Epilogue - The Father of God (Reader x Soldier Boy)
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Final
Author’s note: Listen, I was fully going to add a touch of religious horror and anguish to the epilogue as well to stay on theme, but seeing as how the series ended, I think we all need a truly, truly happy ending, so. Here it is. I hope it soothes the sting.
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“Mom! Dad’s fighting Nixon again!”
You sighed and looked up from your book.
The porch of the farmhouse was bathed in golden light. Your eldest, Jack, was standing at the foot of the stairs and staring out at Soldier Boy, who had made a habit of wrestling with that damned bull almost every evening.
You suspected he liked it, because why… why would he keep picking the same fight?
“Ben, for god’s sake!” you yelled. “Leave the poor thing alone!”
“Poor thing?” he yelled back. “He’s broken another fence, like I have nothing better to do than pick up after him.”
Jack looked at you. “You pick up dad’s socks all the time.”
You nodded. “Yeah, and if I wrestled him, he’d lose.”
Jack frowned. “But dad has superpowers.”
“Yeah, what’s your point?”
“Go inside, wash up before dinner. Tell Leah to come out and get some sun before it dips.”
In the field, you watched Ben finish his fight (nobody ever wins these) and walk back, wiping his hands on a dirty towel and flinging it over his shoulder.
“That towel needs a wash,” you said.
He looked at it and considered your idea. Then shrugged and sat down beside you on the bench.
“What you reading?” he asked.
“Jesus, you can’t read a romance book or something once in a while?”
“I don’t have to, I live in one.”
All six-foot-one of him went red at that.
“Shut up,” he muttered, so murderous it made you laugh.
Leah, five years old and definitely the spitting image of her father, bounded out, ran down the steps, and looked directly at the sun.
“Eyes closed, angel!” you yelled.
“It’s a ball, it’s not very bright!”
You laughed and looked at Ben. “She’ll either spend the entire day in darkness or glare directly at the sun, there is no middle ground.”
“Takes after me,” he said proudly.
It took a few minutes for the sun to properly disappear. Ben stayed by you, hand on your knee, while Leah found an interesting butterfly to trouble before it got tired and flew away.
“Go wash up before dinner,” you told her.
“What’s for dinner?” she asked.
“Sweet potato and chicken.”
“Do we have enough?” she asked.
You frowned. “Enough? Of course we have enough.”
“Okay, because I think he wants to join…” she said, pointing to her left.
You followed her finger to the far end of the property.
A figure stood there… thin. Black t-shirt, faded blue jeans, hair a dull blonde.
Your heart stopped. He looked harmless enough, but something primal in you screamed at you to pick up your daughter and run.
“Get inside,” Ben told her. “Now.”
Leah knew that tone. She went in quickly and had the good sense to shut the door behind her.
“You, too,” he said to you.
“He’s powerless,” you argued. “And I want to come.”
“You can’t stop me,” you said, and… you were right. He couldn’t.
“Lead the way, Soldier,” you said lightly, as if this wasn’t the most terrifying thing to happen to you after eight years of peace.
He stepped off the porch first, his body moving into that old familiar shape you had not seen in years. Not the lazy farmer who fought bulls because he was bored. Not the man who grumbled when Leah put flowers in his hair and pretended not to notice when Jack copied the way he stood.
This was Soldier Boy, shoulders squared, jaw hard, every line of him sharpened by instinct.
The lights around the farm had started switching on one by one, triggered by motion or the coming dark. They cast long white beams over the fields, catching on fence posts and tall grass and the slow-moving dust kicked up by Ben’s boots. At the far end of the property, the man stood still beneath the harsh glow.
The shadows still tried to make him mean. They cut hollows beneath his cheekbones, sharpened the line of his mouth, and threw his eyes into darkness. But his body betrayed him. He was thinner than you remembered, human in a way that still startled you. His black T-shirt hung loose on him. His jeans were faded at the knees. His blond hair had dulled to something closer to straw. He looked like a man who had walked too far and thought about turning back the entire way.
Your heart, traitorous thing, went out to him.
Ben stopped several yards away.
“Get the fuck off my property.”
John lifted both hands immediately.
“I didn’t come for trouble.”
Ben laughed once, short and ugly. “No.”
The word changed the air. It didn’t sound whiny or pathetic, which is what you would have expected from him. It was just… tired.
Ben hated it. You could tell. His shoulders went even harder.
“There’s nothing for us to talk about,” he said. “This is my farm. That’s my house. Those are my kids. I don’t want them seeing you, knowing you, or asking me why some washed-up psycho from my past is standing by the fence like a fairy scarecrow.”
John’s mouth tightened, but he took it.
“I’m not here as Homelander.”
Ben’s expression twisted. “Don’t care.”
“I’m not,” John said. “I’m just here as John.”
That name sat strangely in the field. Small and cold and human.
“How did you get out?” you asked.
For a moment, the years fell away in the worst possible way. You remembered the tower. The glass. The worship. His hand hovering near your cheek. His eyes glowing red with heartbreak. The world ending in a conference room.
“Good behavior, if you can believe it.”
The joke was quiet enough to be sad.
You didn’t smile. “Only prisons let people out for good behavior. You were kept in Vought’s facility.”
He shrugged. “Maybe they wanted to see what I’d do with the freedom.” He looked down briefly, then back at you. “I’m still chipped.”
Ben’s jaw flexed. You studied John in the white farm lights and felt something settle in your chest that you had never expected to feel around him.
Not fear… not pity exactly. Maybe recognition.
It seemed he had spent the last eight years deprogramming himself of Vought’s language despite sitting in the belly of the beast. Left alone to reflect, maybe even repent, his mind entered corridors that were always locked to him when he was powerful. There was an air around him now that you never thought you would ascribe to Homelander.
A man who had finally discovered the world did not owe him worship and had somehow survived the insult.
“It’s cold,” you said. “Come inside.”
Ben turned on you like you had suggested inviting a wolf into bed. “Absolutely fucking not.”
You looked at him. He stared back. You kept looking.
“That thing where you look at me like I’m already losing.”
“I am not letting him in my house.”
You folded your arms. “It’s our house.”
John stood very still, like he knew better than to hope too loudly.
He looked toward the house, then back at John, then at you again with deep personal offense.
Fifteen minutes later, all of you were sitting at the dining table eating dinner in a silence so thick it could have held up the roof.
Luckily, there had been enough, just as Leah had asked.
The children behaved with the eerie perfection of small people who had realized, through pure survival instinct, that tonight was not the night to ask unnecessary questions. Jack kept glancing between Ben and John with poorly hidden fascination. Leah, seated beside you, swung her legs under the table and watched John with open curiosity until Ben cleared his throat once. She immediately dropped her gaze to her plate.
John barely ate at first.
He spent most of dinner looking around the house.
You watched him notice everything.
The coats hung by the door in an uneven row. Jack’s muddy boots abandoned on the mat despite being told twelve hundred times to put them on the rack. Leah’s drawings stuck to the fridge with fruit-shaped magnets: horses, suns, crooked stick figures of you and Ben and Jack, one alarming portrait of Nixon with flames coming out of his nose. Your polished country kitchen, because yes, you had left the city, but you had not left modern amenities behind. Brass fixtures. Good lighting. A wide sink. A coffee machine that Ben pretended was unnecessary but used every morning.
John looked at all of it like he had entered a museum of a life he had not known people were allowed to have.
Ben noticed too. Of course he did.
It only made him angrier.
Dinner finished without bloodshed, which you counted as divine intervention from no god in particular. You had made brownies earlier, and when you pulled them piping hot from the oven, Leah gasped as if you had produced treasure.
You spooned them into bowls with vanilla ice cream, the heat melting white rivers down the sides.
“Alright, kids,” you said, placing the bowls on the counter. “You can take these and watch TV. Don’t disturb Dad and his friend, alright?”
Jack and Leah did not argue because television and ice cream were on the table, and even children understood when heaven opened. They grabbed their bowls and scurried off toward the living room, Leah whispering something to Jack that made him whisper back, “Don’t ask that!”
You waited until the TV flicked on low in the other room.
Then you turned to the two men still sitting at your table.
Ben was glaring daggers at John. John sat rigidly upright, both hands around his bowl, ice cream slowly melting into brownie soup.
“Okay,” you said. “We’ve had food. We’ve got dessert. Anyone need a drink? Because I need a drink.”
You moved to the cabinet and took out the whiskey. You poured two glasses, one for you and one for Ben, then looked at John.
“Do you… still not drink?”
His face changed with such immediate horror that it almost broke you.
“Fucking—no. Nothing. Ice cream is fine.”
You tried to hide your smile as you sat down.
Ben did not bother hiding anything. “Why the fuck are you here?”
John looked into his bowl. Then up.
Ben’s mouth hardened. “I told you, I’m not interested in playing catch with you on the lawn.”
You tensed slightly. Jack was right across the hall. John’s eyes flicked toward the living room, then back to Ben.
John opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
You didn’t need eight years of behavioral analysis to see that he had no fucking clue. He had walked here—because he couldn’t fly and you knew for a fact he couldn’t drive—and somehow made his way across miles of road and field with no powers, no cape, no certainty, and apparently no plan beyond reaching the edge of your property and letting fate humiliate him.
You looked down at your whiskey.
A strange, absurd idea arrived.
“The east fence is broken,” you said.
Ben turned to you. “What?”
“The east fence. Nixon broke it, remember?”
Ben stared at you, unsure of where you were going with this.
“Anyway, there’s a coyote on the loose and I don’t want it entering our property while we’re asleep, so if you could both go take care of that, that would be great.”
Ben was no idiot. But Ben also knew that, practically, logically, you were right.
John straightened slightly. “I can help.”
Ben looked at him with open disbelief. “You ever held a screwdriver in your life?”
That answered the question.
Ben muttered something under his breath that would have gotten Jack grounded for a week, then stood.
“Fine. Come on, Junior Jesus.”
John winced but stood too.
You stayed at the table with your whiskey and your book, though you read the same paragraph seven times and retained none of it.
From the kitchen window, you could see them near the east fence under the farm lights. Ben moved with sharp, irritated efficiency, tool belt hanging low on his hips, sleeves pushed up. John stood beside him, holding a plank like a man presented with alien technology.
Even from inside, you could tell he was failing.
At one point, he tried to hand Ben a wrench when Ben clearly asked for a screwdriver. Ben stared at it. John stared back. Ben said something. John looked at the tool as if betrayed by its existence.
You pressed your lips together.
Then Ben demonstrated how to brace the plank, how to line the hinge, how to hold pressure without splintering the wood. He did it angrily, naturally. John watched with uncomfortable intensity.
He was trying to listen and learn. Earnestly.
Once, Ben physically moved John’s hands into place, rough and impatient, and John went very still.
You looked away before the tenderness of it broke something in you.
They came back in twenty-five minutes later, both tracking cold air and mud into your kitchen.
Ben was wiping his hands on a towel. John looked like he had performed labor for the first time in his life and expected applause or medical attention.
John looked down at his hands. There was dirt beneath his fingernails. He seemed fascinated by it.
Ben reached into the fridge for a beer, popped it open, took a long swig, then paused. He stared at the inside of the fridge for a second like he was personally offended by his own thought.
Then he took out a second beer.
He extended it toward John without looking at him.
John stared at the bottle.
Ben took another swig from his own.
“Jesus—” He coughed, staring at the bottle in betrayed horror. “Tastes like fucking liquid bread.”
Ben laughed. A full, rough burst of sound that filled the kitchen and startled even him.
John stared at him. And you saw it… he liked the sound of it. Being the reason for it. He laughed too and set the beer down on the table.
That’s when he finally looked at you properly, and the humor faded.
The kitchen went quiet. Ben stopped smiling immediately.
“I know that’s not… enough. I know. But I am. Sorry.”
You leaned back in your chair. For once, you did not reach for the perfect thing to say.
You just shrugged, lightly but not dismissively. “Water under the bridge.”
“No,” you admitted. “Not all of it.”
“It was awful,” he said. “What I did. What I wanted.” A brittle little laugh left him. “I had a long time to think about it, and it was kind of fucked up.”
Ben barked out a humorless laugh. “Kind of?”
You shot him a look. He ignored it badly.
John nodded. “Very. Very fucked up.”
You studied him for a long moment.
The man at your kitchen table was not the god who had once tried to turn you into a sacrament. He was not harmless either… you did not believe in harmless men anymore. But he was unarmed in a way you understood.
No powers. No myth. No crowd. No one to reflect him back larger than he was. Just John with dirt under his nails.
“Yeah,” you said. “It was.”
“But,” you continued, “I knew where it came from. So I never hated you for it.”
John looked at you. Something in his face cracked.
“You never hated him?” Ben asked at the exact same time, in an entirely different emotional register.
You looked at Ben first. “No.”
He stared at you like you had betrayed the entire farm.
Then you turned back to John. “You were a product of your environment. That doesn’t absolve you or erase the choices you made, but Vought was responsible for a lot of it.”
“Sure,” you said softly. “You made bad choices. Horrible ones. But you’re here now. You’re trying. That means they couldn’t condition you all the way, right?”
For one long moment, he could not speak. Your grace hit him like something physical. A lovely stab to the heart.
Finally, he looked down at the beer bottle sweating on your nice oakwood table.
You stood, because this was enough tenderness and revelation for one night.
“We have a guest room if—”
“Nope,” Ben said instantly.
You turned. “Ben, come on. We can’t send him all the way back—”
“He’ll stay in the barn. He can sleep with Nixon.”
“He cannot stay in the barn. It's freezing outside!” you said, already preparing your argument.
Ben had said he could stay.
Homelander… John… could stay here.
The realization hit you at the same time it hit John. He looked at Ben.
“Don’t get emotional. You haven’t seen the fucker yet. He’ll find another thing to piss me off about tomorrow, so I’m getting ahead of the—”
John moved. Three strides, then his arms were around Ben.
Ben went completely rigid.
“Get the fuck off me, you pussy.”
But he only pulled back halfway. If he had really wanted to get away, he could have. John hugged him tighter.
“Thank you,” he said, voice muffled against Ben’s shoulder.
Ben rolled his eyes, and it would have been comical if it weren’t also heartbreaking.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Don’t go calling me Dad in front of the kids.”
John nodded against his shoulder.
Ben looked at you over John’s head and mouthed, Get him away from me.
You mouthed back, Hug him back. Then you made a very firm wrapping motion with your arms.
Then, with the expression of a man being led to execution, he let his arms circle John too.
A full two seconds passed before a tiny sob broke out of John.
“Alright,” Ben said roughly, stepping back before the tender feeling could get ideas. “That’s enough.”
John wiped his face quickly, embarrassed.
Ben pointed toward the door. “Go to the barn. I’ll bring you a blanket so you don’t fucking freeze to death. You wake up at five tomorrow and help out. No useless men on my farm.”
Then, for reasons known only to him, he picked up his bowl of melted ice cream and brownie soup before heading outside.
You watched the door close behind him.
For a moment, neither of you spoke.
“Whatever,” he said softly.
You knew what this meant to him, even if he would rather wrestle Nixon naked in January than say it out loud. It had pained him to hurt his son. It had pained him more that he had not tried hard enough before. Sure, he wasn’t responsible for Homelander’s birth or his upbringing, but he still had a chance to do something when he found out and didn’t. Anger won out against effort.
But tonight, he had opened a door.
“Get the kids away from the damn TV,” he snapped, but the emotion in his voice got the better of him. “They have to wake up at five too. Leah is old enough to help with the rest of the fence.”
“The sooner she learns, the sooner she can kill any man who comes close to her.”
You crossed the kitchen and wrapped your arms around him. He grumbled, because of course he did, but his hands found your waist almost immediately. You planted a kiss on his cheek, right over the place where age and peace had softened him just enough to make him handsome in a way that no propaganda poster could ever have managed.
“You did good,” you said.
You smiled against his cheek.
From the living room, Leah shouted, “Mom! Jack is eating my ice cream!”
Jack yelled back, “She gave it to me!”
Ben closed his eyes. “I’ll fight the bull again.”
You laughed and pulled away, taking his hand as you went toward the living room.
Outside, the last of the light had vanished. The farm had settled into its nighttime noises: crickets, wind through grass, Nixon snorting somewhere in the dark like a demon with horns. In the barn, John would be discovering that redemption smelled faintly of hay, old wood, and livestock.
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Feel free to comment your theories on how life goes on after this, I'd love to hear your thoughts <3 <3
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