writinge updates :3

Homelander stared at the ceiling. His thoughts were getting more and more agitated. There was no way he was going to fall asleep any time soon.

He glanced at the corridor outside, his x-ray vision cutting through the wall. Still no Maeve.

He decided to be petty, and that was how he first encountered Lander Home.

It wasn't even the first time he had pulled out Maeve's clunky laptop from underneath her pillow to watch porn. He'd done that a lot before—mainly because he had no way of getting a SupePorn subscription. No credit card to link. But Maeve had them all; she collected porn bookmarks like they were her only passion in life. SupePorn, CapeChasers, V-orgy, PowerPlay, all of them. Homelander suddenly missed the way she got giddy when she realized he had never seen a porn movie before.

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and another scene i removed bc i didnt want another verb-heavy segment was a scene of HL bringing Lander Home to madelyn. and i cut it out also bc i thought that ... u know what, madelyns party apperance will mean more if theres a minimal amount of her in the chapter beforehand. i literally wanted her appearance to feel like . u know , angelic choir playing in hl's head GHFIGHG

That night was when Lander Home ruined everything for him. Maeve too, really. But he didn't want to kill Maeve. He did want to kill Lander Home, though. So the very next day, he went straight to Madelyn's office.

He remembered bringing up the SupePorn to her—but strategically omitting who exactly set him off on this crusade.

"We need to take that entire website down," he hissed.

He got so worked up that she had to coax him to the couch with her in two separate attempts. He got like this, though rarely with her. He knew she didn't like him stomping around her office. Homelander managed to ignore her patting the cushion next to her thighs once. With effort. The second time, he didn't. He heard the drag of the fabric against her soft palm, and immediately, he was there, letting her anchor him down.

"Oh, honey. I'm sorry, but we can't do that." She told him, so patiently. "That would only make matters worse. Are you aware of the Streisand effect?"

Homelander clenched his jaw. He didn't like it when Madelyn dropped all those scientific terms and expected him to follow. They didn't teach them those things in the lab; they taught him about the Declaration of Independence and how to smile. He slowly shook his head as much as he could while it remained pressed against her thighs.

She wasn't surprised that he didn't know the answer. Madelyn was never surprised.

"Well, the more you try to cover something up, the more public it becomes. Sometimes you have to let those things be, okay?" She cooed at him, petting his hair.

Madelyn knows better, he reminded himself. She's the reason everyone loves me now.

Someone always knew better than him. Vogelbaum, Barbara, Madelyn. They all knew better, and he had to listen.

He sometimes wondered how it was possible that everyone always knew better than him. But they did so, he had to listen.

He nodded, staring blankly at the legs of her desk.

Lander Home would get to live another day. And another, and another.

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and FINALLY something with butcher. lmfao. i had a bit of trouble sticking the landing in this chapter, i went thru multiple final thoughts... i decided to cut out a lot of them bc im trying to be less controling of the readers conclusions. for example, i was going to explain why HL freaked out at the end of ch7... but then again, i have given YOU! the reader! all the tools to put it together if u should so desire!!!!! butcher using the word scandal very specifically tapped into something in HL's brain!!!! he freaked out bc he broke his promise to madelyn to Not Have Sex With Men Because Of The Optics. so i removed this bit bc i have a bad habit of hand-holding the reader sometimes and u guys are smart. i know you are!!!! so many of u already picked up on HL's comment about butcher having a beard like jesus!!!!

Maybe it was a fluke, that one time Butcher managed to knock on that specific door in his head. He got lucky. And Homelander had no idea how.

When he first got him hard and pressed their cocks together—Homelander thought he was going to die. Then he thought about how Madelyn was going to be disappointed in him, his brain scrambling to fix this, trying to think of a way to apologize to her. He flew back to the Tower in pure panic until he remembered she was dead and he was the one who killed her.

His breathing shifted. He took himself in his hand.

Yes, Madelyn was dead. Who knew where Lander Home or Certain Actor were today.

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.