#autistic coded

April Fools! But not really!

Then he’s in front of her, gloved fingers tilting her chin with a practiced gentleness that feels less like affection the longer it lingers. “You look good like this, Annie. Heavy. Foggy. Exactly how I like you.”

Annie’s head felt too heavy, the world tilting in slow increments. When she tried to lift her gaze to meet his, the motion lagged, her neck loose and reluctant. She managed a neutral reply, something simple and safe, the words dragging sluggishly from her tongue.

He tilts his head, studying her with that performative attentiveness that never actually listens. His super-senses catalog everything: the slight hitch in her pulse, the way her breathing catches, the micro-twitch of dissociation behind her eyes. It looks like care. It isn’t.

“You don’t have to do that,” he murmurs, still gentle, still composed.

“Do… what?”

“Act like it didn’t happen.” The tone stays soft, almost sympathetic, as if he’s offering her an easier path. “I could hear it, Annie. You think I wouldn’t know?”

There is no real question in his voice. Only conclusion.

She reaches for something linear, something that can be followed step by step, because that is how she understands the world when it is not being bent out of shape in front of her.

“It didn’t happen the way you think it did,” she says, and even to her own ears the sentence sounds insufficient because it is too large and she’s trying to compress a chain of small, ordinary decisions into something defensible all at once. She thinks about how to explain the timeline, the context, the delayed processing. But she’s already done this before — was it yesterday? The day before? She's explained it so many times. And he seemed to understand.

She forces herself to slow down, to break it apart, because maybe if she can explain it just so, he’ll understand. But her mind is slow and her head is heavy and she's repeating herself into friction. “There were multiple conversations open. I send things quickly, sometimes without checking which thread I’m in. You know that. I was drunk… drugged… but I only meant to send them to you. I deleted it but not before he could reply. It was meant for you and I did send it to you… but you still won’t believe me.”

Her hands move slightly as she speaks like she’s holding onto the tension of the instability.

He does not interrupt. That is almost worse.

“And the messages you’re pointing to,” she continues, pushing through the drag in her thoughts, “the tone wasn’t what you think. He talked constantly, most of it is noise, reactions, fragments. I muted him half the time. I froze. When something crossed into that territory, I either didn’t read it fully or I ignored it because I thought it would pass.” She pauses, searching for the exact phrasing that will not be reinterpreted on contact. “Ignoring isn’t the same as agreeing. It’s… delay. I don’t process like you do. You already know this…” And she's not sure if her words or slurring, if he's listening, or if he even cares.

There is a small shift in his expression at that, something almost like amusement, as if she has just confirmed a detail rather than clarified it.

“And when I did understand,” she adds, more firmly now, “When you helped me understand… I cut it off. Immediately. Blocked, reported, everything. That part matters. The timeline matters. You’re collapsing it into one continuous thing when it wasn’t experienced that way.”

He tilts his head slightly, studying her with that precise, unsettling focus, as if each sentence is being stripped down to its most incriminating interpretation before it even fully lands.

“You keep saying ‘I didn’t process,’” he says quietly, almost kindly, as if helping her refine her own argument. “But things still happened. You betrayed me, Annie. And you did it again today. You think I didn't hear that? Should we look at the cameras together to see my little whore being a slut today?”

She exhales, a small, controlled release, because this is the point where the frameworks diverge completely. “No,” she says, “things can happen before I… process… assign meaning to them. Exposure and recognition… there’s a lag. And during that lag, I respond in default ways. Neutral. Polite. Sometimes I freeze. Sometimes I redirect. That doesn’t mean I’m endorsing what’s happening… it means I'm still processing… especially when it’s traumatic.”

He watches her like she's just described a flaw in machinery.

“Stop. Stop with that. He didn’t sexually assault you. You’re not a victim. You liked it. You initiated and escalated. You did all of it and you won’t take responsibility and it’s pissing me off.”

He moves toward her and she backs away.

“No. Don’t do that. Don’t pretend like you’re scared of me. As if I’m the bad guy.”

She doesn’t know how to turn it off, the over-explaining, the need to help him understand… if she just words things right.

That’s the dangerous part. Not the anger, not the grip on her chin, not even the certainty in his voice, but the illusion of processing — the brief, suspended quiet where it seems like something might shift if she just finds the right configuration of words.

It doesn’t.

Because her thoughts are not lining up cleanly anymore. The edges blur before she can hold onto them long enough to assemble anything precise. She can feel it happening, that slow, viscous drag in her head where language becomes heavier than it should be, where cause and sequence slip just out of reach as she tries to stabilize them.

“I’m not—” she starts, then stops, because the sentence fractures halfway through. She recalibrates, tries again, smaller this time, more contained. “You’re… combining things. This isn’t… right.” She can’t place why with her mind full of fog and smoke and thick air. She only knows what she did and didn’t do and that Homelander doesn’t believe her, won’t believe her, and she’ll pay for this.

He reaches his hand out and she flinches. His thumb presses more firmly against her jaw, not enough to hurt, just enough to hold her attention exactly where he wants it.

“That’s what you keep doing,” he says softly, almost gently. “Breaking it into pieces so it doesn’t look like what it is.”

The room tilts slightly, or maybe it’s just her mind slipping again, the medication pulling her further from the center of herself. She tries to anchor on something concrete, the cold seam of the couch beneath her palm, the steady rhythm of her own breathing, anything that doesn’t depend on interpretation.

“I’m not… breaking it,” she says, slower now, words spaced out so they don’t collapse into each other. “I didn’t do anything wrong.” Her slow mind is jumping over hurdles in her haze and she knows nothing will change his mind. “I did everything you asked, showed you everything… He— I didn't ask for that. I didn't consent."

There is a pause, and for a fraction of a second, something in his expression flickers, not doubt, not quite, but irritation at the structure of her answer, the way it refuses to conform cleanly.

Then it smooths over.

He exhales, long and controlled, like he’s the one exercising restraint.

“You hear how that sounds?” he murmurs, almost kindly. “Like you’re trying to outthink it. Like if you make it complicated enough, it stops being simple.”

Simple.

It didn’t feel simple while it was happening. Her thoughts try to reorganize around it and fail.

“I’m not trying to make it complicated,” she says, and there’s a pause before the sentence completes, like her brain has to catch up to her own voice. “I’m trying to make it accurate.”

His smile shifts, just slightly.

“That’s the same thing, Annie.”

And there it is again. His quiet inversion where precision becomes distortion, where clarity is reframed as manipulation.

Her hands move, not deliberately, just a small, instinctive motion, fingers pressing lightly into her own arms as if to confirm she’s still there. The dissociation is thicker now, more pervasive, a soft diffusion at the edges of everything.

She can still track what’s happening. She just can’t keep hold of it long enough to change its direction.

“I didn’t—” she starts again, and this time the words come slower, heavier, each one placed with effort. “I don't know what you want me to say.”

That should be a neutral statement. It isn’t.

His expression softens immediately, almost relieved, like she’s finally said something that fits.

“Exactly,” he says.

The agreement feels wrong before she can even process why.

“Exactly,” he repeats, quieter now. “You don't know what to say because you know what you did.”

The logic folds in on itself, clean and self-sealing. Her perspective becomes a limitation rather than data. Her lack of recognition becomes further proof of what she failed to recognize.

She goes still.

Not deliberately, not as a strategy. Annie tries not to move but sometimes she has to check if she’s still there. It’s easier to remain where she is, to conserve what little clarity she has left instead of spending it on a response that will be absorbed and restructured anyway.

He watches that stillness, and something in him settles.

There’s no satisfaction in it, not exactly. More like confirmation. Alignment between what he decided and what he’s now observing.

“That’s better,” he says softly, as if she’s finally stopped resisting something inevitable. His hand drops from her chin, the pressure gone as quickly as it arrived. “You don’t have to fight me on this.”

Fight.

The word echoes faintly, detached from any real sense of conflict. It doesn’t feel like fighting. It hasn’t, at any point. It feels like trying to map something in real time while the terrain keeps shifting underneath her.

But even that thought slips before she can hold onto it.

He steps back, giving her space in a way that reads as generosity, as if he’s de-escalating something she created. The distance between them doesn’t relieve anything. It just makes the room feel larger in a way that emphasizes how little control she has over it.

“I just needed you to be honest,” he continues, voice quiet, almost tired now. “That’s all I ever wanted.”

Honest.

Another word that no longer has a stable definition in the room.

She doesn’t respond.

Anything she says will be used.

Anything she doesn’t say will be filled in.

He needed to know. So he decided he knew.

She stays where she is, on the floor now without fully remembering how she got there, arms drawn in slightly, not defensive so much as containing, like she’s holding the remaining pieces of herself in place.

Across the room, he watches her for a moment longer.

Then he exhales, a faint, almost dismissive sound, and looks away first.

Where she is quiet because there is nowhere left for her words to go, he is quiet because the conversation, in his mind, is finished.

And for the first time since he walked in, he looks bored.

“The way you’re framing this,” he says softly, as if that settles everything, as if perception alone is proof. “The hesitation. It was against your will? He apologized? You know what you did to me. You ruined me.”

Each clarification is always absorbed, then rotated, then fitted back into the same outline he walked in with.

“I’m telling you what happened from my side" she says, quieter now.

His gaze softens in a way that reads as empathy from a distance.

“That’s what I mean,” he replies.

And there it is, the closed loop completing itself without friction. Her explanation does not collide with his conclusion; it feeds it, becomes further evidence that she is shaping reality rather than reporting it. The more detail she provides, the more material there is to reinterpret. The less detail, the more he infers to his narrative.

She can feel, with a kind of detached clarity, that there is no version of this conversation where the structure changes. Explanation was never the variable being tested. The outcome was determined before she opened her mouth, and everything since has been measured against that fixed point.

Nothing she says alters the shape he arrived with.

He exhales slowly, almost tenderly, as though he’s the one carrying something difficult. “You don’t have to pretend with me. That’s what this is, right? You thinking if you explain it just right, it’ll change what it was. You’re trying to manipulate me and you know it.”

The room feels larger with every word. Explanation itself has become proof of guilt.

When she pushes back, his smile thins. “Right,” he says, soft and final. “We could have had it all and you destroyed it for… him.” The taste feels disgusting in his mouth. "Not a misunderstanding… lied to me multiple times… continued participating in something that disrespects me and then framed it as "non consensual, overwhelming" and yet, continued it? Listen to yourself. You are who you hang with, Starlight. Fucking degenerates. It makes me sick."

In a second, his gloved hand tightens on her chin, not enough to bruise but enough to remind her how easily he could. The wounded tone fractures into something uglier. He grabs her thighs with both hands and spreads them forcefully, super-strength making the motion casual and impossible to resist. His grip is angry, impatient, the way it gets when the mask slips. “You pretending to not understand, to deny still, the fucking audacity to lie to me like this… to play the victim.”

Annie is frozen, nonverbal, and it only enrages him more. He doesn’t wait for sober consent. He never does because consent is implied.

He pushes her down with that terrifying gentleness, fist tightening in her golden hair as he guides her to her knees. The marble is cold against her skin, but his body heat radiates through the suit. He feeds himself into her mouth slowly, deliberately, savoring the way the medication makes her loose and slow. “That’s it,” he murmurs, voice dropping back into that fake-intimate register, the one that pretends at depth while his eyes stay cold and calculating. “Look at you, Starlight. So good for me. So warm and stimulating. This is what I need from you—every day, just like you promised. Only I get this. Only I get to see you loose and obedient and mine.”

His super-senses drink in everything: every choked sound, every reluctant twitch of her tongue, the exact rhythm of her breathing as dissociation creeps deeper. He rocks his hips with controlled thrusts, narrating the whole time like it’s romance instead of possession. “Deeper… that’s my good girl. You feel so much better when you stop thinking. When you’re heavy and compliant and can’t slip away from me.” The cape brushes her cheek with every movement, a constant reminder of the power imbalance. Vought cameras in the ceiling record it all, but he doesn’t need them now—he’s memorizing it himself, super-hearing tuned to the smallest hitch in her throat. He’ll view them later.

“You broke me so many times I just can’t anymore. I wanted us to have a healthy thing. I thought we could be so happy. So happy… I wanted to give you the world.”

He builds it slowly, deliberately, drawing it out because he can. One hand stays fisted in her hair, the other strokes her cheek with mock tenderness while he fucks her mouth deeper, chasing the validation he craves. “You were supposed to be my real thing,” he breathes, voice cracking between lust and accusation. “The one person who wouldn’t make me doubt.”

When he finally finishes—thick and hot down her throat—he holds her there a moment longer than necessary, savoring the way she stays compliant and heavy beneath him. Only then does he pull back, breathing hard, and adjust his suit like the last fifteen minutes were nothing grotesque at all. Quiet tears gather in Annie’s face but she doesn’t say anything, she can’t. She’s still processing. Hot, wet tears on her frozen face and she wishes she could process faster, could collect the pieces enough to understand and leave. But she can’t leave him – she never could.

He steps away, wiping his mouth with the back of his glove as if the entire act had been mutual. It was to him anyway and he shapes their reality.

The tablet is already in his hand, timestamps and audio fragments glowing on screen. Nothing conclusive or definitive. Just enough for the story he arrived with.

His voice shifts again—soft, heartbroken, wounded. “You sent those to someone else. Minutes apart. While I was gone risking everything for us. I offered you a home, the sea, warmth your own family never gave you… and this is how you repay me?”

The spiral pours out, raw and familiar. “You were my dream. The one real, dynamic thing in this fake fucking world. I tried so hard to understand you. Was that you trying? Was that you trying when you hesitated? When you made me doubt? When you fucking betrayed me? I wanted to give you everything, and somehow it’s always ‘we’ or ‘us’ when you apologize for things that aren’t even your fault. But never me apologizing, right? The way you twist things.”

He ignores the way he’d just used strength and foreign commands to push past every boundary. Ignores that he wanted her impaired because sober-her kept saying no. No real empathy. Just his own victimhood painted in warm, pseudo-intellectual tones.

She tries one more time to explain, voice still thick from the medication and the act.

He cuts her off with a soft, pitying laugh that doesn’t reach his eyes.

“But I needed to know the truth,” he says, tapping the tablet once, decisive. The red glow flickers behind his irises for a heartbeat. “I know it and you know it. Don’t fucking deny it. Maybe I could have forgiven you if you had just admitted it but you manipulated and lied… so many times.”

The rage drains away for half a second — then surges back hotter.

Homelander stands abruptly, cape flaring. In one violent motion he grabs the front of her supe costume with both hands and rips it straight down the center. The reinforced fabric tears like paper under his super-strength, exposing her completely. He yanks the shredded remains off her shoulders and throws them across the room like waste.

“You don’t deserve to wear that,” he snarls, voice low and venomous. “Starlight? What a fucking joke. You’re not a hero. You’re just a stupid, worthless slut who spreads her legs for anyone who gives you attention. Hanging around degenerates, letting them talk to you, sending them pieces of yourself that belong to me.” He grabs her by the hair again, forcing her head back so she has to look up at him from the floor. His boot comes down on her shoulder, pinning her there—not crushing, but pressing hard enough that the pressure radiates through her medicated, heavy body. “Look at you. On the floor where you belong. Pathetic. Weak. I gave you everything and you still chose to betray me. I should laser that pretty face right off for what you did.”

For a moment the red glow in his eyes brightens dangerously, the heat building just enough for her to feel it prickling across her skin until she smells burning flesh. Her burning flesh. Then he laughs—short, cruel, dismissive—and steps back.

Starlight stays curled on the cold marble where she is, arms wrapped tight around her bare chest, the torn costume lying in a ruined heap several feet away. The dissociation is total now; her eyes are open but unfocused, body rocking almost imperceptibly in the heavy fog of medication and pain. Every slow thought is delayed, struggling to connect. She hugs herself tighter, trying to disappear inside the armor that no longer works.

The rage drains away as quickly as it arrived. He sinks onto the couch across from her, staring like she had shattered him. The cape pools around him like spilled blood. “Sometimes love isn’t enough,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “I just wish we could do well for once… why do you always do this to me? You’re a bad person, Annie.”

Homelander watches her for a long moment, then scoffs—a short, disgusted sound that cuts through the silence. He leans back on the couch, legs spread casually, cape draped over the armrest, the picture of relaxed satisfaction while she lies broken and exposed on the floor in front of him.

The contrast is absolute.

He is already moving on.