rooted deeply in his mind’s eye, entirely foreign and strangely bright.

"John?" Annie's voice was soft.

"Does it always end like that?" he asked quietly. "In stories?"

The question cracked her heart wide open. It wasn't just the words, but the raw, bewildered sincerity in his rough voice. He was a grown man genuinely asking if happy endings were allowed to exist, simply because no one had ever bothered to give him one.

"Sometimes," she said, her voice careful. "Not always. But sometimes."

He absorbed her answer with a slow, thoughtful nod. Resting his head back against the sagging upholstery, he closed his eyes and let his injured hand settle heavily on the cushion between them.

"Farm Boy," he whispered, the ghost of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. "Jesus Christ."

Annie reached over, retrieving the melting bag of peas and draping it gently back across his swollen knuckles. He didn't open his eyes, but his thick fingers instinctively shifted, curling loosely around hers to keep her hand pinned beneath the ice.

She let him hold her there, a sudden, aching protectiveness rising in her chest. Looking down at their joined hands, she realized she wanted to build a fortress around this room, around the farm. She wanted to keep the rest of the world out forever, just so she could be the one to give him all the firsts he had never been allowed to have.

The bathroom steam clung to the hallway mirror, dampening the collar of Annie’s cotton robe as she stepped into the bedroom. Downstairs, the rhythmic thwack of a kitchen knife hitting a wooden cutting board drifted up through the floorboards.

A soft, involuntary smile touched her lips. John was trying his hand at dinner again. The memory of the charred, smoke-alarm-triggering chicken still lingered in her mind, but there was something profoundly endearing about his stubborn refusal to give up. He was trying so hard to be normal.

She reached for the brass pull of her dresser drawer, but a shadow peeled itself from the corner behind the door. A broad, calloused palm clamped firmly over her mouth, and a thick forearm banded across her waist, hauling her backward until her spine met a rigid chest.

Instinct snapped. Annie thrashed, driving her elbow backward with every ounce of force she had. She twisted her neck, ready to call the light and scream John's name.

"Easy," Ben murmured, his breath brushing the damp hair at her temple. He absorbed her blows without flinching, holding her against him. "Quiet, Annie. Johnny boy’s just downstairs."

The absolute audacity of it froze her in place. He turned her around, backing her slowly until she was pinned flat against the wall. He lifted his hand from her mouth, caging her in with both arms.

"I missed you," he whispered, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that settled directly into her bones.

"Get the hell out," she hissed, her chest rising and falling rapidly.

Ben didn't argue. He just ducked his head and took her mouth. At first, it was the same territorial claiming she was used to: a blunt, bruising heat that demanded surrender. But when she flattened her palms against his shoulders to shove him away, the aggression melted. His lips parted hers with a languid, devastating slide, trading force for a deep, intoxicating reverence. He tasted like rain and cheap tobacco, his tongue sweeping along her lower lip, coaxing rather than conquering.

She had never kissed John, though she often fantasized about it. Annie didn't know the physical weight of his lips, but she knew the way John looked at her—as though she were a delicate, holy thing he was terrified of breaking. Ben didn't look at her like she was fragile; he yielded completely to the kiss, pouring a visceral, starved yearning into her as he dragged his thumb along her jawline, treating her like she was the only water in a century-long drought.

Her hands stopped pushing and curled into the worn cotton of his shirt. A low, rough sound of approval hummed in Ben's throat. He hooked his hands under her thighs, carrying her the short distance to the bed and lowering her onto the mattress. His knuckles grazed the knot of her robe, parting the fabric, his eyes dark and dilated.

“No,” Annie breathed, catching his wrists. “Ben stop, please.”

He froze immediately. The searing warmth of his hands remained flat against her waist, his thumbs pausing their slow circles. “I ain’t gonna hurt you, doll,” he murmured, the rough edge of his voice softening into something quiet and earnest.

"I was late last month," she swallowed, her eyes darting to the floorboards, hyper-aware of the sounds in the kitchen. "A scare. I'm not on anything, and I can't risk it. We can't.”

She waited for the sneer, the argument, the entitlement. Instead, Ben studied her face for a long, quiet second. He pressed a kiss to the racing pulse at her wrist.

"Alright," he said quietly. "I got you. I won't cross the line."

Instead of pulling away in frustration, Ben exhaled a warm breath against her knuckles. With a deliberate gravity, his hands slid down to grip her hips, pushing the edges of her robe entirely aside. He dropped to his knees on the braided rug, sinking down right between her parted thighs.

Annie gasped as he pulled her flush against the edge of the mattress. The sensation hit her all at once—the abrasive, grounding scratch of his beard against the sensitive skin of her inner thighs, the sudden, shocking heat of his mouth. He wasn't rushing. He traced his tongue upward with an easy, unhurried rhythm that parted her effortlessly, drinking down her muffled sigh.

Between the wet, dragging strokes, his breath fanned hot against her damp skin. "So goddamn sweet," he murmured, his voice a dark, rough rumble vibrating straight into her core. "Just like that, doll. Open up for me. Let me taste you."

Her head fell back against the pillows, her hands burying themselves in his hair to keep him wedged exactly where she needed him most. She glanced down through half-lidded eyes, her heart stuttering.

Ben had reached blindly up to the open dresser drawer. His large fingers closed over a scrap of white lace—a pair of her clean panties. He looked up at her through his thick lashes as he wrapped the silk around his own straining length, his grip stroking to the exact, relentless rhythm of his mouth.

"Look at me," he rasped against her center, his breath hot and damp against her skin. "Watch what you do to me. You feel so damn good, sweetheart."

Annie stared down into those striking hazel-green eyes, her breath catching. Where John looked at her with a quiet, desperate devotion, Ben’s dark gaze sought to consume her and be consumed in return.

When she finally came apart on his tongue, biting down hard on the sleeve of her robe to muffle her own violent, trembling cry, Ben rode out the aftershocks with her. He stayed on his knees, lapping up her final shudders before pressing gentle, soothing kisses to her inner thighs until her breathing finally leveled out.

Annie's muscles tensed instinctively. She braced herself, fully expecting the shift—for his hands to guide her down, to demand she get on her knees and finish him off.

Instead, he stood up, the metallic drag of his zipper loud in the quiet room, and tucked the scrap of white lace firmly into his front pocket. Leaning over her, his large hands sinking into the mattress on either side of her hips, he pressed a warm, lingering kiss to the corner of her mouth.

"I've chased a lot of highs in my life, doll," Ben whispered, his voice uncharacteristically tender. "But tasting you come apart like that... that's my favorite fucking drug."

Annie swallowed hard, her fingers white-knuckling the lapels of her robe as she desperately tried to reconstruct the boundary between them. "This was a mistake," she breathed, her voice trembling but resolute. "It isn't going to happen again, Ben."

Ben didn’t argue. He just looked at her swollen lips, her flushed chest, and the way her body was still visibly shivering from what he'd just done to her. A slow, wolfish smirk curved the edge of his mouth—the deeply arrogant look of a man who knew exactly how badly she was lying to herself.

"Sure it won't, sweetheart," he murmured, brushing his thumb softly over her lower lip one last time.

Ben pushed off the bed and walked to the door, pressing his ear to the wood for a long moment, listening to the quiet sounds of John moving around downstairs. Satisfied the coast was clear, he opened the door a fraction, slipped out into the hallway, and was gone like a ghost.

Annie sat on the edge of the bed, pulling the robe even tighter around her shoulders. The silence of the farmhouse rushed back in, but the world felt fundamentally shifted on its axis. The guilt in her chest had tangled into something infinitely more complicated.

She knew with absolute certainty that she wasn’t in love with Ben. But as she touched her swollen lips, haunted by the wet heat of his mouth and the surprising tenderness in his eyes, a troubling realization settled over her. She could no longer pretend this was just a dark, thoughtless escape. Ben's specific brand of worship was carving out a space inside her—a dangerous, secret hollow that she had absolutely no idea how to close.

Chapter Text

Early April 2027

Later that week, the evening routine had settled back into its familiar, quiet orbit: John in the parlor with a book, Annie in the kitchen finishing the last of the dishes, and the fire’s soothing crackle suffusing from the grate through every nook of the old farmhouse.

John was halfway through a cracked-spine Cold War submarine thriller, its margins warped by age and the previous owner's coffee rings, which he'd found buried at the bottom of a cardboard box in the mudroom. So absorbed in the story, he almost didn’t see Annie appear in the parlor doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. She stood there for a moment, watching him, exuding a coiled energy, as though she were standing at the precipice of a decision and trying to talk herself out of it.

She didn't talk herself out of it.

John was wedged into the far corner of the upholstery, his long legs bent awkwardly. Without a word of warning, Annie snatched a throw pillow from the armchair, tossed it directly onto his thigh, and collapsed onto the cushions. She settled on her side, facing the dark television set, and stretched her legs out across the length of the couch, her head resting heavily on the pillow against his leg.

John felt his brain short-circuit for a moment.

His body locked into a state of full-system paralysis, the paperback suspended in midair as though he'd been hit with a stun gun. She was using him as furniture. Annie January was casually occupying his space, the heat of her face and the heavy, settling weight of her shoulders burning right through the thin cotton of his sweatpants.

Annie blindly reached up over her head, her fingers catching his left wrist. She tugged his hand down, flattening his broad palm directly against the crown of her damp hair. Letting go, she nuzzled her face deeper into the pillow on his thigh, and waited with the self-satisfied expression of a woman who had just settled a matter of national importance.

"Did you just..." John started, his voice emerging roughly two octaves higher than its usual register. He cleared his throat. "Did you just drop onto me? And put my hand on your head?"

"Your leg looked comfortable," Annie murmured into his thigh, as though this explained everything.

"There are four other seats in this room."

"None of them are as warm."

John stared down at the top of her head. His hand remained exactly where she had planted it, a heavy, static weight in her hair, because his motor functions had abruptly gone offline and surrendered all administrative control to her.

"Read to me," she commanded playfully.

"I'm reading about Soviet submarine warfare."

"I don't care about the Soviets. What else do you have?”

"Annie, the torpedo room is actively flooding. The pressure hull is failing. I need to know if the captain has the strategic competence to not kill his entire crew.”

“Boring,” she teased. From behind her back—and he genuinely could not figure out when or how she had concealed it—Annie produced a paperback so weathered it was practically disintegrating. The cover featured a woman whose bodice was actively surrendering to the sheer volume of her tits, swooning into the arms of an improbably muscular man. The title, embossed in peeling gold foil, read Surrender at Sunset.

She waved it blindly in the air above her head, batting it against his chest in a silent, bratty demand. The shirtless man stared at John with smoldering, painted eyes.

"Fuck, no," John said plainly.

"Yes."

"Absolutely not."

"I like your voice." She settled deeper against his leg, adjusting her position with a series of small, deliberate movements that she absolutely knew were doing terrible things to his nervous system. "Please? It's soothing. Like a very attractive white noise machine."

"You want me to read you a romance novel."

"I want you to read me this romance novel."

"The man on the cover doesn't have a shirt, Annie."

"I noticed."

"His chest is oiled."

"Extensively."

"There is a woman whose breasts are actively trying to escape her clothing."

"I believe that's called the target demographic."

John looked at the submarine thriller, then at the bodice-ripper, then at the woman using him as furniture who was radiating such unrepentant, wicked stubbornness that arguing would have been like trying to negotiate with the sun. He set the submarine novel facedown on the arm of the couch, closing the cover with the grim finality of a man sealing a casket. "You are actively lowering my IQ," he muttered, snatching the romance book from her grip. "But fine."

The first page was already a disaster.

"'Lady Cordelia's heaving bosom strained against the confines of her ivory corset as Lord Ashworth's smoldering gaze swept across the moonlit terrace,'" John read, his voice flat as a two-day-old soda. He stopped, looking down at her. "His gaze is smoldering, Annie. Smoldering. The author needs you to know that."

"Keep going," she laughed.

"'Her breath came in ragged, wanton gasps as his calloused fingers traced the delicate architecture of her collarbone.'"

John paused again. "The delicate architecture of her collarbone. That's what we're working with here. Collarbone architecture."

Annie curled inward against his thigh, her fingers blindly digging into his knee for stability as she shook with silent, breathless laughter. The vibration transmitted directly through the muscle of his thigh, sending an instantaneous rush of blood straight to his cock.

He kept reading.

"'I have wanted you,' Lord Ashworth growled, his voice like velvet dragged over gravel, 'since the moment your eyes met mine across the Duke's ballroom.'" John set the book down on his knee. "His voice is like velvet dragged over gravel. I want you to sit with that image, Annie. Velvet. Dragged. Over gravel. What the fuck does that even sound like? That sounds like a man with a throat infection."

"Oh my God, just read," Annie managed, wiping her eyes.

"'He seized her wrist and pulled her body flush against the hard, unyielding plane of his—'" John broke off, his eyebrows climbing. "Annie, this man is about to dislocate this woman's shoulder. He seized her wrist and pulled her flush—do you understand the biomechanics of that? If he's standing behind her and he seizes her wrist and pulls forward, he's hyperextending her rotator cuff. She needs a doctor, not a quickie."

John’s dormant left hand—the one she had abandoned on her head—woke up. Thick fingers slipped slowly through Annie’s damp strands, dragging from her crown down to the nape of her neck. He stroked her hair with the hypnotic rhythm of a man gentling a wild animal, his thumb occasionally hooking the sensitive ridge at the base of her skull and squeezing. An involuntary pulse of heat pooled directly between Annie’s thighs.

The laughter evaporated out of her lungs. She didn't lift her head, but the careless, bratty tension melted out of her spine, leaving her heavy and pliable against his leg. When his thumb dug into the nape of her neck again, a ragged, wet sigh caught in the back of her throat.

"Keep reading," she rasped, her voice dropping into a thick, husky register. "I don't care what it says. Just keep talking."

So he did.

He made it to page forty-two before the prose shifted from purple melodrama into explicit, undeniable filth. John stopped reading mid-sentence, his brow furrowing as he stared at the page.

"What?" Annie murmured, turning her face slightly against the pillow. "Did Lord Ashworth pull a muscle?"

"No," John said, his tone entirely clinical. "The author is describing his anatomy."

"And?"

"And she's lying. Or Lord Ashworth is a medical anomaly."

Annie tipped her head back, looking up at him with a wicked, sleepy grin. "Jealous?"

"I'm analytical," he corrected, tapping the page. "She describes him as 'thick as a stallion's and formidable as a broadsword.' If that were true, the sheer volume of blood required to maintain an erection would cause him to pass out from cerebral hypoxia. Not to mention, from a purely logistical standpoint, the female anatomy cannot comfortably accommodate—"

He abruptly stopped, his brain finally catching up to the words coming out of his mouth. Annie was biting her lower lip, clearly trying not to laugh. "So, you're saying Ashworth is compensating?"

"I'm saying," John answered, his voice dropping into a lower, rougher register, "that it’s an unnecessary exaggeration. A man doesn't need to be the size of a broadsword to be highly effective. Though, comparatively speaking..."

He didn't finish the thought. He just looked down at her.

The teasing smile on Annie's face faltered. She searched his bright blue eyes, waiting for the punchline, but what she caught was a sudden, jarring flash of the former leader of The Seven. It was that fiendish, dangerously mischievous glint he used to wear when he had someone perfectly trapped—an expression possessing such a dark, predatory gravity that she couldn't tell if he was stating an empirical fact or just sadistically messing with her head.

The silence in the room thickened, transforming instantly from playful to stifling. A sudden, furious flush crept up Annie's neck, staining her cheeks as her mind supplied the obvious implication. John tilted his head, an arrogant smirk curving the corner of his mouth. "What's the matter, Annie?" he murmured, the low timber of his voice vibrating against her thigh. "Cat got your tongue?"

"Just... shut up and read the book," she stammered, blindly burying her burning face back into the throw pillow.

John’s throat clicked as he swallowed, a betraying heat touching the tips of his own ears. The gratingly flat cadence of his reading vanished as he forced his eyes back to the book. His voice dropped into a frictionless rumble as he dragged his gaze across the words. Annie shifted restlessly against the couch cushions, her thighs pressing tight together, completely blindsided by how effectively the trashy paperback—and the rough, hypnotic vibration of his chest reading it—was working on her.

Ten pages later, the situation became entirely untenable for John.

Between the increasingly graphic descriptions of Lord Ashworth's exploits and the warm, rhythmic pressure of Annie's breath puffing directly against his inner thigh, a very localized ache had settled firmly into John's groin. He clamped his jaw shut, pausing mid-sentence to shift his hips back against the armrest in a desperate attempt to relieve the friction of his sweatpants.

The movement forcefully jostled the throw pillow.

"Quit moving," Annie grumbled blindly into the cotton, her eyes closed. "You're ruining the angle."

John glared at the ceiling, taking a measured breath. He read another paragraph, hand unconsciously tangling in her hair. He shifted his left leg again, knocking the pillow higher up his thigh.

Annie huffed, lifting her head to shoot him an annoyed look. "Seriously, what is your problem?"

"My problem," John ground out, embarrassment bleeding into his tone, "is that you are currently using my lap as a mattress, and I am actively trying not to be a pervert."

Annie blinked. Her gaze dropped instinctively, tracking the line of his torso down to where the pillow was resting directly against the unmistakable ridge tenting the front of his sweatpants.

Her eyes widened, snapping instantly back up to his face.

"So," John continued, his voice tight and petty as he refused to look away from her. "You can either deal with the fact that I occasionally need to adjust myself, or you can roll over and get a faceful of Homelander dick. Your choice."

"You are unbelievable," she stammered, her face flooding with fresh, scalding heat as she quickly yanked the pillow an inch lower down his leg.

"I'm a mortal man, Annie," he retorted, dropping his head back against the wall with a deeply put-upon sigh. "I am reading poorly written erotica while your face is three inches from my cock. What exactly did you expect to happen?"

"Just read the book," she muttered into the cushion, though she conspicuously didn't move her head away.

A short, breathless huff of laughter escaped his nose. He shifted one last time, settling into the corner, and found his place on the page again.

The fire chewed through the last log in the grate, throwing warm, flickering shadows across the floorboards. John’s hand continued its slow, heavy drag through her hair. He was sitting in a dusty parlor, reading a smutty paperback to a woman using his leg as a pillow, and the terrifying, unearned intimacy of it settled into his ribs like a lit match.

Madelyn had done this. She would pull his head into her lap on the expensive leather sofa in her office, her manicured nails dragging over his scalp in practiced circles. She would spoon-feed him quiet reassurances—You're perfect. You're a god. No one can touch you—and the physical contact would spike his nervous system with a chemical relief so intense it felt like a narcotic.

He hadn’t recognized the mechanics of it back then, mistaking the tightening of a leash for an embrace. By the time he was old enough to recognize the manipulation, the neural pathways were already carved so deep that the mere memory of fingers in his hair could make his chest ache with a longing that felt indistinguishable from love.

But this was entirely backward. Annie hadn't fed his ego or promised him the world. She had just marched in, dropped her weight against him, and demanded a story. His hand stalled against the curve of her skull. The sudden realization of the difference—the counterfeit affection he had begged for versus the genuine weight resting effortlessly against his leg—made his throat burn.

Annie’s breathing eventually leveled out, her body going entirely slack against his leg. One hand hung limply off the edge of the cushion. She was asleep.

John stopped reading. The silence of the farmhouse rushed back in, broken only by the hiss of the dying fire. He looked down at the bodice-ripper in his hand, then at the golden hair spilling across his thigh.

He knew he should wake her, disentangle himself, and send her upstairs. But as his thumb smoothed the pulse point behind her ear… he just couldn’t let her go. He didn’t want to.

John set the book silently on the end table and leaned his head back against the wall. The fire popped, a low and comforting sound that blended perfectly with the steady, quiet lull of Annie's soft snores. He didn't move a muscle. He just closed his eyes, his hand resting protectively in her hair, and for the first time in his life, he let the sound of someone else's breathing pull him to sleep.

Chapter Text

Mid April 2027

Ben had been gone for nearly a week.

He'd casually dropped the news on Annie over a plate of fried chicken she'd brought out to the tractor shed—the rusted-out husk he’d been retrofitting into a bunker, stuffing the walls with salvaged fiberglass and suspending a canvas cot from the beams.

He hadn't offered a manifesto, only a gruff acknowledgment that he needed to show his face in the city. Vought’s hounds were still sniffing around, and while he had dug his tracker out of his arm months ago, prolonged radio silence was a surefire way to turn a cold trail into a manhunt.

"I'll be back before the weekend, doll," he'd grunted without looking up, his large hands effortlessly stripping the casing off a live copper wire. "Keep the perimeter tight. And don't let the idiot blow himself up."

Annie had nodded, feeling the unspoken translation hang in the air: I am pulling the heat off this farm to keep you safe. Don't make me say it out loud.

Now it was Friday evening. The oppressive spring heat had baked the dampness out of the valley, leaving the air thick and warm enough to push the parlor windows wide open. Without Ben's looming presence on the property, the farm had settled into a comfortable, vast expanse of rural darkness, where the nearest neighbor was three miles away and the old timber of the house groaned softly as it contracted in the night air.

Annie sat cross-legged on the floor, a sketchbook braced on her knee. The soft scratch of her charcoal pencil nestled into the quiet corners of the parlor. She was drawing the fireplace, using aggressive, dark strokes to capture the soot-stained brick.

John watched her hand move. The repetitive shading, the hyper-focused intensity—it dragged a ghost into the room: Irving. The one person in the Seven who had ever just sat in a room with him without any expectation.

A sharp, complicated ache twisted in John’s chest. It was a toxic slurry of genuine grief and the nauseating guilt that he had been the one to eviscerate him. He had literally ripped the guts out of his only friend, a man who was just trying to protect him, all because John had been too wrapped up in his own fragile ego and blind rage to actually listen.

John looked down at his own right hand, his fingers twitching slightly as his mind supplied the phantom, vile warmth of Irving's blood coating his forearm. He curled his hand into a tight fist, extinguishing the memory.

Annie felt the atmospheric shift before she looked up. The casual slouch of a tired farmer evaporated, his spine locking into rigid alignment, his shoulders squaring as if preparing for an impact.

She paused her charcoal mid-stroke, the graphite hovering a millimeter above the paper.

"I've been dreaming about a woman named Linda Ferris," John said.

Annie didn’t dare break the spell. She pressed the side of the charcoal firmly into the paper, anchoring herself to the floorboards, and waited.

"She was a guidance counselor," he continued, the pad of his thumb dragging a slow, abrasive circle against his mug. "Elementary school in Trenton. I never actually saw her face. Vought’s legal department slipped a casualty report into my debrief the next morning. They’d stapled her ID badge to the folder. Short hair. Wire-rimmed glasses. Smiling like she had a secret."

A sudden gust of wind rattled the loose windowpane.

"Hostage situation," John sneered, his upper lip curling with pure, elitist disgust. "Some methed-out piece of trailer-park trash with a stolen Glock and a grudge against his ex-wife. Standard Homelander deployment. Cameras positioned, SWAT told to sit on their hands, the whole goddamn circus."

He picked up his mug, his knuckles flashing white, and swallowed a mouthful of the cheap rye like he was trying to burn the taste out of his throat.

"I didn't use the door," John said, his jaw tightening so hard the muscle ticked beneath his ear. The firelight caught the sharp glint of his canines as his lips pulled back into a grimace. "I went straight through the gymnasium wall. Twelve seconds flat. Grabbed the local loser, threw him through a plate-glass window, carried out two snot-nosed kids, and hit my mark for the news choppers. Textbook. Fucking flawless. The PR nerds popped champagne."

He paused. The muscle in his jaw jumped again, frantic and irregular.

"What the cameras missed," John rasped, "was the structural integrity of the wall I annihilated. The roof collapsed a minute and a half later. Linda Ferris was holding the fire door open for the kindergarten class. She pushed the last kid onto the grass."

The rural silence pressed in against the farmhouse—an indifferent void of a world that didn't care who lived or died, punctuated only by the shrill, mechanical screech of cicadas in the high grass.

John let out a short, unhinged bark of laughter that made Annie’s blood run cold. "They gave her family a seven-figure payout and an airtight NDA. Stan brought me the disclosure form while I was getting my cape pressed. I didn't even read it. I scribbled my goddamn autograph over her death without even bothering to learn her name, and then I went to a movie premiere and smiled until my cheeks ached."

John leaned forward, his voice turning vicious and biting. "That’s what Vought really was, Annie. It wasn't a company. It was a sensory deprivation tank. They padded the walls with money and yes-men and NDAs so I never had to feel the bones snapping under my boots. Out here? There’s no padding. There's just me, and the dirt, and the ghosts, and I have to sit in the dark and choke on them."

Annie watched him drag both hands down his face, his fingers digging into his own flesh with enough force to leave red tracks, as if he were desperately trying to peel the skin away from his skull.

She dropped the charcoal, shifting her weight to reach across the low coffee table to offer some measure of comfort.

Then, he changed.

It happened in the space of a blink. The frantic, suffocating horror drained out of his features, replaced by a chilling stillness. The vulnerable farmer vanished; an apex predator took his seat.

"But that's not the whole ledger," John murmured softly.

Annie's hand froze halfway across the table.

"There was a guy in Akron," John said, the words sliding out in a smooth, frictionless purr. A rapid succession of micro-expressions fired across his face—a twitch of visceral disgust, a flare of arrogant rage, and then a wave of deceptive calm.

"Vought’s internal surveillance flagged him. For once, the suits actually wanted to do something right. An opportunity for The Homelander to actually be the hero they sold on the lunchboxes. The guy was running a network. Kids.

“A basement full of hard drives and the kind of unspeakable horrors that make your stomach turn just reading the file names. But he had leverage—a state senator, a judge, a Vought board member who liked his particular brand of entertainment.

“So the suits changed their minds. Madelyn called me into her office, patted my cheek, and told me to stand down. They were going to let him walk."

John picked up his mug and downed the remaining three fingers of rye in one smooth swallow. He set the ceramic down with a sharp clack. "I didn't stand down."

A creeping smile stretched across John’s face—the iconic Homelander grin she’d once come to fear. He closed his eyes, tilting his head back slightly as if basking in the warmth of a sun only he could feel.

"I made sure the basement was soundproof," he whispered, his voice dripping with dark reverence. "I didn't use my lasers. No, that would have been too fast. I used my hands. And I made sure he saw the cape.

“I made sure he knew exactly who was ripping him apart, piece by piece. And when the screaming finally stopped..."

He opened his eyes. For one horrific second, Annie swore those blazing blue irises flared with a ring of molten red. She could feel the erratic thrum of her heartbeat ringing in her ears. She blinked, a cold spike of adrenaline hitting her bloodstream, but his eyes were just blue again, reflecting the dying orange embers of the grate. A trick of the light, her rational mind supplied frantically. It had to be.

"I felt like a god," John finished, his gaze burning into hers with depraved, unhinged satisfaction. "I scraped a cancer out of the world, and I enjoyed every fucking second of it."

"I know the script, Annie," he said, leaning in, his voice a lethal, vibrating hum. "I know I’m supposed to cry over him, too. To prove I’m cured. But I would resurrect that degenerate piece of shit tomorrow just so I could do it again. Slower. I’d start with his eyes."

The horrific specificity of the threat hung in the air, a physical pressure pressing against Annie's eardrums.

Annie’s pulse hammered against her collarbone. The cognitive dissonance was deafening. Part of her—the part that wore the Starlight costume and believed in justice—agreed with him. She didn't mourn the pedophile. In fact, she felt a dark, vindictive thrill at the thought of that monster being torn apart. And that thrill terrified her.

But what terrified her more was the way her body reacted to the unfiltered dominance radiating from the man across from her. The unapologetic power of him, even stripped of his abilities, ignited a shameful, twisted heat that curled her toes.

John was powerless, bleeding if he caught a nail wrong, but she’d always believe him to be the most dangerous thing in any room. He wasn't a broken man seeking redemption. He was a caged predator: highly intelligent, infinitely patient, and entirely capable of becoming a prolific serial killer if he simply decided the world deserved it.

Homelander wasn't a costume John wore; Homelander was the same Farm Boy sitting across the table.

"You're analyzing the risk," Homelander purred, the moniker fitting perfectly over the lethal amusement in his eyes. "You're sitting there wondering if the leash you put on me is going to hold."

"I didn't put a leash on you," Annie fired back, her voice remarkably steady despite the adrenaline flooding her veins. "And I'm not afraid of you, John."

"Bullshit," he murmured, his voice dropping an octave, slipping from mockery into something dark and intimately possessive. "You're terrified. But I think you like it."

Slowly, the manic, terrifying light in his eyes began to dim. The Homelander smile faded, retracting back into the shadows of his psyche.

"I killed a mother because I wanted to look good for a camera," John said, the words scraping out of a throat that sounded like it had swallowed glass. "And I butchered a monster because I wanted to play God.

“One of them makes me want to put a bullet in my own head, and the other makes me wish I still had my powers. I'm broken, Annie. I'm completely fucking defective. But you're the only person on this earth who sees the rot inside of me and doesn't run."

Annie set her charcoal down.

She looked at him for a long moment. She took in the firelight playing across the hard, angular lines of his jaw, the bruised knuckles resting on the coffee table, and the extraordinary complexity of a man who could shed tears for a stranger he'd killed by accident and smile about a monster he'd torn apart on purpose.

And she made a decision.

"Alex," she said. The name landed between them like a dropped glass.

"My ex," she continued. "Before Hughie. We grew up on the pageant circuit together." She watched the firelight move through the amber rye, tilting the mug back and forth in her hands.

"I know Reggie told you his real name and his powers, but you didn't actually know who he was. He was the most decent person I've ever known. The kind of guy who'd give you his coat in January and then stand there shivering and insist he ran hot. He actually gave a shit when he asked how you were doing. He was… good."

The harsh bite of the whiskey scoured her throat, a sharp heat keeping her anchored to the room.

"When he got drafted into The Seven, I was the one who pulled him into the plot to take you down." Her jaw hardened, the tendons in her neck pulling tight. "I sat him down and laid out every detail, every risk. I asked him to have my back, and he didn't even hesitate."

She looked up from the mug, meeting those piercing blue eyes directly. "I told him I knew the system from the inside. I told him that I could cover him, that I'd keep him safe." The steadiness in her voice held for exactly one more sentence before the fault line gave. "I told him to trust me."

Instead of reaching for her or offering a hollow defense, John remained perfectly still, granting her the quiet weight of his undivided attention.

"You knew exactly what you were doing." Her voice dropped into a lower, harder register, vibrating with a raw, long-buried fury. "You dragged me up to that roof and paraded his mangled body around like a fucking trophy. You took a good, innocent man and reduced him to butchered flesh and bone just to prove you could."

"Yes." The word lacked any defensive edge, an unvarnished admission from a man who refused to insult her with excuses.

"You wanted me to understand that loving someone made them a target. That caring about anyone gave you a weapon to use against me."

"Yes." The amber light caught the hollows of his cheeks, illuminating a stark, self-loathing resignation as he sat before a firing squad of his own design.

She had imagined, for months, that this moment would feel like lancing a wound: a sharp, clarifying pain followed by relief. It didn't feel like that. It felt like setting down a bag of rocks she'd been carrying for so long that her spine had curved to accommodate the weight, and discovering that standing up straight hurt infinitely worse than the carrying.

"He was twenty-six years old." Her voice cracked. "He was the real thing, John. Uncomplicated, genuine good—the kind of good that people would go to hell and back for. He trusted me, and that trust is what killed him, and I never got to tell him—"

She pressed her lips together hard enough to blanch them.

Sitting across the table, John held the line without constructing any illusion of empathy. The grim set of his jaw revealed a man who understood that offering comfort now would be pure selfishness, a cheap way to soothe his own conscience by hijacking her grief.

John’s knuckles went stark white around his mug, his chest rising in a jagged inhale as he forced himself to absorb the reality of her tears without looking away.

Annie cried quietly, though not for long. She didn't have it in her, not tonight, not with the crickets screaming through the windows and the rye burning in her stomach and the man across the table watching her with those penitent eyes. She wiped her face with the heel of her hand and took a ragged, stabilizing breath.

"I lo—"

The word caught in her throat like a splinter of glass, and she swallowed it back down, panicked. She closed her eyes, pressing her lips together, recalibrating. When she opened them again, what came out was rawer and less polished, but safer.

"I care about you, John. More than I know how to deal with right now. And you tore my friend apart. I need you to know that I am holding both of those things, and neither one is going away. I don't want to see anything bad happen to you, and I don't know what the hell to do with any of it."

The aborted syllable didn't slip past John. A brief, seismic flicker flashed behind his eyes—a painful acknowledgment he immediately filed away without pressing the issue. Pushing her to finish the sentence was a right he hadn't earned, so he allowed the small confession to linger in the suffocating space alongside everything else they were learning to carry.

"Okay," he rasped, his voice scraped raw by the understanding that she was handing him something infinitely fragile, and he was terrified his bloodstained hands were too clumsy to hold it without breaking her further.

The dying embers pulsed a dull, fading orange against the relentless noise of the crickets outside, while the catastrophic wreckage of their shared history saturated the heavy air between them.

Annie reached across the table, laying her hand flat on the scarred wood palm up, an offering he met by slowly encasing her fingers within his grip, the warmth of their interlocked hands serving as the only tether in the quiet room.

"I'm trying," John whispered, his thumb dragging carefully across her knuckles.

"I know you are," she answered softly.

"Don't give up on me."

"I won't."

Chapter Text

Mid April 2027

The screen door shuddered on its hinges at half past eleven.

Annie flinched, her hand jerking out of John's grip so violently her knuckles clipped her mug. It hit the floorboards, splashing a wide, dark arc of amber rye across the warped wood. John snatched the ceramic out of the air on the rebound—reflexes kicking in before conscious thought—but he didn't pull away.

Instead of retreating as Annie expected, John deliberately rested his arm back on the table, leaving his fingers inches from where hers had just been. He tilted his chin up, his expression settling into a smug, territorial challenge.

John may not have known the particulars of their secretive dynamic, but he knew Ben was sweet on Annie, and his Homelander reflex was entirely content to stake a claim. He stared back at his father, silently daring him to say something.

A cold, jagged spike of adrenaline and guilt rippled through Annie’s spine.

She stared at the spilled rye, her skin prickling with the electric flush of a thief caught holding the silver. The phantom memory of Ben’s bruising grip in the barn collided viciously against the delicate, blooming trust she had just cultivated across this very table.

If the old soldier opened his mouth right now—if he decided to casually drop the ugly, desperate reality of their steamy encounters onto the floorboards—the resulting shockwave wouldn't just shatter the room. It would rip out every painstaking stitch John had just made toward his humanity.

Ben stepped into the threshold, bringing the chill of the night air in with him.

He looked… eviscerated. Not injured exactly—Ben didn't get injured—but hollowed out by the kind of marrow-deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical fatigue. His jaw was shadowed by a rough, week-old beard, and his heavy canvas jacket was stiff with dark, coagulating patches that smelled of industrial ozone, raw copper, and scorched meat.

Ben’s hazel eyes swept the room, cataloging the spilled rye, Annie's panicked face, his son’s defiant posture, and the intimate chemistry of two people who had been sitting far too close in the dark.

Walking past the coffee table, he dropped his gore-fouled jacket on the floor without a word and collapsed onto the far end of the parlor couch. The ancient springs shrieked under his bulk. He scrubbed his heavy palms down his face, the dry rasp of skin against stubble sounding loud in the quiet room.

Annie shot John a wide-eyed, frantic look. Please, for the love of God, do not provoke him.

John simply arched an arrogant eyebrow, his blue eyes brimming with mischief.

"Are you two done eye-fucking each other?" Ben grumbled, letting his head fall against the backrest.

John’s upper lip curled. "Are you done tracking biohazards onto the rugs?"

"There's lasagna in the fridge," Annie interjected, her voice pitched with the bright, studied casualness of a crisis negotiator trying to talk a jumper off a ledge. "I can heat it up."

"Not hungry." Ben’s voice was a sandpapered rasp. He sounded like a man who had worn through the lining of his own throat.

"You look like shit," John noted, leaning back in his chair. Despite the bite in his tone, a flicker of actual, reluctant concern tightened the corner of his eye. "What the hell happened?"

"Vought needed a dog," Ben muttered, his eyes closed. "Indonesian operation. Something went sideways in a lab outside Jakarta, chewed through the security detail. Needed someone to sweep it without leaving evidence on a satellite feed."

"Sweep it?" Annie asked, her stomach twisting. "What was it?"

Ben's jaw flexed, the muscle ticking hard beneath his ear. "A kid. Fucked up on V, glowing like a halogen bulb, but... just a kid."

John didn't flinch. "How long did it take?" It was a cold inquiry, one apex predator asking another for the tactical debrief of a kill.

"Three hours. Would've been two, but the little shit could regenerate. Had to get creative."

The silence that followed was textured with the things nobody was willing to say out loud. The only sound was the hiss of the dying fire and the distant, restless stamp of a horse out in the barn.

"I'm so fucking tired," Ben breathed. The words bled out of him like air from a punctured tire. For a moment, the impenetrable, mid-century fortress of Soldier Boy’s machismo simply caved in on itself.

"Eighty years," he continued, his voice low and bitter. "Kept on ice, thawed out to be a bullet for a company that’d melt me down for scrap metal if the board thought it would bump the quarterly stock price. Point me at a target, pull the trigger, smile for the cameras." He let out a harsh, humorless exhale. "I don't even know what the hell I am without the shield."

He didn't open his eyes, but the raw sincerity in the room suddenly felt smothering. "I just want a decent pour of bourbon. I want a woman who doesn't look at me like I'm a loaded weapon. I want to sleep eight hours without dreaming of bodies blown to shit. Jesus Christ, that’s it. That’s the fucking dream. Soldier Boy just wants a nap and a goddamn home-cooked meal."

John went perfectly still. The petty, arrogant amusement drained from his face, replaced by a sudden, sharp ache of recognition. For the first time, he wasn’t looking at a rival or a legend; he was looking at a mirror. John knew exactly what it felt like to be the circus monkey, to be insulated by PR handlers and smothered by the Vought machine until you didn't recognize your own reflection. He knew the insatiable hunger of wanting a normal life you weren't built for.

Annie felt the temperature in the room quickly hurtling toward absolute devastation.

"Right," Annie said briskly, standing up. "Moratorium. I am officially declaring a moratorium on generational trauma for the rest of the evening."

She crossed to the sideboard, pulled open the top drawer, and retrieved a battered deck of Bicycle playing cards and a half-empty cardboard box of candy. She walked back and dropped them on the table. "I'm teaching you poker."

John stared at the deck. "It's midnight. Besides, The Home— I don’t gamble, and I certainly don't play insipid civilian parlor games."

"You have nowhere to be tomorrow except the chicken coop," Annie countered, splitting the seal on the cards. "And we are playing for your secret stash of Mike and Ikes that I know you’re hoarding in the barn, so the moral stakes are negligible."

“How the fuck do you know about those?”

“Ah ha, so you admit it!” she teased, dealing the cards. “I saw the green boxes stacked behind the spare generator. You aren't as stealthy as you think you are, Farm Boy.”

"They are a superior confection," John defended stiffly, lifting his chin. "And I don't hoard them. I strategically relocate them for safekeeping. Ashley used to have my macros calibrated to the microgram. I spent thirty-six years eating unseasoned chicken breasts and protein paste so I'd look good in spandex. If I want to eat green sugar pellets in my barn, I will."

From the couch, Ben made a deep, rumbling sound that was half-laugh, half-groan. "Oh, this is going to be a fucking disaster." He shifted heavily on the cushions, his eyes still closed. "Let the boy have his candy, doll. God knows it's the sweetest thing about him."

"Shut up," John snapped, though he pulled a small pile of the candies toward himself anyway.

Annie dealt two hands with crisp, practiced snaps. "Five-card draw. The goal is to make the best hand. But the real game isn't the cards—it's the other person. You watch their face, their hands. Try to bluff me."

John picked up his cards. He handled them with the furrowed, overly precise concentration of a man attempting to disarm a bomb, slowly arranging the suits in his hands.

He looked up at her, his face completely, aggressively blank.

"John," Annie sighed. "I can already see your hand."

"How?"

"Because you're holding the cards facing me."

He looked down and quickly flipped them around; the tips of his ears burned a furious red.

"Fucking rookie," Ben chuckled lazily from the couch.

"Mind your own business, fossil," John snapped, the petty, defensive sting of a fallen god discovering he was bad at something rising in his voice.

By the third hand, it became rather obvious to everyone in the room: John could not bluff.

He had spent his entire life as the most powerful being on the planet; deception required a subtlety he had never needed to learn. Every time he drew a good hand, his posture straightened by a fraction of an inch, his pupils dilated, and a predatory smirk played on his lips. Every time he drew badly, his jaw tightened and his nostrils flared, as though the deck itself was intentionally disrespecting his superiority.

"You have nine tells," Annie informed him, sweeping his pile of green Mike and Ikes across the table. "Your entire face is a tell.”

“I do NOT have tells.”

“You are the worst liar I have ever met. I once watched Hughie try to convince a bouncer his fake ID was real, and he was better at this than you."

"Yeah, well, Hughbert has the bone structure and general aura of a wet paper towel," John sneered. "A stiff breeze could intimidate him into confessing to treason."

From the couch, Ben let out a sudden, raspy bark of laughter. "Kid looks like he apologizes to the furniture when he stubs his toe."

John actually smirked—a genuine, unguarded half-smile—looking over at his father. "He literally apologized to a doorframe once at Vought Tower. I saw it."

Annie rolled her eyes, though she was fighting a smile of her own. "Are you two quite finished bonding over your shared toxic masculinity?"

"It's not toxic if it's objectively true," John replied smoothly. "And for the record, I was the most convincing public figure in American history. I sold a hundred million dollars in merchandise with my smile alone."

"That's not lying, John. That's performing. You're world-class at one and absolutely fucking terrible at the other."

"She's not wrong," Ben offered. He had shifted onto his side, his heavy boots hanging off the armrest. His eyes were still closed, but the corner of his mouth twitched. "Homelander couldn't bluff a toddler. All brute force, zero finesse. Got that from his daddy, unfortunately."

John scoffed. "So you're admitting you can't bluff either?"

One of Ben's hazel eyes cracked open, glinting with poorly veiled glee and cunning. "I said you got the brute force from me. I didn't say shit about the bluffing. I'm a magnificent liar, kid. The trick is you'll never know when I'm doing it."

Annie dealt another round. John drew a straight, unconsciously leaned forward so fast he nearly bumped the table, and Annie raked in his candy with a sweetly vicious smile.

"She's cheating," John exclaimed heatedly, pointing at her.

"I am not. The game isn't rigged, Farm Boy. You're just terrible at it."

"You're counting cards."

"You can't count cards in a closed five-card draw between two people, John. The math literally doesn't work. You just suck."

John huffed, sitting up taller. "My brain possesses a kinetic processing speed that you can't even fathom. I can calculate trajectory and velocity in micro-seconds."

"And yet," Annie said sweetly, tapping the table with a manicured finger, "you just tried to play a three of clubs and a jack of diamonds as a pair. So unless the quantum math says three equals eleven, hand over the green ones."

"Keep yapping with that smart mouth, sweetheart," Ben mumbled, his voice gravelly and thick with impending sleep, "and I'm gonna put you over my knee and smack that pert little ass until you learn how to play nice."

Annie froze, her face burning in scandal.

"Jesus Christ.” John bristled in genuine revulsion, his Homelander sneer fully engaged as he glared at the couch. "Do you have to make literally everything sound like a cheap porno? You gonna bend me over and spank me too, old man?"

Ben let out a raspy, exhausted chuckle, not bothering to open his eyes. "Don't flatter yourself, kid. You're not my type."

"Ben!" Annie snapped indignantly, throwing a single playing card that fluttered harmlessly onto his chest. "Shut the fuck up."

"But I would take a goddamn switch to you," Ben continued, entirely unfazed by the card. "Maybe if someone had tanned your backside when you were a kid, you wouldn't have been so eager to drop to your knees and beg Old Billy Boy for a favor."

The barb hit dead center. A flush of hot, indignant humiliation crept up John’s neck, his jaw locking tight. His eyes flashed a dangerous, furious blue, the air pressure in the room dropping instantly as he opened his mouth to retaliate. "You son of a—"

"Okay, next hand before we escalate to actual murder," Annie intervened quickly, her voice sharp as she scooped up the cards.

She looked over at the couch to gauge Ben's reaction, but he was already gone.

The heavy, regular cadence of deep sleep filled the room. Ben’s broad frame was curled loosely on its side, the seemingly permanent, violent tension softened from his brow and jaw. He looked startlingly young and completely at ease—as much as a bear at rest can look at ease. It dawned on Annie that the old soldier had felt safe enough to fall vulnerable in their presence. The realization twisted Annie's stomach into a complicated, painful knot of affection and profound sadness.

John silently surveyed his father's sleeping form. He searched the relaxed features, unwillingly tracking the physical echoes of his own face. Ben was undeniably handsome, probably a terror with women in his prime—maybe more than John, a thought that immediately grated on his ego.

But the resentment gave way to something heavier. What if he had raised me? John wondered. Would Ben have beaten the weakness out of him? Would fatherhood have mellowed the soldier? Would John be a better man, or just a different brand of asshole?

Despite the barbs, John couldn't deny the shifts he’d seen. He remembered Ben driving into town to get livestock penicillin for Maisie without being asked. He noticed the soft, unguarded way his father would look at Annie when he thought no one was watching.

And that was the problem. The territorial, feral Homelander reflex boiled in his veins whenever Ben looked at her. John knew he had no claim to Annie—he believed he didn't deserve her—but the thought of his father being the one to keep her felt like swallowing acid. He wanted Ben to find the peace he had just cried out for. He genuinely did. He just couldn't stand the idea of him finding it with her.

Annie tracked the micro-expressions flickering across John’s face. She saw the messy, clumsy restraint warring in his posture, the quiet tragedy of a monster trying to figure out how to be a son.

"I'm going to bed," Annie whispered, setting her cards down. She looked at Ben, considering waking him, but decided against it. Let him rest, she thought.

"I'll be up in a minute," John said quietly.

Refusing to look away from the couch, he simply listened to the soft creak of the floorboards marking her ascent up the stairs.

Once the second-floor door clicked shut, the parlor belonged entirely to him. John stood and gathered the scattered cards, stacking them neatly beside the remaining candy. Crossing the room, he lifted a thick knitted throw blanket from the armchair and draped it carefully over his father's broad shoulders.

With a final glance at the sleeping soldier, he switched off the lamp, leaving Ben to the warmth of the firelight before heading upstairs in the dark.

Chapter Text

Late April 2027

The adrenaline of the Indonesian op had acted as a chemical brace through the poker game, but the moment Ben finally surrendered to sleep on the parlor couch, the debt came due. The nightmares dragged him under, and for the next four days, he vanished into the tractor shed.

The first night, Annie wrote it off as renovation fatigue. The tractor shed conversion had been consuming his evenings, so much so that the steady percussion of his hammer had become as much a fixture of the property's nocturnal soundscape as the barn owls.

The second night, she left a covered plate of leftover chicken pot pie on the corrugated threshold, only to find it the next morning exactly where she'd placed it, the gravy congealed into a slick disk and a determined column of ants marching across the crust.

By the third night, the unbroken silence radiating from the shed had mutated from a mild annoyance into a gnawing anxiety that twisted in Annie's gut every time she looked at his empty chair at the dinner table.

And then, just after dark, the anxiety crystallized into a visceral spike of terror. Annie was standing on the porch when the frantic, high-pitched bleating started. A thick-shouldered, mangy coyote had breached the tree line, pacing aggressively along the wire of the goat pen. Houdini and the rest of the herd were packed into a tight, trembling knot in the center of the enclosure, their hooves stamping the dirt in a terrified frenzy.

Annie’s heart vaulted into her throat. She spun around, her eyes reflexively darting toward the tractor shed. The corrugated door, however, remained stubbornly shut. No heavy boots crunched across the gravel; no booming curse rang out to chase the scavenger back into the trees. Ben was locked in his own dark world, deaf to the physical one.

She scrambled for the heavy iron pitchfork leaning against the porch railing, but John was already moving.

“Stay here,” he instructed firmly.

Annie had expected a loud show of aggression to spook the animal, but John didn’t wave or shout. He simply stepped off the porch and walked out into the damp yard, his hands tucked casually in the pockets of his faded jeans.

As John approached the wire fence, the ambient noise of the farm faded to an eerie silence. She watched him stop within ten feet of the canine, chin tilted down and posture braced into an unnatural stillness. He locked eyes with the animal—a cold, dead-eyed stare that promised annihilation.

The coyote stilled mid-snarl. Every survival instinct in the wild animal’s biology recognized the challenge. The scavenger’s hackles dropped. Letting out a sharp, pathetic whine, it scrambled backward, tearing into the tree line so fast it nearly tripped over its paws.  

John watched it retreat, his posture now entirely relaxed and unbothered by the sudden silence. When he pivoted back toward the porch, the amber beam of Annie’s flashlight caught his face.

Annie stopped breathing. For a moment, she swore she saw his corneas flare—a flash of laser-hot red cutting through the fading twilight.

"Nothing to worry about," John called out, his tone breezy and perfectly even. "Just a stray. I handled it."

“John?” Annie’s hand shot out, her fingers wrapping tight around his wrist as he stepped onto the porch.

He paused, glancing down at her grip before his eyes met hers. He offered a mild, painfully patient smile. “What is it?”

Annie searched his face, her pulse hammering as she scoured his expression for that familiar twitch of arrogance, the cold indifference. But all she found was an open, slightly concerned expanse of bright, innocent blue.

“Nothing,” she managed, dropping her hand and forcing her lungs to expand. “Sorry. You go ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Suit yourself,” he murmured. “Don’t stay out here too long.”

“I won’t.”

Standing alone in the dark, the reality of Annie’s situation hit her like a freight train. If that flash of red ever became more than just a trick of the light, if that switch in his brain ever flipped back to Vought’s golden god, her own power would be like throwing matches at a hurricane.

Ben wasn’t just a bitter, heavy-drinking houseguest; he was her contingency plan. She was isolated on a farm with a man who could paralyze wild animals with a look, and the only weapon on earth capable of stopping him was locked in a shed, losing his mind.

That paralyzing realization festered in her chest for the next twenty-four hours, winding her nerves so tight they threatened to snap. By the time she sat down at the kitchen table for dinner on the fourth night, she felt like she was vibrating out of her skin. John, however, seemed entirely unbothered by his father’s ongoing absence.

"Is he going to starve himself to death in there, or is this just a theatrical phase?" John asked casually, cutting a piece of chicken. "Because honestly, the lack of toxic masculinity at the breakfast table has been incredibly refreshing, but I really don't want to deal with a corpse on the property."

He savored his dinner with the calm ease of a man enjoying the atmospheric improvement, asked for seconds of the biscuits, and launched into a detailed, increasingly agitated monologue about the six Nigerian Dwarf goats they'd picked up at the county auction the previous weekend.

It had been Annie's idea—a practical investment in the farm's long-term self-sufficiency, and precisely the kind of forward-thinking agricultural planning that made John look as though he were actively calculating the kinetic force required to launch livestock into orbit.

"The small one figured out the latch," John said, pointing his fork at the kitchen window with the grave authority of a man delivering a threat assessment. "I watched him do it. He hooked his jaw under the gate pin and lifted. That's not instinct, Annie. That's premeditation."

"Easy there, Farm Boy. Houdini’s just a baby goat. A literal kid. He's exploring his environment."

John shook his head vehemently, pointing his fork at her. "He's a sociopath with hooves, Annie. I know the signs. If he organizes the others into a coordinated strike against the vegetable garden, I am not negotiating with livestock. I will laser him. And I want it on the record that I predicted his criminal trajectory from day one."

“John, you don’t have lasers anymore.” Do you? she wanted to ask.

Across the table, he stopped chewing and held her gaze. He considered her for a long moment, tilting his head just enough for the warm overhead light to catch a flicker of amusement or, perhaps secrecy, in his eyes. Slowly, his mouth curved into a smile that was all teeth before he casually picked up his knife and went back to dissecting his dinner.

After John's bedroom door had clicked shut and the farmhouse had settled into its familiar chorus of creaking timber, Annie pulled on her boots and crossed the dark yard.

The cool night air bit at her cheeks as she passed the reinforced wire of the goat pen. Seeing the new gate latch gleaming in the moonlight sent an involuntary pang through her chest.

She had found him behind the barn one afternoon, crouched in the dirt with a wrench in one hand, conducting a one-sided conversation with Houdini through the wire mesh.

"Listen to me, you miserable little degenerate," Ben growled, tightening a bolt on the hinge. "I have killed men in eleven countries. I have been frozen in a nuclear reactor. I have survived things that would make your tiny goat brain implode. And I will not—I will not—be outsmarted by a twenty-pound ruminant with the IQ of a dinner roll."

Houdini stared at him with his flat, yellow, profoundly unimpressed goat eyes and began methodically chewing the sleeve of Ben's denim jacket through the wire.

"That's—hey. Hey. That's my—goddammit, let go—"

Annie leaned against the barn wall and watched, a helpless grin spreading across her face. Ben hadn't seen her. He was fully absorbed in the losing battle of trying to extract his sleeve from the jaws of an animal that weighed less than his left leg, his voice cycling through increasingly creative profanity while Houdini chewed with the serene, bovine determination of a creature who had never once in its life experienced a consequence.

"You're going to lose that sleeve," Annie called.

Ben's head snapped up. For a second, the expression on his face—caught, embarrassed, a full-grown super soldier being publicly humiliated by livestock—was so boyishly flustered that Annie felt something warm in her chest that had nothing to do with guilt or desire or the wreckage of their entanglement.

She just liked him. In that moment, watching him fight a goat, she simply, uncomplicatedly liked the man.

"I am handling the situation," Ben announced with stiff, wounded dignity, as Houdini ripped a three-inch strip of denim free and trotted away with it hanging from his mouth like a victory flag.

Annie laughed, the deep, full-body kind that made her double over and grip her knees, the kind that burned her ribs and made her eyes water.

"Yeah, yeah," he muttered with a soft smile, turning back to the bolt. "Glad my suffering entertains you."

"It really, really does," Annie managed, wiping her eyes.

She sat down in the dirt beside him, her back against the fence post, and handed him the socket wrench he'd been reaching for. They worked on the gate together in comfortable silence—Ben tightening the new hardware, Annie holding the hinge steady—and for twenty minutes, neither of them mentioned John, or the shed, or the thing between them that didn't have a name.

Annie tore her eyes away from the pen and stared at the tractor shed. The door was unlocked, as expected. She shouldered it open, bracing herself for the usual scene: Ben sprawled against the workbench with a bottle of the good bourbon he'd been smuggling in from town, or shirtless and sweating through another set of punishing calisthenics designed less for fitness than for self-flagellation.

What she found was worse.

Ben was lying on his back on the canvas cot, fully dressed, his boots still laced, his hands folded across his sternum in the composed, symmetrical arrangement of a corpse laid out for a wake. His eyes were open, fixed on the corrugated ceiling with the hollow, unfocused stare of someone who had stopped seeing the physical world approximately seventy-two hours ago and had not yet found a reason to check back in.

The shed was pitch-black. No bottle. No cigarette cherry burning in the dark. Nothing.

"Ben?"

His eyes tracked sideways without his head moving. "Visiting hours are over, doll."

Annie stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind her. The air was stale and warm, carrying the familiar scent of fiberglass insulation underlaid with the sharper notes of gasoline and musk. "You haven't eaten since Tuesday."

"Not hungry."

"You're always hungry. You ate an entire raw onion last week because you said it reminded you of field rations in Normandy."

"That was to remind me of the Ardennes," Ben grunted, his gaze sliding back to the tin roof. "This is just me wanting to be left the hell alone."

Annie sat down on the overturned milk crate he was using as a nightstand, close enough to see his face in the thin blade of moonlight slicing through the door gap. Up close, the damage was more visible. The skin beneath his eyes had a bruised, sunken quality, and the week-old stubble blurring his jaw made him look less like a legendary super soldier and more like a man arguing with a parking meter on a Tuesday afternoon.

"You look like shit, Ben."

"Thank you, sweetheart. Your bedside manner is a real comfort."

She let the deflection bounce off her. She had learned that Ben's sarcasm functioned like a perimeter alarm: the sharper it got, the closer you were to something he didn't want you to see. Right now, the sarcasm was concertina wire. "I'm serious."

"So am I. You've got a gift. Truly. The Florence Nightingale of Bumfuck, Maryland."

She sat on the milk crate and listened to the distant stamp of the horses, waiting him out the way she weathered John during his dark stretches.

It took four minutes; she counted.

Ben swallowed hard, his throat working around something that wouldn’t go down. He tried to speak, stopped, and closed his eyes. When the words finally came, his voice had hollowed out, stripped of its mid-century swagger until all that remained was a dry, bloodless rasp.

"The kid was crying for his mother."

Annie's hands went still in her lap.

"The whole three hours. Underneath the V, underneath the mutations... there was still a little boy, screaming for someone who was probably already dead in the rubble."

His jaw locked, a muscle jumping erratically. "The regeneration kept bringing him back. I'd put him down, and he would knit himself together and start screaming again. Over and over and over. The same word. I don't speak Indonesian, Annie, but you don't need a fucking Rosetta Stone to understand a child crying for its mother."

Annie understood, suddenly, that he hadn't been staring at the ceiling for four days. He'd been staring at a steel chamber in Jakarta, watching a child reassemble itself over and over while it screamed.

"Jesus, Ben," she whispered.

"Don't." The word was a sharp reflex. "Don't give me the pity eyes. I've killed plenty of people. This shouldn't be any different."

"But it is."

The silence returned, thicker this time. When Ben broke it, the corrosive self-mockery had eroded into something raw.

"I keep hearing it—the crying. It's in everything: the pipes, the wind, the goddamn cicadas." He let out a shuddering breath.

"Eighty years. Eighty fucking years of doing this. I could stack the bodies end to end from here to the Maryland border and still have enough to line the ditches. And this is the one that sticks. A kid I never knew, in a country I can't spell, crying for a woman I probably also killed."

He turned his head on the canvas and looked at her. In the moonlight, his hazel eyes had lost every trace of their usual predatory calculation, leaving behind something muddied and exhausted and profoundly lost.

"What the hell am I, Annie? I'm eighty-goddamn-three years old, and the only skill on my resume is killing things. Take away the shield and the boardroom pointing me at a target, and I'm just a..." He searched for the word. "A big, stupid, empty weapon with nobody left to fire it."

Annie reached out, her fingers gently covering his calloused knuckles where they rested on his chest. "Hey, that's not true," she murmured.

"Yeah? Name one thing I'm good at that doesn't involve breaking something."

"You rebuilt the tractor carburetor with John," Annie murmured, her voice low and unhurried. "You patched the leaks in the barn and the farmhouse roof without anyone asking. You drove thirty miles to buy penicillin for a piglet you swore was just 'future bacon.' I watch you feed the chickens, Ben. I hear the way you talk to them when you think you're alone."

Her thumb brushed the rough skin of his hand. "You're insulating this shed with your bare hands because you refuse to take up space in our house, even though there's a warm guest room you've never once asked for. You're actually trying to be better with John. And your hands... they're good at building things. You don't just destroy."

Ben went perfectly still. As she spoke, the rigid, defensive plates of his expression began to crack. The hardened soldier melted away, leaving his face devastatingly soft, his hazel eyes tracking her features with a quiet, breathless adoration she had never seen him direct at anyone.

A jagged breath hitched in his chest, escaping as a broken, abbreviated sound that might have been a laugh if he hadn't been drowning in so much guilt. He couldn't hold her gaze anymore; his eyes drifted back to the dark ceiling, overwhelmed by the grace she was offering.

"Stay with me tonight."

Annie's chest seized.

“Please. Just for tonight.”

“Ben, I—"

"I'm not trying to lay you," he said, his jaw tightening. "I'm not looking for a quick fuck." The admission hung between them like a stripped wire, and she watched him wrestle with the admission. "I just… I don't want to be alone in here tonight. With the sound. That's all. Just—be here. You don't have to do anything but sleep. Just stay. Please."

Annie knew staying was a mistake. She knew that every kindness she extended was a promissory note on an account she couldn't honor. She knew that the compassion and the cruelty of what she was doing had become so inextricably tangled that pulling on one thread would unravel the other, and somewhere at the center of the knot was a man who was asking her, with his whole heart, to simply not leave him alone in the dark.

But she unlaced her boots anyway and set them beside the crate.

The military surplus cot was emphatically not designed for two. Annie lay on her side facing the wall, and Ben curved behind her, his chest warm and solid against her spine. His arm came around her waist, settling heavy across her hip, and his face buried into her hair with a deep, shuddering inhale, as though her shampoo could overwrite the notes of scorched flesh that had been living in his sinuses for a week.

"Thank you," he mumbled drowsily against the back of her skull.

"Go to sleep, Ben."

"Yes ma'am."

His breathing changed within minutes, the permanent, low-grade vibration of tension simply dissolving. He slept in the carefree way a dog sleeps after being brought inside from the cold.

Annie lay awake for a long time, the complicated weight of her choices pressing down on all sides.

Chapter Text

Late April 2027

Sleep did not bring her peace. The moment Annie’s consciousness surrendered, the dream seized her, dragging her into a hazy, feverish space.

She dreamt of her Farm Boy.

The fragments surfaced in the liminal dark— impressionistic, nonlinear, carrying the blurred logic of a mind that had slipped its leash and was running somewhere it wasn't supposed to go.

She recalled the teasing, languid glide of his hands mapping her skin beneath the hem of her shirt. Then the dream shifted, pulling her into the searing memory of his mouth—the sharp, grounding bite of his teeth on her lower lip, followed by the bruising slide of his tongue against hers.

She felt the phantom drag of his thumbs rolling over her nipples, pinching the sensitive peaks with a dominance that made her back arch. His mouth descended, his hot, unhurried tongue tracing the hollow of her throat and the curve of her jaw, commanding her pulse before pressing a lingering kiss just beneath her ear.

The dream dipped lower, her mind conjuring the thick outline of his cock pressing against her inner thigh. In the hazy logic of her arousal, she remembered how he had arrogantly compared himself to Lord Ashworth's formidable size in Surrender at Sunset—and the cocky bastard hadn’t been exaggerating. He was… big and unyielding.

The scale of him bordered on obscene, easily 11 or 12 inches of Vought-engineered perfection, the kind of proportions that made her dream-self whimper and spread her thighs wider in the same breath. The geneticists had clearly had very specific opinions about what peak male specimen required, and they had been generous. She shouldn't have been surprised. They had built him to be the pinnacle of everything. Of course they hadn't skipped a single detail.

The dream culminated in a vision that sent a lick of fire up her spine: John kneeling between her spread thighs, those blazing blue eyes staring up at her with predatory worship as his tongue parted her slick folds.

Scream for me, Princess.

Annie surfaced from the dream, wet and gasping.

The shed ceiling swam into focus above her, the thin light of predawn spilling through the gap in the door. Her eyes blearily took in the cot beneath her, the arm draped heavy across her waist, and the broad chest radiating furnace-heat against her back.

Wrong man. Wrong bed. Wrong everything.

But the arousal sat low and molten in her belly—a throbbing, insistent pulse that the dream had wound to a pitch her conscious mind had no authority to override.

Her skin felt electrified, every nerve ending firing at a frantic frequency that had nothing to do with the man sleeping behind her and everything to do with a man who had never once intentionally touched her below the neck—save for the violence of an elevator, or the desperate, forced #Homelight kiss she had initiated for the cameras over a year ago. Yet, here he was, commanding her complete arousal.

She could feel Ben's body against her: the dense weight of his chest, the slow cadence of his sleeping breath warm against her shoulder, and pressing against the curve of her ass, the rigid, unmistakable evidence of his body's involuntary response to the dawn.

Annie should have swung her legs off the cot, laced up her boots, and crossed the dewy yard before the light changed. But the hunger clawed at the logic in her brain, shredding her willpower until there was nothing left but a feral, aching void. She succumbed to the temptation. She pressed backward, initiating a slow, grinding roll of her hips that dragged the hard, thick length of him against her slick cleft.

Ben stirred with a low, half-animal rumble, his arm reflexively tightening as his hips pushed into the friction.

"Mmm." His mouth found the curve of her shoulder, lips warm and lazy against her skin. "Good morning to you too, sweetheart."

She reached behind her blindly, her fingers hooking the waistband of his shorts and tugging the elastic down over the hard, straining heat of his cock. The feel of his girth in her palm drew a ragged, feverish whimper from her throat.

With a frantic desperation, her other hand shoved her own shorts and underwear down her thighs, kicking them free in a single, graceless motion. Ben's breath hitched audibly as he felt how shining and completely slick she already was. Instead of taking him immediately, she rubbed the broad, swollen head of his cock against her wet folds, reveling in the hot contact and friction.

She slammed her hips backward, her slick pussy swallowing every inch of him in a single, greedy plunge. A moan tore out of her so loud and unrestrained that Ben thought she might shatter from that alone.

"Fuck," Ben groaned into her hair, his grip on her hip tightening hard enough to leave finger-shaped bruises. "Christ, doll, you're soaking wet. The hell were you dreaming about?"

She didn't answer. She couldn't answer. Because how could she tell him she’d been dripping over the thought of his son taking her on the parlor couch, calling her Princess while he bred her? There was no version of that sentence that could exist in this bed.

The humid air in the shed thickened with the smell of sweat, musk, and hot canvas. They fell into a blind, brutal rhythm—her back to his chest, his face buried in the curve of her neck. Fast and urgent, the heavy, wet slapping of skin on skin made the cot's metal joints shriek beneath them. His hand slid from her hip down to the aching bud between her legs, his thick fingers working her in tight, ruthless circles that her body responded to with a Pavlovian immediacy she despised.

"That's it," Ben growled against her ear, his breath hot and damp. "Squeeze that sweet pussy for me, sweetheart. Milk it. Take what you need."

She took it, eyes squeezed shut, chasing the shadow of a dream. And somewhere, swallowed in the blinding heat and the relentless physical overload, the friction scrambled her internal censor.

"Jo—"

She gasped, immediately biting down hard on the meaty edge of her palm to extinguish the vowel, but the shape of the name had already breached the air.

Behind her, Ben's hips stuttered. His fingers stilled between her legs.

He had heard it.

The realization flooded Annie with cold terror, but she didn't stop moving. She clenched around him hard and ground backward, trying desperately to bury the slip.

"Don't stop," she begged, reaching back to dig her nails into his thigh, pulling him deeper. "Ben. Fuck. Stretch me good. Don’t fucking stop."

Ben resumed, but the rhythm had changed. The urgency vanished, replaced by a conscious downshift. A hesitancy had crept into his thrusts, as though a partition in his brain had been rerouted to process what he’d just heard even as his body continued to perform.

He wanted more. His hand abandoned her clit, trailing upward in a slow, deliberate glide—over her hip, along the curve of her waist, dragging over her ribs to thumb the hardened peak of her breast through her shirt. The calloused fingers continued up the column of her throat, finally cupping the delicate line of her jaw.

He tried to turn her face toward him.

"Annie, doll." His voice was hoarse against her temple, stripped of all bravado. "Look at me."

The clumsy, unpracticed tenderness tripped every wire in her nervous system. If she looked at him—if she met his eyes while he was buried inside her—the illusion she had built would shatter.

Panic seized her. She wrenched her jaw out of his palm, twisting violently against his grip to shove his heavy shoulders flat against the canvas. Ben grunted in surprise as her leg swung over him, pinning his hips. She sank down onto his thick, upward-jutting cock, crying out as the sheer size of him stretched her wide, but she didn't stop.

She planted her hands flat on his chest and rode him with a sudden, punishing velocity. She rolled her hips in wide, grinding circles, one hand dropping to pinch and pull at her own breast while the other dug into his collarbone. She was a feral, magnificent sight, and Ben's cock twitched hard inside her at the sudden display of aggression.

She refused to let him ground her. Snatching the metal chain of his dog tags, she yanked him upward just enough to bury her face into the junction of his neck and shoulder in a vicious parody of a lover's embrace. She sank her teeth into the muscled cord of his collarbone, her fingernails raking down his spine to leave livid, bleeding welts. She was trying to tear the tenderness right out of him.

"Annie—Jesus, slow down—"

She shook her head wildly, grinding her clit relentlessly against his lower stomach. "Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Fuck me, Soldier Boy. Give it to me."

She bit harder, tasting copper, her hips slamming down with a bone-jarring ferocity. She needed the sting. She needed the rough, bruising, drag to drown out the guilt and the inescapable truth that she was fucking the wrong body. She was salting the earth so nothing soft could ever grow here.

Something snapped behind Ben's eyes. The searching gentleness collapsed into a surge of wounded frustration that had nowhere to go except directly through her. His large hands clamped around her biceps, shoving her off of him with a force that was neither gentle nor cruel but carried the blunt, unambiguous weight of a man who had reached for something precious and been slapped.

Annie hit the canvas on her stomach, the air rushing from her lungs. Before she could scramble upward, Ben's heavy hand gathered both of her wrists, wrenching them behind her back and pinning them flush to her spine. He dragged her hips upward, forcing her onto her knees, and drove back into her from behind. The intrusion was jarring, stealing her breath as he seated himself to the hilt, fueled by the dark burn of rejection.

"This what you want?" he growled against the back of her neck. "Just this? A warm cock to stretch you out and no fucking questions?"

Annie pressed her face into the canvas and took it. The relief of retreating into the familiar, impersonal collision was so overwhelming that her throat locked, a sob trapped permanently behind her teeth.

"Yeah," Ben rasped, his grip on her wrists tightening to the edge of pain. He shifted his weight, driving down at a steep, punishing angle that bottomed out against her cervix with every stroke. "That's what I thought."

The physical shock of the deep, blunt impact made Annie gasp, but instead of pulling away, she squeezed her eyes shut and pushed back. Every time he degraded her, every time he punished her with the thrust of his hips, her pussy clenched tighter, milking the anger out of him.

"Just a good little Vought whore taking what she's given," he sneered, the words dripping with a venom that masked his own hollowed-out ache.

He dropped his full weight onto her spine, crushing her flat against the narrow cot. Immobilized beneath his heavy, sweating bulk, she could only gasp into the canvas as he drove relentlessly into her wet heat from above. They were both teetering on the edge. Ben's muscles locked. Even through the red haze of his anger, a deeply ingrained instinct flared—he remembered how terrified she was of getting pregnant. With a harsh, guttural groan, he ripped his cock out of her dripping folds.

He erupted, coating her lower back and thighs with scalding streaks of his release. Driven by punishing spite, he plunged two calloused fingers deep inside her throbbing channel, burying them to the knuckles and dragging upward with a merciless, searching pressure. Annie screamed into the canvas. She shattered instantly, the climax hitting her with such violent force that her spine bowed and a ragged, uncontrollable shudder ripped through her body, her inner walls clamping down on his fingers in a rapid, relentless crush.

The silence that followed was heavy and abrasive, punctuated only by Annie's fading tremors and Ben's ragged, oxygen-starved breathing.

He withdrew his fingers, the wet, sliding sound loud in the quiet shed. Reaching up, he stripped the thin cotton case off his pillow and used it to gently wipe his semen from her back—a confusing, contradictory gesture of care from a man who had just fucked her with pure malice.

Ben rolled off her, falling flat onto his back and staring up at the corrugated tin. Annie remained exactly where he left her, lying on her stomach, her face turned deliberately toward the wall, putting the entire width of the narrow cot between them.

He exhaled, a long, shuddering sigh that carried the crushing weight of the tender connection he had wanted, and the mean, punishing reality she had forced instead .

"Annie," he murmured. It wasn't a question but a hollowed-out surrender. The sound of a man bleeding out and knowing nobody was coming with a tourniquet.

She was already pulling her shorts up, her back to him. "I should get back before John wakes up.”

As she bent to lace her boots, Ben reached out, his scarred fingers extending toward her elbow. "Annie."

Annie pulled her arm away as she stood, a natural motion that could have been accidental if either of them had wanted to pretend. "Get some sleep.”

Behind her, the shed door scraped shut, and Ben lay on the canvas cot in the new light and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until the pressure bloomed into red and black starbursts behind his lids.

He could still smell her on the pillow. He could still feel the phantom grip of her cunt around his cock. He could still hear the half-swallowed name of his son.

He'd known for a long time now, since before the poker night.

He just hadn't wanted to stop pretending.

Annie stood in the shower under water cranked to a blistering heat, dragging a rough washcloth over her collarbone in punishing, systematic strikes.

She scrubbed her neck until the skin flared an angry red. She scoured her wrists, pressing hard enough to ache against the nascent bruises left by his massive fingers. She washed the slick, stinging evidence from between her legs, but the frantic, abrasive friction changed nothing. The metallic tang of old canvas and the heavy, sour musk of the tractor shed still clung to the back of her throat, burrowing so deep into her marrow that no amount of cheap drugstore soap would ever scour it clean.

She dressed in clean clothes, toweled her damp hair, and carefully constructed the mask—the bright, impenetrable, professional-grade veneer she had perfected under the unblinking glass eyes of Vought’s press corps.

Satisfied with the flawless stranger in the foggy mirror, she padded down the hallway and descended the stairs. As she pushed open the door, the kitchen consumed her—a jarring assault of domestic normalcy, the rich, earthy scent of percolating coffee warring with the acrid sting of incinerated bread.

John stood at the stove in faded sweatpants, his dark hair sleep-mussed, wielding a plastic spatula with the combative concentration of a man engaged in a deeply personal war against breakfast. A skillet hissed violently on the front burner beneath the gurgle of the percolator, while a gravel-voiced country singer crooned from the old windowsill radio about the particular heartbreak of rural American loneliness.

"Morning," John announced, glancing over his shoulder. The smile that broke across his face—open, boyish, and entirely unguarded—hit Annie straight in the chest like a hollow-point round. He pointed the spatula toward the counter. "Fair warning. The toast suffered a catastrophic structural failure. We are classifying it as a total loss and moving past it."

He gestured to the two smoking, matte-black squares resting in the toaster. "The eggs, however, are salvageable. I executed a tactical recalibration and reduced the thermal output of the burner. This is called learning, Annie. Growth."

"They're smoking," Annie observed.

"That's steam."

"John,” she smiled softly, “they're literally smoking."

"It's aggressive steam, okay?" He poked at the skillet with the spatula, his brow furrowed. "Anyway, your goats are fucking terrorists. Houdini and that other little shit broke the latch again. I'm out there at the ass-crack of dawn, and they're just standing in the tomatoes. Staring right at me. Chewing. They have this smug, completely dead-eyed look on their faces—like they actually think nothing can touch them. It's infuriating."

“Remind you of someone?”

John shot her a very unimpressed look.

"They're just curious," Annie managed, forcing a light, breezy laugh from her chest. But the sound was brittle, and John’s smile faltered by a fraction of an inch, his unnervingly sharp blue eyes locking onto the slight, discordant tremor at the edge of her mouth.

"They're hostile insurgents, Annie," John countered, his jaw setting stubbornly as he scraped the eggs onto two plates. "They maintained unbroken eye contact while they chewed. Zero remorse. That little fucker specifically operates like a chronic agitator. I'm currently assessing the viability of a reinforced perimeter. Or a catapult. I haven't decided yet."

The kitchen was warm with the domestic absurdity of a man who had once leveled city blocks now filing grievances against baby goats. Twenty minutes ago, she had been in the shed, biting down on canvas to keep from screaming his name.

She sat at the table. The plate of eggs steamed in front of her, aggressively seasoned with what appeared to be the entire oregano supply of Kent County. Her fork felt absurdly heavy in her hand.

"Good?" John asked, watching her face with hopeful, anxious intensity.

"Delicious," Annie lied, forcing the first bite past the sandpaper lining of her throat. She felt something inside her chest cave inward like a sinkhole.

John beamed. He actually beamed—a brief, radiant flash of pride. Picking up his plate from the counter, he dropped into the chair across from her.

They ate to the sound of the radio. Morning light crept through the kitchen window, warming the tabletop and catching the steam from their plates. Outside, a determined clanging against the new gate hardware suggested the perimeter was already under siege. It was almost certainly Houdini.

"So," John said, between bites. "Before I forget. I noticed the northwest corner of the chicken run has a sag in the wire. Bottom rail is pulling free from the post. I can re-staple it this morning, but the post itself might need replacing. The base is soft."

Annie looked at him over the rim of her mug. Less than a year ago, the man didn’t know a staple gun from a soldering iron. Now he was flagging rotted wood with the matter-of-fact precision of a man who had traded Vought’s PR playbook for a tractor manual.

It was her framework, even if John had done the actual bleeding. He had earned the calluses, but she had handed him the hammer. She’d stood in the mud during those early miserable mornings, wrapping her hands over his to adjust his grip on an axe while he vibrated with rage and humiliation. Every skill he had now was a seed she’d planted in scorched earth, nurtured only because she’d stubbornly refused to let it die.

That wasn't nothing. In the corrosive moral accounting of her life, the reality of what she had done mattered. She had taken the most dangerous man on earth and helped him become someone who noticed sagging chicken wire, made terrible eggs, and fought with goats. That had to count for something. It didn't erase what she was doing out in the dark, but it was real, and it was hers.

"Annie?"

She blinked. John was watching her, his fork paused halfway to his mouth. Those blue eyes, the same ones that had stopped a coyote dead in its tracks hours ago, were trained on her with a quiet, searching attention.

"You didn't sleep in your bed last night," he noted.

Annie felt the heat blooming across her cheeks, her body reacting to the threat before her mind could even formulate a lie. "How do you know that?"

"The walls in this house are paper, Annie," he murmured, his tone dropping a devastating half-step. "We both know I can hear exactly what happens in your room at night."

Her pulse lurched. John held her gaze, tracking the sudden drain of color from her face, cataloging the split-second of raw panic before she could mask it. Then, he looked back down at his plate and casually speared a piece of egg.

"I assume you ended up on that piece-of-shit parlor couch," he said, chewing thoughtfully. "The springs in that thing are practically a human rights violation. Honestly, I don't know how normal people sleep on garbage like that without breaking their spines."

He was throwing her a lifeline, but the heavy drag of his voice made the terms of the deal clear: I know you're full of shit, and I'm letting you get away with it.

"Yeah," she managed, her throat tight. "I fell asleep reading."

"Mmm."

Annie reached for her mug, but her fingers gave way to a fine, rapid tremor that chattered the ceramic against the tabletop. She gripped the handle tightly to choke the sound, but his eyes had already tracked the movement.

Instinctively, John reached across the space between them, his large hand swallowing her trembling knuckles in a brief, steadying warmth. His thumb pressed down just enough to anchor her hand, a grounding touch born of concern, before he pulled away.

“Careful. It’s hot.”

His hand had closed directly over the faint, darkening band where Ben had pinned her arms behind her back, meeting the mark with a touch so gentle it made the phantom violence throb.

Annie set the mug down and tucked both hands into her lap beneath the table. Sensing the sudden shift in mood, John pivoted. He understood exactly how tightly she was wound, reeling the intensity back with the practiced ease of a fisherman who knew when to loosen the line.

"In other news," John announced, gesturing toward the yard with his fork. "I need executive clearance to assassinate the rooster."

Annie blinked, the conversational whiplash leaving her dizzy. "Reginald?"

"He's a certifiable menace." John’s brow furrowed in genuine, offended disbelief. "I went to collect the eggs at dawn, and he dive-bombed the back of my neck like a kamikaze pilot. We locked eyes afterward, Annie. There is zero soul in that bird. I'm telling you, it’s him or me."

"He's protecting his flock," Annie managed, forcing a light, breezy laugh from her chest. But the laugh didn't land quite right, and something quick and assessing moved through John's eyes before he let it go.

"He’s a fucking feathered psychopath," John countered, his jaw setting stubbornly as he scraped his plate. "I'm currently assessing the viability of turning him into a very tough, very vindictive soup."

He let the joke hang. The poultry material was running dry, and the kitchen settled into a stretch of quiet. John set his fork down. He looked toward the window, his eyes catching the light pooling on the sill, the steam curling from the percolator, the radio's low, gravelly drone. The faint, practiced warmth left his face, leaving his features slack and exposed. He stared at the scratched wood of the sill as if a message had suddenly been carved into it overnight.

"This is it," he said, turning his mug between his palms. "This part right here. The best part of the day."

He looked around the kitchen, his eyes lingering on the stove before dropping back to her. "Before the animals get loud, or I have to fix whatever the clusterfuck of the day is. Just sitting here. In the kitchen. With you.”

He tossed the observation out casually, the way he used to check his hair in a green-room mirror before a broadcast. “The coffee's terrible, you know. And you always eat the eggs even though they’re either burnt, salty, or over-seasoned."

It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. Even sweet Hughie, with all his stuttering devotion, had never come close to this kind of naked vulnerability. And she had to receive it while her thighs still ached from the tractor shed, swallowed by a roiling wave of gratitude that John no longer possessed the senses to smell his father on her skin.

"The coffee isn't that bad," she whispered blandly.

"The coffee is objectively terrible. It tastes like someone dissolved a boot in hot water." He reached across the table, his eyes fixed on the counter as he dragged the jar of strawberry preserves toward his plate. Annie watched him load a thick smear of red onto a bagel, his attention captured by the pastry for a long second.

He didn't look up as he spread it. "I drink it every morning because you make it. I would probably drink battery acid if you handed it to me with that look on your face."

“What look?”

John paused, the bagel halfway to his mouth. "The one where you think you're hiding how much you worry about me. The one that says I belong to you."

He offered her a small, lopsided smile before taking a bite, the red jam smudging the corner of his lip.

Staring at the dark, mussed hair and the easy slope of his shoulders, Annie felt her mouth water with a feral, intrusive craving. She wanted to lean over the table, lick the sweet smear from his face, and tear his clothes off right there on the linoleum.

The thought lanced through her, making her head swim. I’m going to love this man for the rest of my life, and I have never deserved anything less.

Four more bites of food were all she could manage before the room began to spin. Nausea rose in her throat, choking out any chance of finishing her breakfast. Forcing a tight, strained murmur about a sudden migraine, she pushed her chair back. It took everything she had to keep her feet at a walking pace until she hit the stairs.

The moment her bedroom door clicked shut, her legs simply gave out. She sank onto the edge of the mattress in the half-dark, gasping for air as the meticulously constructed compartments in her mind ruptured.

Through the floorboards, the mundane sounds of the morning filtered upward, an agonizing contrast to her collapse. The radio twanged. John hummed along, utterly off-key, the soft clatter of silverware echoing as he scraped the ruined toast into the bin and gently covered her abandoned plate with foil, saving it for her for later.

Annie pressed her palms flat against her burning eyes, her chest heaving as the first ragged sob tore its way out of her throat. She curled inward, pulling her knees to her chest, and finally wept—harsh, ugly tears for the ruin she was making of all of them.

Chapter Text

June 25, 2027, Mid-day (Present day)

The patchwork pendulum lunged and recoiled on its chain in the sweltering mid-day heat. Every strike from John’s fists landed with a disciplined, clockwork thud, rattling the fluted iron sheets around him.

Left jab. Right cross. Left jab. Left jab. Right cross.

Held together by a fraying web of duct tape and hope, the weathered leather leaked a thin trail of sawdust from a split seam near the bottom. Each impact sent a fine cloud of dust motes spinning into the shafts of the blistering late-June sunlight bleeding through the siding.

He’d been at it for over an hour. His knuckles were raw, the gauze wrap already soaking through with a pinkish stain. The muscles in his shoulders and forearms burned with the acrid fatigue of a man who was not hitting a bag to improve his technique, but because the alternative was putting his fist through flesh and bone.

His jaw was locked, his eyes flat and welded to the canvas. Brine tracked down his temples and pooled beneath his chin, dripping in a steady rhythm to stain the concrete floor. The outbuilding held no other sound—only the high, metallic groan of the chain and the dull, meaty thud of wrapped knuckles burying into dead weight.

 Over and over, he maintained that relentless pace, the cadence of a man desperate to beat a memory out of his skull.

He didn't hear Annie's footsteps on the gravel outside.

The world was reduced to the ragged drag of his lungs, the groan of iron, and the jagged loop of tape that had replayed behind his eyes since he’d walked out of her bedroom at three that morning.

It was an immutable reel, a phantom film he couldn’t pause or outrun. So he struck again. And again. And again. The sawdust bled, the chain shrieked, and in the burning dark of his own mind, John kept swinging.

He threw a savage right hook, the bag leaping on its chain.

John knew how to throw his punches properly now. He wasn’t windmilling or dropping his guard the way he had when he first hung the bag back in late May—back when his muscle memory still operated on the denial that nothing in the universe could hit him back.

His father quickly cured him of that delusion.

John threw a sharp one-two combination, his hips rotating flawlessly, remembering the gruff, unexpected patience in his father’s voice.

May 30, 2027 (three weeks ago)

The combat vet had found him on an early Tuesday morning, the air already thick and soupy with oppressive humidity. John was hammering at the bag with a graceless, desperate fury—all wild, exhausting momentum that yielded nothing but wasted strength.

Ben leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, and watched his son’s terrible form for about ninety seconds before the professional obligation to intervene overwhelmed his commitment to being entertained.

"Jesus wept," Ben drawled. "Who taught you how to punch?"

John stopped mid-swing. “Nobody. Obviously.”

"Obviously." Ben pushed off the doorframe and walked to the bag, steadying it with one hand. He surveyed John’s stance—feet too wide, weight too far forward, elbows flared, chin up—and hummed thoughtfully.

"Narrow your base," Ben instructed, tapping John’s ribs. “Feet shoulder-width. Not wider. You’re standing like you’re trying to stop a truck.”

John’s gaze leveled on him. A prickly, defensive armor—the knee-jerk Homelander reflex that bristled at any implication of inadequacy— flared once behind his eyes and then, surprisingly, subsided. He begrudgingly obeyed, adjusting his feet.

"Good. Now bring your elbows in. Tight. Right here.” Ben tapped his own ribs. “Your elbows protect your liver and your kidneys. You leave them out like that, and any asshole with a decent hook puts you on the floor in one shot."

"I've never been on a floor in my life," John muttered, but he tucked his elbows.

An amused crease broke across Ben’s forehead. “Sure, kid. Only the whole world watched you eat the floor at the White House. Live broadcast. No commercials.”

“Fuck.”

Soldier Boy tracked the sudden, fiery crimson rushing to the tips of his son’s ears, cutting bright through the film of sweat. He had the leverage to break him right there, to lay into the kid’s humiliation the way his own father would have. Instead, he swallowed a sigh.

"Chin down. Always. You get hit with your chin up and your brain bounces off the back of your skull. That's how normal people die in bar fights."

Ben stepped behind the bag and held it steady with both hands. "Hit it. Jab. Left hand. Don't swing—punch. Straight line from your shoulder to the target. Shortest distance between two points.”

John jabbed. The impact was sloppy, his wrist turning on contact.

"Lock your wrist. You're letting it break at the joint. A broken wrist means you're done—one hand out of commission and the other guy hasn't even started."

Ben's voice was firm and measured, entirely devoid of the theatrical condescension he deployed in most of their interactions. He sounded, for the first time, like a man who had trained soldiers. "Try again."

John jabbed again; this time, the wrist held.

"Good man. Now your cross. Right hand, same principle: straight line, full rotation through the hip. Your power doesn't come from your arm. It comes from the ground. You drive up through your back foot and rotate your hip. The arm is just the delivery system."

John drove the cross home. The bag jumped on its iron tether, a solid, satisfying thud that tore straight though his knuckles, vibrating up the bones of his forearm.

Ben nodded in approval. “Better. Next time, don’t telegraph the cross. If I can see it coming, I’m already out of the way.”

For one grueling hour, they punished the leather until John’s shoulders burned like hot iron. Ten minutes into the water break, he foolishly nodded when Ben offered to show him how to really fight without rules.

"Hit me."

"You want me to hit you?"

"I want you to try. There's a difference." The corner of Ben's mouth twitched. "I'm going to show you what a real fight feels like when the other guy isn't a bag of sawdust. Come on. I'll go easy."

Where John lunged and gasped, Ben moved like smoke over oil—a masterclass in calculated inertia. He didn't strike; he merely let John break himself against an invisible wall. It was a seamless sequence of ghosted slips and micro-blocks, followed by a sudden, jarring slap to John’s unprotected flank. The contact was light (at least for a superpowered soldier), but the message was clear: You're open. I'm inside. You're dead.

"See? You drop your guard after the jab. Every time. That's the habit we need to kill." Ben reset his stance. "Again."

And so they went again, for another twenty minutes. Only when John was down to a heaving breath did Ben finally call an end to the session.

“Good job,” Ben praised, clapping John on the shoulder before tossing him a water bottle.

"You won't win a fight against anyone who knows what they're doing. Not yet. But you can survive one. And surviving is the whole game when you don't have the luxury of being bulletproof."

Sitting on the workbench that morning, sharing water in the quiet heat, the air between them had felt different.

John drank greedily, the water running down his chin. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at his father—the relaxed frame, the easy confidence in his stance, the specific quality of attention he'd been giving John for the past hour.

Just a father teaching his son how to not get killed.

John offered an extra bottle, his ribs still heaving from the exertion. "Why are you doing this?"

Ben twisted the cap off with a sharp crack. He let the question hang in the humid air of the outbuilding while he drank. When he spoke, he chose his words carefully.

"You think this farm is a fortress, kid? It ain’t. Eventually, you’re gonna have to step off it, and so is she. And the second you do, someone’s gonna try to take a piece of you.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I’m not gonna be around forever to bail your ass out when things go sideways. “You need to be able to protect yourself. And her. Consider this my insurance policy.”

The admission was brief, but it left a clammy draft in the room. I’m not gonna be around forever. Ironic, considering the blue fire of V1 coursing through his veins—a serum built to cheat the grave. Yet, whether "leaving" meant a voluntary disappearance or the violent end that eventually claims every weapon of war was a line neither dared to cross. Ben didn’t offer a map to his future, and John didn’t have the stomach to ask how much mileage his father had left.

"Does Annie seem... off to you lately?" John asked suddenly.

Ben paused, lowering his drink. "No more than usual. Girls get moody. Maybe she’s on the rag.”

John shook his head, deep in thought. "No, it’s not that. She's not sleeping. She's barely touching her plate. She goes out to the fields at dawn and doesn't come back until dark, and when she does..."

He trailed off, looking at the scuffed floorboards, searching for the right brand of misery.

"She’s got that look," John said, the words tasting like ash. "The Vought look. The press-conference smile. The 'God Bless America, everything is perfect' face. It's the face I used to make before I cut someone in half.”

Ben went quiet. The casual, old-school bravado faltered for a second, replaced by something heavy. He took another slow sip. "How long?"

"A week. Maybe more. It’s getting worse," John said, leaning forward, trying to read the man who was supposed to be his blood. "Do you know anything about it? Did something happen out here?"

Ben looked away, his eyes tracking a runaway goat just beyond the entrance. “No.”

"I've tried asking her," John pressed, his voice dropping to a frustrated whisper. "She walls up. Full lockdown. Every single fucking time."

Ben let out a gravelly hum of acknowledgement but offered nothing else.

The unspoken understanding that Annie was pulling away from them both had settled heavily in the space. John had looked at Ben, the question burning a hole in his chest: Are you sleeping with her?

But he swallowed it. If he asked, and the answer was yes, the rare scrap of paternal care Ben had just offered him would curdle into manipulation. John wasn't ready to lose the only crumb of real fatherhood he had ever received.

So he kept his mouth shut.

"I'll talk to her," Ben asserted after a long minute. "My way. You stick to yours."

"Your way involves a bottle of bourbon and a complete disregard for personal boundaries."

"My way gets results, kid. Your way involves some goddamn chamomile tea and a passive-aggressive staring contest. We cover different territory."

John let out a dry, humorless breath that was almost a smile. "You think it'll work?"

"I think she’s got a dick-hardening amount of attitude.” John rolled his eyes, but Ben just plowed ahead with a fond, twisted grin. "And I once fucked a KGB chick in the sixties for three hours straight, and she still wouldn’t tell me where the missile silos were even while I was balls deep in her tight little ass. So no, probably not. But you gotta swing the bat, son."

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

Ben laughed, sliding off the workbench. "Same time tomorrow?"

"Sure.”

Chapter Text

June 24, 2027

On the other side of the property, Annie was kneeling in the dirt of the east field, covered in fungicide and the deteriorating remnants of her patience.

The late-June heat sat on the valley like a wet towel, the humidity so dense it blurred the tree line into a shimmering green haze. The blight had taken the cabbages first—a creeping, yellowish rot that worked inward with systematic cruelty. The tomatoes had followed, and now the bell peppers were showing the same sickly, wilting droop.

She clipped away the infected growth, trying to calculate how much of the summer harvest was a total loss. It was not a good day to be Annie January. And the fact that it was also, technically, her twenty-seventh birthday made the cosmic timing feel specifically, personally vindictive.

Birthdays on the farm didn't matter. They belonged to the girl who used to wear white and gold and smile for cameras. Out here, she was just a woman kneeling in infected dirt, running a farm that was slowly falling apart, while simultaneously navigating a sexual affair with the father of the man she was in love with.

Happy fucking birthday, Annie.

She stayed in the fields until the light began to soften, avoiding the farmhouse and the two men inside it with the deliberate evasion of a woman who had simply run out of faces to wear.

The evening had finally cooled enough to make the outdoors bearable, the first fireflies of the season beginning their blinking ascent from the tall grass.

Annie sat on the top step of the back porch with her boots unlaced, wearing a sleeveless white cotton shirt and a vintage-style button-down skirt she’d found in the attic. A mug of chamomile tea was cooling in her hands. John sat beside her, his long legs stretched down the steps. They weren't talking. It was the tired, comfortable silence of two people content to exist in the same space without filling it.

The screen door banged open behind them.

"Jesus Christ, my eyes," Ben drawled, his voice carrying the theatrical disgust of a man surveying a scene of profound personal offense. "What is this, a goddamn prayer circle? What am I looking at right now?"

John didn't turn around. "We're drinking tea. Chamomile tea."

"I can see that. I can see two fully functional adults sitting on a porch at sunset drinking warm leaf water like a couple of ninety-year-old biddies." Ben descended the steps, carrying a large, unmarked ceramic jug cradled in the crook of his arm.

He sat on the bottom step and looked up at them with the self-satisfied expression of a man about to solve a problem nobody had asked him to solve.

Annie raised a brow in alarm. "What the hell is that?"

"This," Ben announced, pulling the cork with a soft pop and inhaling deeply with closed-eyed reverence, "is about three gallons of pure, unadulterated liquid engine block. Two hundred proof sugar shine. Cooked it slow over seventeen days in a still I rigged up out of copper pipe, a pressure cooker, and a radiator I ripped out of the old Ford. I call it White Lightning. One sip'll make your dick hit your chin."

Annie stared at him, deadpan. "I don't have a dick, Ben."

"Metaphorically speaking, sweetheart," Ben said, completely unfazed as he sloshed the jar. "Point is, it’s got hair on it."

John glared at him, his face tightening. "You built a still."

"I built a still."

"On our property—," John said, his voice dropping to a harsh, panicked whisper.

“On Annie’s property.”

"Do you have any idea what kind of heat is on us? Vought has thermal satellites. The feds are probably running drone sweeps over this entire sector. If they catch a heat signature from a rogue boiler in the woods, they won’t send a local sherrif."

Ben let out a soft, dismissive snort, though his eyes sharpened just enough to show he took the point. "Relax, Hoover. I wrapped the boiler in insulated tarp and routed the exhaust through the old root cellar. Nobody's seeing a damn thing from space. Besides, it's sitting on a small, discrete portion of your land that I have also, separately, repurposed for a patch of premium grass."

Ben poured a generous measure of the cloudy liquid into a mason jar and held it out. "Happy Thursday."

"You're growing weed?" Annie's voice climbed an octave. "Where?"

"The southeast quarter-acre behind the tree break. Prime dirt. Mixed in some chicken shit to give it a kick." He took a slow, evaluative gulp, his jaw working as his throat burned. "Not bad. Tastes like a battery cable, but it'll do the trick."

“I’m not putting that hillbilly rotgut in my body,” John said flatly, looking at the cloudy jar with visceral disgust. "It looks like radiator fluid. Because it is radiator fluid."

"Suit yourself, Boy Scout." Ben extended the mason jar toward Annie.

“Annie doesn’t want your garbage either,” John snapped, stepping in slightly, his arm tensing as if to block the jar.

"Actually," she said, cutting right through John's protest and reaching for the jar, "it's my birthday."

John's head snapped toward her. "What?"

"June twenty-fourth. I'm twenty-seven," she said, her fingers locking around the mason jar. She didn't look at John; she kept her eyes on the cloudy liquor. "I didn't say anything because honestly, who gives a shit? But right now, my crops are rotting, my life is a disaster, and I want to get completely blind drunk so I don't have to look at either of you for the next four hours."

She raised the jar to Ben, a bitter, sharp edge to her smile. "Happy birthday to me."

"Annie—" John started, the protective reflex immediately tightening his jaw.

She looked at him, and the raw, exhausted vacuum behind her eyes stopped him cold. "Do not do the protector bit tonight. I am begging you. Just let me drown out the noise for five minutes, okay? That is all I'm asking for."

The protest died in his throat. He clenched his jaw, looked away, and said nothing.

Annie drank.

The sugar shine hit her like a blowtorch dragged down the center of her chest. Her eyes watered. A shuddering, full-body convulsion rippled through her as the heat detonated in her stomach.

"Holy mother fucking Jesus Christ," she gasped, coughing.

"She's a natural," Ben laughed raucously, clapping her back. “I’ve never been prouder.”

"That tastes like a car battery exploding in my throat."

"That’s the taste of freedom, sweetheart," Ben said. "Soldiers, prisoners, and hillbillies with nothing left to lose. Builds character."

He cracked the cork on the jug again, sloshing a fresh wave of fire into her jar and filling his own mug to the brim.

"Drink up, birthday girl," Ben said, raising his mug in a mocking toast. "Unless you want to go back to your leaf water."

Annie didn't blink. She didn't look at John's furious silhouette beside her. She wiped the back of her hand across her burning mouth, looked Ben dead in the eye, and took a long, reckless gulp.

By the third pour, the burn had dulled to a warm, spreading glow that softened the edges of the world. By the fifth, the iron bands around her chest didn't exist anymore. Nothing existed except the extraordinary, narcotic relief of not having to perform for a single second.

John watched from the top step, his tea going cold in his hands.

Annie's transformation was rapid. Sober Annie managed her expressions the way an air traffic controller managed a runway. Drunk Annie was a completely different organism. She laughed too loudly. She talked with her hands, nearly knocking the jug out of Ben's grip twice.

And she leaned into physical contact the way a cat basks in sunlight.

She was leaning into Ben: her shoulder against his arm, her hand resting casually on his knee, her head tipping sideways to rest against his shoulder as she giggled at a joke.

"You know what your problem is?" Annie announced, jabbing a finger at Ben's chest. "You’re a fraud. Underneath the whole... the whole scary soldier, I’m gonna murder you vibe... you're just a giant, stupid teddy bear."

"I am a weapon of mass destruction, you little lightweight," Ben rumbled, his head swaying slightly as he glared down at her. "I am a goddamn American hero and a stone-cold killer, and I will not be slandered by a woman who can't hold her liquor."

“You sang to the pony, Ben.”

“I was establishing dominance.”

You were brushing the mare’s mane and telling her secrets about the Cuban Missile Crisis!”

"That information was strictly on a need-to-know basis," Ben slurred, swatting at the air. "And she was an excellent listener. Very professional."

"He cried, John!" Annie called up the steps, her face bright with gleeful, inebriated delight. "During The Fast and the Furious! Big, fat, Soldier Boy tears!"

"It's about family, goddammit!" Ben barked, a dark, drunken flush crawling up his neck. "And brotherhood. Chrome Dome... he gets it. If you don't weep when those two cars split up at the end, you're not a man, you're a communist robot. I regret nothing."

John didn't smile. His gaze had shrunk to a laser-focus, locked onto the place where Annie’s fingers rested against Ben’s knee. The knuckles were loose, her thumb occasionally making a small, mindless crescent stroke against the denim. He felt a cold, oily knot twist behind his navel. It was the absolute certainty that he was looking at an old habit.

By now, Ben's grip on the English language was unravelling. His voice had dissolved into a thick, low-frequency growl, his consonants blunting into mush. When he couldn't find the nouns he wanted, he simply began stringing together archaic obscenities, cursing the steps, the mosquitoes, and the humidity with an inventive, foul-mouthed fury that sounded like a dockworker trying to recite Scripture.

"You know what the real tragedy is?" Ben announced to the darkening sky. "Air conditioning. It's made everyone soft. We used to sleep in the mud in France. With the rain and the rats and the goddamn artillery shaking the fillings out of your teeth. Now everyone needs their memory foam and their weighted blankets. You know what my weighted blanket was? A dead German. True fuckin' story."

"So what I'm hearing," Annie slurred, pointing a shaky finger at him, "is that you spooned a German guy named Klaus. Ben, are you trying to tell us something?"

"I am not a queer, you little instigator," Ben barked, thoroughly affronted as he threw his hands up. "It was tactical survival. And besides, you of all goddamn people should know that I like—"

Annie’s hand shot out, her palm slapping over his mouth with a frantic, fleshy smack that cut him off mid-syllable. Her heart did a sudden, sober flip in her chest.

Ben didn't bite her, but his eyes crinkled with drunken malice as his tongue swiped flat across her palm.

"Ew! Jesus, gross!" Annie yanked her hand back, wiping it aggressively against her skirt. "You're disgusting."

John set his tea down on the step.

"Okay," he said, his voice dropping into the quiet, authoritative tone that both of them recognized as the end of the discussion phase. "That's enough."

Annie's head lolled toward him. "What?"

"You've had enough. Both of you." He descended the steps and firmly extracted the jug from Annie's loose grip.

"Hey—I wasn't done—"

"You're done."

"It's my birthday, John," she whined.

"Happy birthday. You're done."

"Homelander's angry," Annie stage-whispered to Ben, her eyes wide and glittering with mischief. "He's doing that thing. The scary thing."

John didn't yell. Instead, his face did something muchworse—his eyes went completely dead and unblinking, the corner of his mouth twitching upward into a rigid, hollow imitation of a smile that didn't reach his face. A tight, rhythmic pulse throbbed in the muscle just beneath his cheekbone.

"I'm not angry," John said, his voice entirely flat, a sharp contrast to the furious ticking in his jaw. "But I am taking you inside."

Ben raised his mason jar in a sloppy, exaggerated salute. "Copy that, Commander. The asset is all yours."

He hauled himself to his feet with careful, deliberate focus. "I'll be in the shed. Probably unconscious. Don't wake me unless the farm is actively on fire, and even then, think about whether it's really worth it."

He staggered down the steps, leaving the jug of moonshine on the porch railing, and weaved across the dark yard toward the tractor shed with the zigzagging trajectory of a battleship navigating an asteroid field.

The kitchen was dim, the overhead light casting a yellow pool across the table. John sat Annie in a chair and filled a glass of water from the tap.

"Drink." His tone brooked no argument.

"I don't want water."

"I don't care what you want. Drink."

Annie took the glass with both hands. Her coordination had departed three drinks ago, and as she tipped the rim, the water ran down her chin and throat in thin, cold rivulets, soaking the collar of her shirt.

"Oops," she said, looking down at herself. Then, with the unfiltered delight of a woman liberated from self-consciousness: "I'm all wet, John."

John was filling a second glass at the tap. He turned around.

The wet fabric was functionally nonexistent now, transformed into a translucent film that mapped her skin. It tracked the curve of her collarbones and the slope of her breasts, sticking fast. It was immediately apparent that she was not wearing a bra. Her nipples had tightened in the cold—two distinct peaks straining against the wet fabric with a visual clarity that redirected every drop of blood in his body to a single, concentrated location below his belt.

John abandoned the second glass on the counter. He tilted his head back, staring hard at a crack in the ceiling and waiting for the red haze in his vision to clear. On the count of three, his voice came out flat. "Drink the water, Annie."

"I'm not thirsty. I'm wet." She plucked at the soaked fabric, letting it snap back against her skin with a wet smack. “I’m so fucking wet, John.”

She looked at him with scheming, hopeful eyes. “Do you have a towel? Or a shirt? You could give me your shirt. Take your shirt off, Farm Boy.”

"Drink. The. Water."

Annie lifted the glass, took three defiant, sloppy gulps that sent additional rivulets cascading down her chest, and shoved the glass across the table with a petulant force that sloshed water over the rim.

"There. I drank. Happy? Are you happy now? Is big scary Daddy Homelander satisfied that his prisoner has been adequately hydrated?"

Daddy. John’s eye twitched.

"You're not my prisoner."

“I am lit... lit-er-ally a hostage. You're force-feeding me. It’s a violation of the Geneva... the thing. This is Gwan-tanamo with better wallpaper”

John pinched the bridge of his nose. The patience he was currently deploying was borderline heroic, given that the woman in front of him was drunk, bratty, and essentially topless.

"I'm going to get you a dry shirt," he said, turning toward the stairs. "Stay in the chair. Don't move. Don't—"

Her hand found him before he could finish the sentence. Or rather, her palm landed heavy and warm over the tensed ridge straining against the gray fleece, flattening over the top of his erection as it throbbed against her hand. She squeezed, her fingers checking the density of the flesh through the fabric.

"I knew it," Annie gasped, her eyes wide and blazing with vindicated triumph. She squeezed harder, tracing the thick outline through the cotton. "I knew you were packin’. Giant Homelander dick. God, it feels even bigger than it looked in my—"

His fingers clamped around her wrist like an iron cuff, peeling her hand off his groin with a rigid, agonizing slowness that felt like tearing his own skin off.

"Don't," he said, the word coming out rough and wrecked. "Annie. You're drunk."

"I'm not that drunk."

“You’re drunk enough that you won’t remember this tomorrow. And after everything we’ve talked about—everything with Becca—I’m not doing this with you until you’re sober.”

“John, stop being a priest,” she whined, leaning her weight into him. “I’m not—I’m not drunk. I’m completely fine. I wanna taste you. Just a little itty-bitty taste.”

"You are 100% drunk. You just told a coyote story to a glass of water ten minutes ago."

"I was being conversational."

"You were being insane."

"Your dick is hard, John."

"My dick is not the topic of this conversation."

"It's a very prominent topic. It's right there. Being topical."

John closed his eyes, inhaling slowly through his nose. He held the breath, manually overriding the urge to just give and lose control, before he let it out. Then he bent down, hooked one arm under her knees and the other behind her back, and lifted her in a single, clean motion.

Annie yelped—a high, startled sound that dissolved immediately into breathless giggling. Her arms instinctively wrapped around his neck, her wet shirt soaking a cold, spreading stain into his.

"Oh my God," she laughed, her face pressed into his shoulder. "You're carrying me. Like a big, angry, sexually frustrated bride."

"You're the bride in this scenario."

"You're the bride of my heart, John. The bride of my heart."

"Please stop talking."

He carried her up the stairs with steady arms, her body warm and loose and trusting against his chest. She felt lighter than he expected, and the ease with which he held her stirred something deep in the back of his mind that he filed away for later examination.

He shouldered her bedroom door open, crossed to the bed, and set her down on the mattress with the exaggerated care of a man depositing a live explosive. He took a step back and pointed at the pillow.

"Sleep," he instructed. "I’m getting you one of my flannels since I don’t know where you hide your clothes. And I don’t feel like digging through your dresser right now. By the time I’m back, you better be under the covers with your eyes closed.

He turned to leave.

Annie's hand caught his wrist.

The grip was surprisingly strong for a woman who had consumed enough alcohol to sterilize a field hospital. Her fingers locked around his joint with a sudden, fierce determination that jerked him off balance, and before he could correct his stance, she launched herself off the mattress and into him.

Her mouth hit his.

The kiss was not tender, and it was not romantic. It was a drunk woman's kiss—sloppy, aggressive, tasting of White Lightning and desperation. Her lips slid wetly against his, her teeth catching his lower lip with a sharp, accidental bite that drew a hiss of pain and something considerably more dangerous. Her tongue pushed past his lips. Her hands fisted in the front of his shirt.

John didn't kiss her back.

His hands stayed strictly at his sides, his fingers curled into white-knuckled fists. His body went rigid with the excruciating tension of a man standing at the exact intersection of everything he wanted and everything he knew was wrong.

She was drunk. She was pressing her wet, barely-covered body against his, her mouth hot and urgent, and his erection a physical agony trapped between them. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to grab her hips, push her down, and take exactly what she was offering.

But he didn't.

He stood there and let her kiss him without reciprocating, because the version of himself that would take advantage of her intoxication to get the thing he'd been starving for was the version he had spent the better portion of a year trying to kill.

When Annie pulled back, her eyes were glassy and unfocused, searching his face with the desperate intensity of a woman trying to read a sign from a moving car.

"Kiss me," she pleaded, a pathetic, intoxicated little whine catching in her throat as her mouth brushed his again. "Please."

"No."

"John—"

"Not like this,” he rasped, the words barely a vibration in his throat. "Not when you won't remember it."

He reached up, gently unhooked her fingers from his shirt, and stepped back. The distance between them felt like a canyon.

"Go to sleep, Annie." He turned toward the door. "Happy birthday."

He made it two steps.

Annie's hand closed around his wrist and pulled—not with a sloppy, uncoordinated grab, but with a shocking torque that wrenched his shoulder backward and sent his center of gravity lurching.

His knee caught the edge of the mattress. Before his brain could override his body's instinct to catch himself, Annie shoved both palms into his chest with a Vought-enhanced force that had no business coming from a woman her size.

John hit the mattress hard on his back, the springs shrieking beneath him, the air punching out of his lungs. In the half-second it took him to process what had just happened—the ceiling swimming into view, the bedframe groaning, his arms splayed—Annie was already on top of him.

She swung her leg over his hips and dropped her full weight onto his pelvis, her knees digging into the mattress on either side of his waist. The wet fabric of her shirt dragged across his chest as she leaned down, her hands pinning his shoulders, her hair falling around his face in a curtain of gold.

"Annie—" The word came out strangled. His hands instinctively gripped her thighs before his conscious mind could countermand the order.

She was a solid weight of pure heat on his pelvis. Her wet shirt stuck to his bare throat and chest, an icy shock that was neutralized by the blistering warmth of her skin and the hard points of her nipples digging through his layers. The dual sensations sent a jagged bolt of desire up through his spine that whited out his vision for a full second.

"You don't get to... to walk away from me," Annie slurred, her forehead accidentally bumping his chin before she looked at him with wide, unfocused eyes. "Not tonight, John. Not on my goddamn birf-day. You don't get to lay there with a—with your giant dick, act like a little saint, and then just... just fucking leave me."

"I didn't say I don't want it." His voice trembled, his fingers tightening on her thighs despite every signal his brain was sending to release them. "I said not like this."

"Like what?"

She rolled her hips in a torturous loop, dragging the slick, scalding center of her skirt against his lap. He could feel her arousal soaking through his sweatpants to coat the hard length beneath.

The sound that tore out of John's throat was not so much a word but the sound of a load-bearing wall developing its first massive crack.

“Like this?” she whispered, hovering over him. Her balance was a little off as blinked, trying to focus on the massive, rigid shape tenting the gray fleece. A loose, wicked giggle escaped her. “Looks like it’s gonna explode. I can fix it.”

Before he could even swallow, she fell forward again and buried her tongue in his mouth.

John didn't pull away this time, but his hands locked onto her thighs, his fingers digging into her skin with a bruising force that anchored her hips right where they were, stopping the torture of her grind.

He broke the kiss, his breathing ragged, his palm shooting up to wrap firmly around her jaw, holding her face inches above his. His chest was heaving, his vision swimming with the pure agony of her weight on his erection.

“You think I don’t want to fuck you? That I don’t want to sink myself balls deep in that sweet, tight little pussy?” he hissed, his voice thick with an arousal so intense it sounded like a threat.

“Look at me, Annie. I want to rip these clothes off and fuck you until neither of us can breathe. I want to split you open and drive myself so deep inside you that you'll be leaking my come for days. I want you coming around my cock so fucking hard your legs shake, until you feel me in your bones every time you take a step on this farm."

He tightened his grip on her jaw slightly, his eyes burning into her glassy, unfocused stare.

"But you’re not fixing anything tonight," he whispered, his voice dropping to a rough, ruined scrape. "When I fuck you—and I am going to fuck you—you are going to be completely sober. I want you to know exactly whose cock is stretching you out. I want you to remember every single thrust, and I'm not doing it while you're hiding behind a bottle of hillbilly moonshine. Now go to sleep.”

“No.”

Chapter Text

June 24, 2027

"No."

The word was a quiet, dead syllable that didn’t belong to the drunk girl who had just been giggling on the porch less than an hour ago.

John removed his hands from her thighs, his palms pressing hard against her shoulders to shove her off him. "Annie, get the fuck off me."

He was furious—at her, at the room, but mostly at the white-hot pulse between his legs. He hated the powerlessness of it, the degrading reality of being pinned like a weak human.

On any other night, he wouldn't have minded. If she had shoved him down and climbed on top with that filthy grin and those clear, doe eyes, teasing, “Ride or die, Farm Boy,” he would have grabbed her hips. He would have let her take whatever she wanted. He would have begged her to.

But Sober Annie was gone.

This was Moonshine Annie. And she didn’t ask, and she certainly didn't yield. Leaning forward, she planted her palms against his shoulders, letting her full weight press him down with an inescapable torque.

John let out a sharp groan as the pressure forced his spine flat against the mattress; he could already feel her grip painting tomorrow’s mottled bruises deep into his skin. He braced his feet, trying to buck his hips and roll her off, but it was no use. Without the Compound V, he was trying to shift an anvil.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he snarled, his neck straining as he tried to dislodge her.

Suddenly, Annie’s face crumpled.

"What the fuck is wrong with me?" Annie echoed, her voice cracking, her glassy eyes turning hard and feral. She slammed both palms against his torso, pinning him flat.

"You. You're what's wrong with me."

She swayed above him, her wet hair falling around his face like a curtain, the alcohol loosening a dam that had been holding back months of wreckage. Her words tumbled out in a desperate, slurring rush.

“It’s you and your stupid, sexy beard. Stupid. An’ how cute your butt looks in those jeans. Could pop a nickel off that ass—”

"Annie—"

"An' your dumb smile. 'M talking about the real one, not that... that creepy Homelander shit you do for the cameras. An' your voice when you read t’me—it does that rumbly thing in your chest an’ it makes my spine sing. An’ your laugh, an' the way you look at me like I'm—" She hiccupped, her brow furrowing as she lost the thought. "Like I'm the only thing. Like you'd... you'd set the whole world on fire jus' to keep me warm."

She choked on a sob, her tears dripping down to splash against his bare throat.

"But you killed 'em. You killed so many... You hurt me. Tried to make me kill Hughie. You killed Alex." She shook her head, a bitter, broken sound escaping her. "You’re a monster. You’re a fuckin' monster, and I... I can't stop thinking 'bout you. Every fuckin’ minute. It's... it's tearing me apart."

She leaned down closer, her breath hot against his lips, her eyes wild with a desperate, warped logic. She rocked her hips forward, a deliberate friction against his erection.

"I jus' need it out. If I fuck you. Jus' once... right now... then maybe I can get you out my head. Maybe I can fuckin’ breathe again."

She dragged her nose along his cheek, chasing the line of his jaw. "Please, John. Jus'... please."

John listened, a cold, venomous rage building with her every word. His nostrils flared, his upper lip curling back over his teeth.

The patient, understanding Farm Boy he had spent months building didn’t recede so much as get shoved out of the chair. The man who replaced him sat straighter, smiled wider, and had significantly less interest in being polite.

The Homelander.

"Oh, Starlight," he rumbled, a sharp, hollow little smile cutting through his fury. "You think a drunk, sloppy hate-fuck is gonna get me out of your system? I’m in your blood. Your marrow. You can't just… fuck me out of your head. I'm not your little toy soldier in the tractor shed.”

Annie flinched. He tracked the wince, a dark satisfaction warring with the sickening plunge in his stomach. He couldn’t tell if she was recoiling from his cruelty, or from the undeniable truth of what she’d done.

He waited for the pushback, for some furious denial to tumble out of her mouth.

Nothing came.

The thought that she might actually be letting him touch her—that she might be riding Soldier Boy when he wasn't around—threatened to tear the bottom right out of his stomach.

“You could bounce on my dick ‘til you’re raw,” Homelander pushed on, his voice dropping to a dangerous, unstable purr. “Drain my balls dry every night ‘til this shit farm rots in the dirt, and you’d still taste me in the back of your throat every time you close your fucking eyes. You can’t get rid of me that easily. Because what you want from me—what you really want—isn’t something you can get on your back.”

"I can try," she whined, her tongue heavy over the words. "Jus’ stop fighting it an'... an' lemme."

With a clumsy, uncoordinated heave, she lifted off his shoulders just long enough to wrench the wet cotton shirt over her head, her back arching as the fabric dragged across her breasts. The shirt caught on her ear, twisted inside-out, and sailed into the dark.

Her breasts swung free, the areolas flushed and damp, the pink peaks puckered tightly from the chill. Below her, John’s cock jutted against the confines of his sweatpants so violently that the grinding in his jaw produced a sharp, audible pop.

He scrambled to shift his weight and pitch her off his lap, but Annie was too fast. She caught his shoulders and hammered him back into the mattress, her knees digging into the sides of his ribcage with enough supe-strength to compress the cartilage until his lungs barked out a sharp grunt of pain.

“Stop it,” she warned, a dark, drunken petulance bleeding into her tone. Her bare breasts swayed inches from his face as she pinned his wrists against the mattress. She studied his white-knuckled fists with a heavy-lidded fascination. "You keep bein' bad, Farm Boy, an' I'm gonna have t'tie these pretty hands to the headboard.”

The word tie hit a tripwire.

The room vanished, replaced by the sterile, blinding white of the Bad Room, the cold bite of the leather straps, the smell of ozone, and his own childhood terror. A dark, vicious reflex snapped inside his chest.

“You want to tie me down?” Homelander whispered. His voice had gone somewhere subterranean—the sound of a man speaking from the far side of locked door. “The last people who strapped me down, I tore them apart. You try it, and I’ll split you wide open from the inside out.”

Annie didn't hear a threat over the thrum of her own liquor-addled brain; she heard an invitation.

“Yeah,” she whimpered, manic and feverish. “Do it. Split me open. Wreck me. Break my fucking pussy, John.”

Annie gathered both of his wrists into one hand, her small fingers barely circling the joint but the power behind them made the grip absolute. With her free hand, she reached down and fumbled with the front buttons of her vintage skirt.

Her coordination was shot; the small plastic discs kept slipping from her grip. With a frustrated growl, she fisted her hand into the fabric and pulled. The material tore with a sharp, ragged rip, the remaining buttons popping off to click against the floorboards.

The torn fabric fell away, leaving her in nothing but black lace panties that sat low on her hipbones.

John averted his gaze, studying a crack in the plaster of the ceiling like it contained the secrets of the fucking universe.

"Look at me," Annie commanded.

When he didn't move a muscle, she ground the soaked lace down onto his hard length—a burning, breath-taking drag that forced a strangled hiss through his teeth.

"Look. At. Me."

Annie's grip on his wrists vanished as something more urgent caught her attention. She grabbed the collar of his shirt with both fists and pulled, muttering that she wanted to see him. The fabric tore cleanly down the middle, exposing his chest.

"Wanna see you," she mumbled, nuzzling her face into his chest hair. She dragged her breasts along his torso, her hard nipples raking through the coarse hair, and the friction pulled a low, shuddering moan out of her throat. "God, you smell good. Wood smoke and... jus'... man."

John fisted his hands into the bedsheet, his knuckles turning white, keeping his eyes glued to the ceiling plaster.

"Touch me," she whined, her gaze snapping back up to his, heavy and commanding despite the glaze of the alcohol. "John. Please. Touch me."

“No.”

"I said touch me," she breathed, prying his fingers from the sheets with a strength that made his grip feel decorative.

She guided both of his hands to her breasts, pressing his palms flat against the warm, heavy weight of them, forcing his fingers to curl around the soft flesh. His calloused thumbs grazed her nipples involuntarily and she gasped, her spine rolling, her hips grinding down against his cock in a motion that dragged an obscene, throaty sound out of both of them.

"'S exactly right," she moaned, squeezing his hands tighter against her chest. "Jus’ like that."

John bit his lip so hard he tasted blood. “You are making it exceptionally fucking difficult to keep up this noble Farm Boy bullshit right now.”

“Fuck the farm boy. I wan’ the psycho. I wanna feel that huge fuckin’ Homelander dick deep inside me.”

Homelander let out a dry, mocking laugh. “As flattering as that is, Starlight. I’m not a vibrator you can switch on because you’re sad and horny. Go fuck yourself.”

“M’kay,” she shrugged. “Gonna make you watch.”

Annie let go of one of his hands, leaving his palm resting heavily against her bare breast, and brought her fingers up to his throat. Her hand closed around his neck—not with a lethal squeeze, but with a firm, unyielding pressure that pinned his windpipe just enough for him to feel the manufactured Vought strength behind it.

"Look at me," she whispered.

He kept his head turned, fighting the violent urge to throw her through the drywall. Annie let out a loose, frustrated sigh, sliding her wet center along the rigid length of his sweatpants, squeezing his throat infinitesimally harder at the same time.

The friction was intense, his thick shaft trapped flat against his stomach, getting crushed by her molten weight. A scrambled, broken sound tore out of John's throat—a crude vibration of pure, agonized restraint as he fought with everything he had to keep from moaning.

Homelander finally snapped his gaze down, glaring at her with eyes that promised retribution.

"There he is," Annie crooned.

Keeping her hand locked around his pulse, Annie raised her free hand to his mouth. Her index and middle fingers prodded clumsily against his lower lip.

"Open," she commanded softly.

Homelander held her gaze, a dark, hateful fire burning in his eyes. He thought about refusing. He thought about spitting in her face. But he was partially curious, partially drowning in the sheer, filthy eroticism of the moment, and separately, there was a cold spark of primitive fear in the back of his mind that reminded him she could snap his neck like a twig if she lost control.

Slowly, begrudgingly, he parted his lips.

Annie shoved her fingers deep into his mouth, against the damp heat of his tongue. “Suck.”

For one dark second, Homelander considered biting clean through her knuckles. Annie must have felt the tension lock through his jaw, because an impish, conspiratorial grin spread across her face.

"Go ahead, tough guy," she mocked, pressing her fingers deeper against his tongue. "You'd only break ‘em.”

John let his jaw relax. He began to suck her fingers down forcefully, wrapping his lips tight around her knuckles and working his tongue in long, deliberate strokes, making a loud, wet swallowing sound as he tasted her. His eyes never left hers.

"Good boy," Annie breathed, her eyes rolling back.

The phrase was a direct hit to his psychology, but the physical sensation was doing something worse to her. The suction of his mouth on her fingers was an erogenous lightning rod that sent a visible tingle straight to her clit. She let out a loud, uninhibited moan, her head tossing back as her hips gave another wet twitch against his lap.

She withdrew her glistening fingers from his mouth with a slow, wet drag, a string of saliva stretching between her hand and his lips. Her eyes were hooded as she looked down at him.

"Watch.”

Annie reached down, clumsily pushing the black lace of her panties to the side, exposing her bare, dripping slit.

Keeping her hand firmly on his throat, she pushed those same saliva-slicked fingers deep inside her heat, stretching her tight opening right in front of his face. She let out a stuttering gasp as she began to finger herself vigorously, the wet, squelching sound of her arousal filling the quiet bedroom as her hips undulated in a slow, torturous rhythm against his thighs.

"Look how wet I am for you," she keened, her thumb circling her clit.

John lay beneath her, his mind a chaotic, screaming void. His pupils were blown wide, consuming the blue of his irises. Beneath his sweatpants, his cock twitched violently, leaking a dark stain into the gray fleece.

He hated the circumstances, he hated the powerlessness, but the filthy "good boy" praise and the sight of her touching herself on top of him was a sensory overload he couldn't block out.

From the darkest sub-basement of his mind, a fantasy unspooled with a terrifying vividness that turned his stomach and hardened his cock in the same beat. It was a brutal craving for control.

He imagined grabbing a fistful of her hair and wrenching her head back, spitting in her mouth just to watch her choke on it. He pictured forcing her on her knees, shoving his dick down her throat, and pinching her nose shut until her eyes bulged, her throat convulsing around him while tears streaked her cheeks.

He fantasized about flipping her face-down, tearing her panties aside, and driving himself balls deep into her ass without warning, without lube—just a raw, splitting shock of it while she screamed into the mattress. 

He wanted to force-feed her the reality of being powerless, to make her beg him to stop and hear nothing in return but her own choking.

The image lasted two seconds. The taste it left was acid and bile, because the fantasy wasn't alien. Because the man who had done exactly this—who had taken and taken and taken without hearing a single no—was not dead.

He was in a cage, and Annie was rattling the bars.

The cage was holding, but the beast inside it was smiling.

That's not who I am. That's not who I am anymore.

"Oh God," she wailed, her thighs clenching harder around his ribs. "Fuck. Fuck, John—can feel you under me—so fuckin' hard — s’good—God—m’gonna come jus' from this—"

Her rhythm spiraled. As her movements grew more frantic, the wet sounds of flesh on flesh escalated to a fever pitch. Annie lost all abandon. She drove her fingers deeper and faster, working herself into a frenzy. Her moans climbed into a sharp, breathy whine, her back arching so hard her spine bowed.

Her internal muscles clamped down on her fingers in a rapid, crushing vice as long, trembling convulsions tore through her. She came hard, crying out as her pussy spasmed around her hand.

Annie sagged forward, gasping, her free hand migrating south to brace against his heaving chest. After a moment, she slowly pulled her fingers free, her breath hitching as she smeared the thick, cream-streaked come all over her folds, coating her clit and her inner lips until she was gleaming in the dim light. It was a deliberate display designed to obliterate the remaining threads of John’s composure.

She brought her soaked fingers right back to his lips. "Taste."

John may have been pissed, but his body was more obedient this time. He opened his mouth, taking her fingers all the way into his throat, savoring the distinct, musky flavor of her climax. An involuntary, low hum of pure enjoyment vibrated in his throat.

The sight of him doing that—the absolute submission of the mighty Homelander sucking her fingers clean with a purr of pleasure he couldn’t suppress—sent a fresh jolt of heat straight to Annie's core. The arousal spiked so hard and fast she briefly wondered if she was ovulating.

Her hands were trembling as she reached down and rucked the waistband of his sweatpants and boxers down his thighs. His cock sprang free—long, thick, and fully engorged, the purple head throbbing against his stomach.

Annie's mouth literally watered. A string of drool stretched from her lower lip and dropped, landing squarely on the swollen head of his cock.

John let out a tense, high-pitched whine—an animal caught in a snare.

"Fuck.” His hips jerked off the mattress, chasing the contact.

"Stop," Homelander growled. "I mean it. Touch my dick again, you little brat, and I’ll make the rest of your birthday profoundly unpleasant. I might be powerless right now, but if you don’t get the fuck off me right now, I swear to fuckin’ God I will find a way to severely punish you for this."

"Shhhh." Her left hand returned to his throat. With her right, she wrapped her fingers around the base of his cock and stroked him in long, twisting pulls from root to tip. "S’okay, baby. M'gonna help you. You're so hard it looks like it hurts. Lemme take care of you. Lemme make my Farm Boy feel good."

She guided him to her cleft and began to rub the rigid length against the glossy, swollen folds of her pussy, dragging the cleft of her skin up and down his shaft in a torturous, dry-humping friction.

Annie was so soaked that his cock slid effortlessly against her, the wet, slapping sound of their skin meeting turning the air in the room thick. With every upward thrust, the hard head of his cock clipped her hyper-sensitive clit.

John's head drove back into the pillow. The tendons in his neck stood out like cables. His fists had torn through the top sheet entirely, his fingers now shredding the fitted sheet beneath. A string of unwilling, highly aroused vocalizations spilled out of him.

As Annie got closer to her own peak again, her fingers tightened convulsively around his neck.

"Annie—" Her name came out mangled, shoved sideways through the shrinking space in his windpipe. "You need to let go of my throat. Right fucking now. You squeeze any harder, you're gonna crush my trachea like a fucking juice box, and I’d prefer to keep breathing."

She loosened her grip by an infinitesimal fraction, just enough to let oxygen slip past his vocal cords, but the terrifying weight of her fingers remained. She could end him right here, accidentally, and he couldn't do a damn thing to stop it.

Her hips moved faster. The drenched, rhythmic sound of her pussy sliding along his cock filled the room, punctuated by her increasingly incoherent moans and John's losing battle of hostile silence.

Annie let out a sharp cry, her hips hitching as she came for the second time, the sheer friction of his shaft against her clit pushing her over the edge. The orgasm rolled through her in visible waves, the hot evidence of it flooding against his cock and dripping down his shaft.

John was desperately trying to will his erection away.

Drunkenly offended that he hadn't tipped over the edge with her, Annie wrapped her hand around his glazed shaft. "Make a mess for me," she demanded, jerking him with a fast, ruthless pace.

She pumped his length without mercy, her hand coated in her own juices; the friction was absolute agony. John closed his eyes tight, gritting his teeth and trying with everything in his soul to deny her the satisfaction of breaking him.

"C'mon," she coaxed, her voice wrecked and raw. " I want it. I wan' it all over me, John. Wanna feel how hard you come. Give it t'me."

His willpower held for eight more seconds.

With a harsh, guttural shout, he came hard—thick ropes of heat spilling over her hand, her bare thighs, and pooling in the hollow of his stomach.

Relinquishing her grip on his pulse just long enough to lift her hand, Annie held her fingers up between them. They were glazed, strung thick with the milky web of his arousal. Her tongue carved a shameless path across her palm, lapping up the syrupy mess like a starved animal.

A wicked smile curved her lips as she savored the mess. She took her index and middle fingers deep past her lips, sucking them clean with vulgar greed, her cheeks hollowing around the digits. She released them with a wet smack, her tongue lazily chasing a final streak of moisture down to the knuckle.

“Mmm,” she hummed. “You taste like such a good boy.”

A predatory heat burned in her eyes as she began to drag her heavy, fever-flushed body down his torso. “Let’s clean up the rest.”

She leaned down, her tongue swiping flat across his abdomen, lapping up the cooling stripe of release with the lazy focus of a cat at a saucer.

John lay beneath her, utterly dazed, panting as he tried to catch his breath from the aftermath of the release. She slid her lips over the wet head of his cock, taking the top two inches into her mouth and sucking once, hard, before releasing it with a loud, wet pop.

Annie slid back up his body, her eyes completely out of focus now.

"M'gonna fuck you," she mumbled against the hollow of his throat, hand fisting into his gray sweatpants to drag them down further. "Gonna fuck you s'good, John. Jus'... jus' lemme get you hard again and I'll..."

With her other hand, she reached between them. She began jerking his semi-flaccid cock, her sticky hand trying to pump him back to a full erection a second time.

Her hand was no longer on his throat; it was splayed flat across his navel, her fingers tangling in the dark hair of his stomach. She hoisted her hips, positioning her wet, glistening hole directly over the head of his cock, preparing to slide down and impale herself.

Something in him—something that had been building since the moment she first shoved him onto this bed, something that had been accumulating pressure behind his eyes and in his chest and in the marrow of his goddamn bones—reached its limit.

He snapped.

With a sudden, explosive surge of adrenaline that surprised both of them, his hands shot up and clamped around her waist. He twisted his torso, throwing his full weight into her flank and rolling her over.

The mattress slammed against the wall; the headboard cracked against the plaster. The springs shrieked in protest as Annie hit the mattress hard on her back.

Before she could even process the shift, The Homelander was over her.

He pinned her wrists to the bed on either side of her head, threading his fingers through hers, his knees bracketing her thighs. His cock, still half-hard and slick with the mingled evidence of both of them, rested heavy against her mound, the intimidating length of him laid flat against her stomach from her folds to her navel.

"Enough!" The word erupted from him in a deep, guttural roar.

Annie gasped, dazed by the sudden, impossible violence of the reversal.

Homelander’s eyes were blazing— a deep, molten red that illuminated Annie's face in a warm, eerie glow, casting ruby shadows across the pillow and turning the dark room into something out of a fever dream.

Annie stared up at him through the red-tinted dark, her pupils blown wide, her mouth hanging open. The light from his eyes played across her features like firelight.

"Pretty," she whispered.

The sight of him like this—the unexpected return of the domineering Homelander towering over her, pinning her to the sheets—sent an involuntary spasm rippling through her. She moaned, shuddering, and he could feel her gushing hot all over his balls.

Every primal instinct John possessed was screaming at him to wrap her legs around his waist and plunge deep inside her.

He took a ragged, grounding breath. The wonder in her voice—the childlike, completely unafraid awe of a drunk woman looking at the weapon that had terrified the world and seeing something beautiful—hit him in a place he didn't know he had.

“I said enough,” he breathed, his voice vibrating with absolute authority. He closed the distance between them until his breath ghosted across the tip of her nose, his arms trembling where they braced on either side of her head, the last ring of fading red dissolving until there was only clear blue.

Annie stared up at him, the alcohol and the rejection colliding in a messy, emotional wreck. Tears spilled hot out of the corners of her eyes, tracking sideways into her hair.

"Why don' you want me?"

John looked down at her—at the tears, the shredded skirt, the beautiful, chaotic ruin of the woman he loved. The arrogant sneer melted off his face, leaving behind the exhausted, desperate Farm Boy.

"I do want you," he snapped, the mean edge of Homelander softening into something raw and vulnerable. “But I’m not going to be your mistake. I’m not going to fuck you when you’re hammered on bathtub moonshine and crying. I’m not going to be the piece of garbage you try to scrub off your skin tomorrow morning because your life is a goddamn clusterfuck and you think throwing yourself at the villain will fix it. I’m not a toy you get to use to punish yourself.”

He dropped his forehead to hers. “You think I want a drunk late-night fuck you won't remember? Some messy, blackout hook up where you pass out halfway through and I get to jerk off to the memory like some pathetic fucking teenager? I waited a year, Annie. I chopped your goddamn firewood and read your shitty novels and ate your cooking and slept ten feet from you every single night for a year. I am not a fucking side dish, Princess. When I have you, I am having all of you.”

The pet name landed between them, caustic and dripping with arrogant condescension. Annie’s pupils bled wide and hungry, consuming the warm brown of her irises in the dim shadows of the bedroom until there was only volcanic black.

A damp flush crept up the column of her throat, chased by a wave of gooseflesh that pebbled across her bare shoulders and tightened the peaks of her breasts. Her teeth sank deep into her swollen lower lip, trapping a pathetic, needy little whine behind it.

Oh, she likes that. The Homelander's satisfaction was instantaneous and predatory. Even blind-drunk and crying, the word struck a chord that went straight to her cunt. John tracked the flush, the dilated pupils, the helpless shiver, and filed it all away in the vault for later.

His thumb traced her knuckle. "You’re the best person I know. And you're lying underneath me, wet and willing, telling me I have pretty eyes. And I'm trying not to lose my goddamn mind. So please. Please stop. And just go to sleep."

Annie let out a soft, broken hiccup. “Don’t leave me.”

She turned her face into his neck, her body beginning to go slack as the alcohol finally began to drag her under.

“M sorry,” she mumbled, so quietly he almost missed it. "I jus'... I jus' wanted..."

She didn't finish the sentence. Within seconds, her breathing evened out into the deep, measured pull of a blackout sleep.

John stayed propped up over her for a long minute, listening to her breathe, waiting for the tremulous vibrations in his own muscles to subside.

Spite told him to leave her exactly as she was—tits out, pussy bare and sticky—out of pure, petty malice for what she had put him through. But he couldn’t do it.

He slid off her, his joints voicing their discontent in the quiet room. He tucked himself back into his sweatpants, the waistband snapping against the still-sensitive skin hard enough to make him hiss.

The reptilian part of his brain offered one last poisonous gift: his hand in her hair, his cock between those slack lips, using her sleeping mouth until he emptied himself down her throat and left his come sitting on her tongue — a parting gift she'd wake up tasting and never be able to scrub clean.

He forced the thought away.

Picking up the remnants of her skirt from the floor, he used the clean linen to gently wipe the drying come from her thighs, her stomach, and his own skin.

He crossed to her dresser, ignoring his previous rule about not digging through her things, and pulled out a pair of clean cotton panties and an oversized gray t-shirt.

With an exaggerated, careful tenderness, he redressed her limp body, pulling the shirt over her head and guiding her legs into the underwear without waking her. He lifted her blankets, tucking her securely beneath the covers up to her chin.

Before he turned away, he reached out, the pad of his thumb running once over her swollen lower lip in a tender caress.

Then he turned and walked out of the room.

John descended the dark stairs on legs that didn’t feel entirely his own, his chest tight, every nerve vibrating with an adrenaline high he couldn't shake. The screen door groaned briefly as he shouldered through it.

The night air was cool now, the fireflies gone, the fields stretching out into a vast, black void. There was a bite of chill in the breeze, but it did nothing to clear the dense fog in his brain.

He was reeling, his mind trying to process everything that had occurred upstairs. He closed his eyes, feeling the familiar, burning pressure building behind his retinas.

Behind his eyelids, the world was not dark. A dull, throbbing pressure pulsed in the space between his brow and his temples—the hot, building charge he hadn't felt at full strength in almost a year. It was as though there was a furnace behind his eyes, warming up, the infrastructure rebuilding itself one synapse at a time.

No.

He bore down on it, a desperate hand clamped over a hemorrhaging wound. The pressure pushed back, patient, indifferent to his opinion on the matter.

For a split second, a pathetic, bruised piece of him wanted to let it happen. It craved the heat back in his eyes; it wanted to scour this fragile, mortal weakness right out of his blood so he would never have to feel helpless again. But if he let the god wake up, the Farm Boy died—and he took Annie with him. Godhood meant empty skies and cold sheets.

I don't want them back, he mentally snarled, violently crushing the craving. Whatever you are, whatever's rebuilding in there—stay down. Stay the fuck down.

He leaned against the porch railing and closed his eyes, gripping the banister to steady the tremor in his hands. The wood groaned beneath his palms, hairline fractures suddenly spiderwebbing through the surface. He squeezed harder.

There was a sudden, sickening crunch of yielding timber.

The pressure pulsed once more, sullen and slow, and receded to a low hum at the base of his skull. Not gone. Waiting.

His eyes snapped open. The solid, two-by-four wooden railing had crumbled in his grip, reduced to a handful of jagged splinters that rained down into the grass.

"Fuck," he whispered. Then louder, to the empty yard and the dark field and the indifferent stars: "Fuck. FUCK!"

He stared at the crushed remains of the railing in his fist—the splintered wood, the compressed grain, the kind of structural damage no mortal grip should have been capable of producing—and felt the confirmation settle into his gut like a swallowed stone. "Motherfucker," he whispered.

John let loose a quiet, ragged string of creative profanities, his forehead coming down to rest against his knuckles. He stayed like that for five minutes, waiting for the trembling in his chest to stop.

Then, his eyes found the ceramic jug Ben had left sitting on the porch railing.

John reached out, pulled the cork with his teeth, and tilted the heavy clay back. He took a punishing gulp straight from the mouth of it. The 200-proof sugar shine hit his throat like liquid glass, burning a track from tongue to sternum and radiating outward through his limbs. His eyes watered, every nerve ending ignited simultaneously, and for one blinding, merciful second, he felt all the noise and pain disappear.

He drank again, longer this time, letting the fire scorch a path straight down to the returning monster trying to break free.