transgenderification beam

The visitors told John they wanted to test how his education was coming along. They were going to show him some pictures, and they wanted him to say the first adjective that came to mind. There were no right or wrong answers; they just wanted to see his associations.

Homelander remembered John's stomach twisting at that concept. Marketing visits brought a lot of new and interesting people down to the lab—but they also brought so many new tests, with so many rules he still had to map out. He had a whole book of those in his head, shared between him and the other boy who looked just like him, who sometimes talked to him when no one else would.

"Do you not want your juice box?" the man asked, leaning in. His breath stunk of some deadly disease they hadn't diagnosed him with yet.

John looked at his untouched juice box. He didn't know he was supposed to be doing something with it.

The man looked at the glass behind him. John knew from experience that the doctors were standing outside it.

"Can he have—?" The man awkwardly lifted the juice box toward the glass.

"Yes." Barbara's voice cut through the speakers mounted in the corner of the room. "You may have to open it for him."

"...Okay. Sure." The man seemed a bit confused by that.

John watched him unglue a straw from the side of the box that he hadn't noticed before. He stabbed the juice box with it and slid it toward him. John had wondered how he was supposed to drink the liquid inside, but that answered the question. He also added a new rule to the book: anything Marketing brings as a gift, use immediately.

He took a cautious sip. The juice was sweet. Many years later, Homelander would learn that the sweet flavor was apple.

"Let's start the exercise, okay?" The woman slid the first photo across the table. "Just say whichever adjective comes to mind."

John looked at it. It was an image of a soldier in green fatigues.

He tried. "Brave?"

The managers cooed something at him and scribbled something down, pleased. John blinked. He usually had to work much harder for doctors to give him the same reaction.

Next image, a man in a suit. He guessed he was smart. A woman in a pink dress. She was kind. The pictures kept coming. Some of them were of people he had just begun to learn about in his other lessons. Ronald Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt. Wise, heroic. Gorbachev was stupid, which made the visitors even happier.

As tests went, this one wasn't half bad. He just had to sit there and say words. John was debating internally whether he should even call it a test if it didn't hurt.

The woman slid the last image toward him.

"Do you know who that is?"

John leaned closer, the juice box straw still in the corner of his mouth.

"Ummm."

"John." Barbara's voice cut into the room. "We talked about filler sounds."

He looked down as if she were in the room with him.

"Sorry."

Stupid. Let his attention slip, forgot about the doctors outside. This was still a test.

"Try again, please."

Barbara clicked off the mic while the managers exchanged an awkward glance.

"I don't know who that is." He formed a proper sentence instead of a noise, and his breath shook only slightly.

"That's okay! You may have seen a different picture." The marketing man tapped the image. "That's Jesus Christ."

John glanced at the face on the table—now it seemed familiar. They'd only just begun going through the Bible during his lessons, but he remembered the name from other presentations his teachers had shown him.

He nodded cautiously.

"What's the first adjective that comes to mind?" the woman asked, giving him an encouraging smile.

"Umm—"

John's stomach twisted again. He made a noise instead of answering properly. Barbara didn't say anything, but that was even worse. That meant she was making a note of it, and enough notes at the end of the day meant that he would be sent to the Bad Room again. John quickly leaned in closer to the picture, studying it with wide-open eyes, rushing to offer an actual answer.

Jesus Christ stared at him with kind, understanding eyes. He had long, flowing hair and a face that didn't look like a man's face to him, despite the beard. He seemed both young and old, and there was a halo of light behind his head. His skin was smooth, his lashes long. He wore a flowing dress.

He had to say something. John had to say something. He didn't know what to say. But he had to say something. Maybe he should just compare it to other pictures he had seen. But maybe there was a rule about not repeating words.

"Pretty?" he forced out.

Nobody said anything for the longest time. The marketing people blinked at him, clearly stunned. The man very slowly clicked his pen and wrote something down on his clipboard. John immediately understood he had said something wrong. And now he knew for sure he was going to be sent to the Bad Room again.

The juice box in his hand exploded as he accidentally squeezed it too hard.

"Oh, sh—" The marketing man scrambled away from the splash of sweet juice, getting up with a grinding noise from his chair. The marketing woman was not far behind him, pure concern on her face.

John glanced at the twisted-up box in his hand, and he felt like crying because he had broken something again. His lungs started to fill with stuttering breaths.

"John." Barbara's voice crackled from the speaker again. "Please stand in the corner while our guests leave."

His bare feet padded across the floor as he scampered to the usual spot he had to take whenever someone went in or out of any room he was in. Eyes on the wall, hands by his sides. He was still clutching the crushed juice box, the sticky liquid dripping down his trembling fist.

The marketing visitors didn't say goodbye. They just gathered their belongings and ran out. Nobody told John to leave the corner, so he remained where he was, trying not to cry.

The doctors didn't know it back then, but he could already hear through the walls at that age. Hear and see—he tried to keep it a secret for as long as he could, but they found out eventually. But that day, they had no idea he could hear them discuss the fact that he had just called Jesus pretty.

"Well, that doesn't have to mean anything," one doctor said. He was too new in the rotating cast of doctors for John to know his name.

"To be fair, we are raising him in an environment dominated by distant female caregivers," another doctor pointed out matter-of-factly. "From what I remember from my few psych classes, that is pretty much a recipe for developing homosexuality in young boys."

"I'll thank you not to bring up psychoanalytic nonsense in my lab, Anjali," Barbara replied almost immediately. She didn't sound pleased with the comment. Or with John, for that matter.

"You know Vought is going to have our heads if he does turn out to be—you know."

"You're both jumping to conclusions. I'm more inclined to blame his limited vocabulary instead. He is below the benchmark for his age," Barbara intoned with a little exhausted sigh. "But since Marketing is going to blow it out of proportion anyway, we can take some precautions."

"Such as—?"

"He's starting combat training next week. We'll remove all female Supes from the roster. Keep only men. Let him form an association between physical violence and male individuals. And let's limit exposure to male nurses and doctors to weaken the already existing caretaker association."

"Hey, I need these extra hours here, Barbara. We're still renovating the house."

"Oh, please, Adrien."

"Vogelbaum won't like that."

"Vogelbaum should be distancing himself from this project anyway. And you can repeat that to him, I don't care. I've already told him as much."

John listened to all of that, and he didn't know what to make of it. But a week later, they let in the first Supe ever to fight him. Well, maybe not fight, because he didn't know he was allowed to hit back during that first encounter. But he remembered that the reason the man in a prison outfit was punching him until his brain rattled in his skull was that he had called Jesus pretty during a test. So he added a new rule to the book of rules: never call anyone pretty, especially men. Just in case, don't talk about men ever.

What John learned, Homelander retained. When they let him out of the lab and into the limelight, he later understood what those marketing managers were so afraid of. Once he learned about the concept of men being attracted to men, and how the world at large spoke about them, he finally understood why one adjective had made the whole lab panic.