The first time you got invited to a real important party, one of those places where nobody went to have a good time but to be seen having a good time, you already knew you were going to end up dragging home a moral hangover that would last two days. That night, though, you cared even less than usual.

You’d arrived late on purpose. Not for glamour or that kind of strategy people with even a shred of self-respect called “making an entrance.” You came late because you didn’t want to go in. Because if you turned back before crossing the threshold, you could still pretend you had some kind of control over your own life. The doorman looked you up and down, hesitated an extra beat when he saw the black tracksuit, the worn-out sneakers, and that face like you’d already fought the world before breakfast, and then let you in with a smile that was far too polished to be sincere.

Inside it smelled like expensive perfume, freshly poured drinks and that faint sweat people leave behind when they know they’re being watched. There were flashes in one corner, phone cameras in another, reporters with hungry eyes, executives with perfect teeth, and filler supes smiling like an entire PR department was yanking the corners of their mouths from behind their necks. It was a new-media party, one of those celebrations where Vought pretended not to care and therefore cared about everything.

Most of the heads in the room were deeply unbearable to you. Though really, most people in general seemed like assholes to you, so you weren’t exactly a reliable judge of what was pleasant and what wasn’t.

You ordered a drink the second you walked in. White wine. Cold. Too cold. You didn’t care. You knocked it back like it was water and felt the alcohol hit your stomach with the relief of someone who wasn’t looking for happiness, just a slight warping of the edge of reality. In your other hand, your phone. Your thumb sliding across the screen without really looking at anything. Scrolling. Again and again. A sterile gesture, no more alive than breathing in a sealed room. If you dissociated enough, maybe you could forget you were trapped in a room full of pricks. Dissociation and getting drunk. In fact, the only reason you’d agreed to come was the promise of free food and drink. Mostly drink.

Around you, people recognized you.

At first cautiously. Then with more nerve.

A few came over with that carefully trained media sparkle in their eyes, probably convinced you were some interesting eccentricity, a rare specimen from the post-Homelander media ecosystem. The sort of creature that could make headlines. They asked about the resistance of the anti-Vought supes, about Vought’s condition, about the political climate, about whether you really believed the company had changed or whether it was all makeup and dried blood. You answered with the same expression you’d use to reply to spam email. And people loved it. 

That was the problem. One of many.

People always seemed to think your hostility was some kind of art performance. They mistook your irritation for wit, your apathy for mystery, your bluntness for calculated provocation. Interviewers laughed nervously when you insulted them. Audiences clipped your worst lines and posted them online calling you iconic. Men invited you onto podcasts hoping you’d publicly tear them apart, because humiliation got clicks. Women said you were refreshing because you’d stopped giving a shit about being likable years ago.

Nobody understood that you genuinely disliked interacting with most human beings.

You weren’t cultivating a persona. You were just a fucking asshole with a microphone and internet access.

One journalist came up to you, and luckily you had alcohol on hand, though you would’ve loved to shove a goddamn anxiolytic up your ass and see if that took the edge off your universal disgust.

“Do you think the rise of anti-corporate sentiment among younger generations represents a real social shift after everything that happened with Homelander?”

The interviewer had the brittle smile of a man who probably moisturized his face more than he slept. You looked at him over the rim of your wine glass.

“No,” you said, flat as a blade. “I think people are fucked and depressed and they’re just now realizing billionaires make it even harder to get antidepressants.”

A tight laugh slipped out of him; the camera guy snorted under his breath.

The interviewer tried to recover.

“Sure, but surely—”

“Also,” you went on, “your network takes money from pharma and military contractors, so honestly I don’t see the fucking joke.”

This time the laughter around you was louder.

Someone nearby whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

You drank more wine.

That became the rhythm of the night. Someone came over with carefully media-trained enthusiasm, asked a question designed to go viral, and you answered with the conversational warmth of a knife fight. And people loved it. There was the grotesque irony: the less socially acceptable you became, the more fascinating they found you. It was like modern media had developed a fetish for women who looked like they were always five minutes away from telling someone to go fuck themselves live on air.

You figured that was your niche now: a deeply depressed woman with nicotine addiction and political rage turned into entertainment because she’d gone viral off some shitty homemade podcast.

At some point during your third glass of wine —or fifth, maybe— you’d stopped counting around the time some podcaster compared you to “a postmodern punk philosopher” and you nearly laughed wine out your nose—the mood in the room shifted.

“Vought hasn’t changed. They’re like those clothing conglomerates that print Stop Racism T-shirts in factories in Bangladesh. Pure marketing shoved up your ass.”

“The new supes? Yeah, sure. They’re adorable. Like trained dogs that sit when you kick them. I wonder if they’ll fetch the ball too when you throw it.”

“Do I believe in corporate redemption? I don’t know, man, would you have let fucking Ted Bundy back on the loose?”

People laughed.

That was the worst part.

They laughed because they thought you were doing a role. Because nobody wanted to accept that, for reasons you didn’t fully understand yourself, the poison came out of you naturally. That there wasn’t irony in your answers, or not all the irony they imagined. That you were like this even when there weren’t cameras. That cynicism wasn’t a pose, but a miserable way of staying upright.

A reporter with her hair pulled back in a ponytail so tight it looked painful told you your presence was “very refreshing.” You took a sip from your glass and nodded as if you cared. Then you walked off without saying goodbye.

After all, you’d survived worse than a party.

You’d survived Homelander.

Or, more exactly, the way Homelander had warped the whole country into a panic clinic. During his reign of terror you’d become another name on a list of inconvenient people. They’d tracked you online like so many others, and like so many others they’d tried to shove you into their fucking Fourth Reich camps for posting a few shitty memes about the narcissistic crybaby. Thankfully, during your run for it before they locked you away, Marie Moreau and the others helped you, and you spent some time with them in Canada while you waited for the storm to pass.

And when it finally did, you decided you were never going to shut up again.

You started a channel. Then a podcast. Then another channel, because the first one got too small. You talked about Vought, about economics, about the machinery of spectacle, about politics, about the people smiling on TV while signing eviction orders with one hand and groping the glass with the other. You had a way of saying things that didn’t seem designed to be liked; that was exactly why people liked it. Nobody quite knew what to do with you. Too rough to turn into a mascot, too visible to erase, too tired for them to sell you as an inspirational product.

An enfant terrible, they called you.

You preferred not to think about the part where the label sounded like praise.

Moreau had contacted you when the noise around all that became useful for a concrete cause, after they’d called you for the first live national broadcast and you’d called them all frauds for standing around talking bullshit while Vought announced the arrival of a new batch of supes destined to become the company’s makeover campaign. She told you about a network, about resistance, about supes who weren’t swallowing the rebrand, about people willing to drag the muck still hiding under the spotlights out into the open. You listened in silence, one hand wrapped around your glass and the other planted on the edge of the table, and in the end you said yes not because you were especially interested but because, for once, it seemed more entertaining than staying a selfish bitch with no agenda. You’d still be an asshole, but at least it would mean something.

What you used to do out of boredom became a weapon. And that, in a way, depressed you more than anything else, because it worked. Because every sentence you said hit, bounced, caught fire. Because even your rage had found a market.

Someone else tried to steer you toward something gentler, some shit about optimism, civic engagement, and “hopes for the next generation,” and you nearly told them to swallow the microphone. Instead, you gave them a smile so dry it could’ve started a fire and said:

“My hope for the next generation is that they develop enough self-respect to stop asking me idiot-ass questions.”

By then a small crowd had formed around you, half fascinated, half horrified.

Then the room changed.

Not dramatically. Not at first. But with that subtle electric rearranging of attention that announces the arrival of a predator, or a celebrity, or both at once.

You felt it before you saw it, the way you always did when a room started reorienting itself around power. Conversations thinned out. Several heads turned. A few phones lifted. An invisible current moved through the crowd with the delicacy of a knife sliding from its sheath.

And then, entering like he’d been built solely to be looked at, Stan Edgar appeared.

You recognized him instantly. He moved with the quiet precision of a man who never wasted a gesture because he’d long ago understood that stillness could be a language all on its own. The suit was immaculate. The expression, neutral. The eyes, alert in that way of someone who’d spent too much time around monsters to be impressed by them. Around him paraded several supes in suits that managed to look ridiculous and expensive at the same time, like a corporate version of mythology designed by committee and financed by fear.

And then, with all the theatrical weight of a carefully delayed reveal, the main attraction arrived.

Soldier Boy.

You knew enough of the propaganda version to feel irritated before you even saw him in person. Vought had sold the story like it had been carved into patriotic stone: Soldier Boy, betrayed and buried, had tried to stop Homelander, and Homelander, monstrous and ungrateful, had locked him away again. Soldier Boy, the great American image, returning to defend justice and freedom once more.

You’d been told a very different story. One you’d heard from Marie, who knew because of things Starlight had told her. Enough truth, in fact, to make you sick before he’d crossed half the room. The reality was much older and uglier: a racist, misogynist bastard with the moral depth of a puddle and the historical hygiene of a war crime. A man who’d handed power to Homelander for reasons nobody quite understood —maybe because he was his son— and who was also a total fucking asshole. Honestly, when you heard it, you weren’t surprised in the least. You’d never expected anything good from Vought.

And there he was. Not long after being thawed out, restored like a rusted weapon polished up for one last campaign. The cameras found him immediately. So did the crowd. He moved through them with the pleased swagger of a man fully aware of how much of his own legend was being rewritten in real time. A woman hung off his arm, all shine, status, and the kind of beauty designed to reassure a room that the beast could still be socially domesticated.

The first thing that hit you wasn’t his face.

It was the atmosphere.

Everything around him gave off a kind of exhausted virility, a performance so aggressive it seemed to crack under the weight of its own effort. He looked like a man who’d spent a century being sold as the answer to other men’s insecurities and had never once considered that maybe he was the symptom. Fragile masculinity wrapped in an expensive suit like some goddamn clown. An ego with war medals pinned to it. A dead-fashioned virility desperately trying not to smell like the past.

You felt a wave of boredom so deep it almost resembled pity.

Almost.

For a second you didn’t even register him as attractive. His whole concept repelled you too much for that. The mere idea of him already made your skin crawl. So you did what you always did when somebody killed your patience in public: you went after more wine, more food, and treated the entire event like a waiting room.

A while later, when the room became unbearably loud and your tolerance for human interaction started fraying, you escaped to the balcony with a cigarette and your phone in hand. The cold air seemed several orders of magnitude cleaner than the party. Behind you, the glass doors glowed with warm, carefully manufactured noise. In front of you, the city stretched out in hard geometry and indifferent lights.

The balcony was empty, as if the air outside had something contagious the fancy people preferred to avoid. You shoved the glass door open with your shoulder and stepped out into the warm night, into the city glittering below with its rows of windows and neon, its breathing made of engines and ads and distant sirens.

You lit a cigarette with steady hands, even though inside everything in you was dragging toward a softer, less useful place. The first drag scraped your throat and reconciled you with still being there. You leaned against the wall in a corner, crouched slightly, and looked down at your phone again, staring at fucking TikTok reels without thinking about anything while you took a clonazepam and washed it down with wine. You’d never understood why people bothered with illegal drugs when the legal ones were better and, on top of that, you couldn’t even get arrested for using them.

The party was still behind you, muffled by the glass, a murmur of steel and crystal and laughter with an expiration date.

Then you heard the door open again.

You didn’t lift your head, truth was you had no interest in having to deal with anybody and you knew it was best not to make eye contact.

You heard footsteps, the rustle of fabric, a stifled laugh, too close and too wet to be innocent. The night’s silence tightened a little, as if something that didn’t belong had just come in uninvited. You were still staring at the screen when a shadow fell across the floor beside you and a woman’s voice suddenly broke in a short, startled noise, almost a gasp.

That made you look up.

The woman was turned toward you with her lips parted, mascara still intact but her eyes wrecked by sheer embarrassment as you watched her adjust her neckline and bring a hand to her mouth, completely thrown off by smeared lipstick. The man behind her had his fly down and one hand planted brazenly on the wall, like the whole balcony belonged to him by biological right. He wore the lopsided grin of men who live convinced the world owes them something.

It was fucking Soldier Boy.

You recognized him before you even processed it. The body first. The posture. The way he occupied space like the air ought to move aside out of respect. There was something of a badly restored statue in him: an old-school masculine facade, a shell with its varnish cracked, the smell of something that had survived too long in a closed room. The suit fit him like a deliberate provocation, though what would have looked heroic on anyone else just came off as a half-rotted ego on him.

The bastard looked you over slowly, like he was sizing up a chair.

“Well, well,” he drawled, voice rough and deliciously offended by your mere existence. “What have we got here? You gonna keep starin’, doll, or do you wanna join in? Could be fun, sweetheart. Unless you’re more of a voyeur.”

You took another drag and then looked at him with the flat, blinking patience of a woman evaluating sewage. Truth was, you were unbelievably fucking lazy, and the clonazepam was kicking in, so your head was in that sluggish state of total anesthesia that let you give exactly zero shits about some goddamn bearded orangutan.

“I think I’ll pass. Rather not catch AIDS from a fucking mummy. But thanks, that’s real considerate,” you said, not bothering to sound enthusiastic. Christ, that clona was something else. Maybe you should take another one, because this shit was starting to hit.

The woman made a choking sound. Soldier Boy’s grin held for half a second longer, and then you saw it: the instant, almost microscopic shift in his expression. Not pain. Never that. But irritation. Real irritation. The kind that told you you’d hit exactly where his skin was thinnest.

He tilted his head at you.

“What the hell’s your problem?” he snapped, a little too hard. “You don’t know how to be polite to a man or have you goddamn kids lost all your manners?”

You raised your eyebrows. The guy was really like this. Incredible.

“Dunno, man. When I see a man I’ll let you know,” you shot back, shrugging.

It landed. You knew it because the lines around his mouth went hard. There it was, the classic straight guy having a full-on masculinity crisis just because a woman said something that hit right at his cock-brain. It was so predictable you could almost fall asleep.

He took a step toward you.

“What the fuck is your deal, you little shit? You some kind of man-hatin’ lesbo or what the hell?”

“Not really into the sapphic thing, honestly,” you cut in, calm as falling snow. “But if you keep talking, I might reconsider. Jesus, every sentence you spit dries up more pussy than the last.”

The woman let out a quick, involuntary laugh, because the line was just too good to hold in. Soldier Boy’s face darkened a little more.

“You think you’re real fuckin’ funny.”

“No,” you said. “I am funny. That’s a fact. Like it’s a fact that you’re fucking embarrassing, by the way.”

The girl cleared her throat.

“I think I—”

“You don’t think anythin', doll” he cut her off, never taking his eyes off you. “Wait for me at the bar. I’ll be right there.”

He said it with a softness that was way worse than shouting.

She hesitated. Looked from one of you to the other. Then she grabbed her purse with fumbling hands and slipped through the door without looking back.

Now it was just the two of you on the balcony.

The smoke from your cigarette mixed with the warm air and the expensive perfume still stuck to his skin. The night around you stayed the same, with its distant lights and its city pretending not to care. Only the size of the tension changed. It got narrower. Closer. Almost intimate.

Soldier Boy moved right in front of you. He’d shifted his body language to seem bigger, harder, more intimidating. Classic tactic to scare the people in front of him. Too bad you gave exactly zero fucks. Force was the last resort of losers, or idiots with half a brain, so it didn’t impress you. Besides, you didn’t think he was going to kill you, and it’s not like you were scared of a few punches when you regenerated fast as hell. Or maybe it was the goddamn benzos and alcohol making you so thoroughly, gloriously indifferent.

“You know, doll” he said, pulling out what you recognized as a joint from his pocket and continuing once he lit it, “back in the day young ladies had manners. Some values oughta stay dead instead of gettin’ tossed in the trash.”

You shrugged.

“Well, back in the day men were useful. You went off to war and that kind of shit. Now at most you start a podcast to cry because you can’t get laid. I’d say we came out ahead.”

He jutted his jaw forward like he wanted to chew through the answer.

“Well, look at that, we got ourselves a smart mouth,” he laughed. He sounded delighted with himself. “What are you, one of those chicks who thinks she’s better than everybody else because she uses fancy words or some shit?”

“No, just pretty sure I’m smarter than you,” you said with perfect calm, hiding a crooked smile. It was fine to provoke him, but you weren’t stupid enough to push your luck too hard.

His smile came back, slower this time, meaner. There was a kind of satisfaction in it that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with domination. Like the exchange had woken him up. Like insulting you was more stimulating than whatever the hell he’d been doing a minute ago.

“Watch that mouth, sweetheart.”

“I’m not the one who had his face buried in some random woman’s tits in the middle of a party with two hundred cameras.”

He made a noise halfway between a laugh and a growl. He took the joint out of his mouth, letting a cloud of smoke drift around him. You almost asked for a hit, but decided he probably wouldn’t be too eager to share. If you’d known he had weed, maybe you would’ve reconsidered being such a bitch. Well. You still had clonazepam left.

Soldier Boy leaned in slightly without really bending. He smelled like weed, tobacco, and whiskey. His eyes had gone amber in the reflected light from inside, and you could see the resentment in his face perfectly. You held his gaze, bringing the cigarette to your mouth as you took a long drag.

“I could blow your fuckin’ head off right here, babe” he murmured, almost a growl.

You took a couple of seconds before answering.

“That’d be a bitch for the cleaning crew,” you observed. “Blood’s a hell of a mess to scrub out.”

He muttered something under his breath, something like fuckin’ mouthy bitch, or maybe an even dirtier variation. Didn’t matter. What mattered was the tone: quick poison, childish, almost offended.

And then you laughed. That was the mistake.

Not the insult. Not the mocking. The laugh.

Because laughter was intolerable to a man built like him. Violence they understood. Hatred they understood. But ridicule shrank them down, it turned rage into impotence. And all at once they weren’t feared anymore, they were just embarrassing.

Soldier Boy’s face changed.

For the first time all night, you genuinely thought he might hit you. Like hit you for real.

And for some absurd reason, it almost pleased you. There was something perversely satisfying about pushing people until the mask slipped and whatever was inside came crawling out.

Then the balcony door opened again.

“Benjamin.”

Stan Edgar’s voice cut through the tension like a clean blade.

Soldier Boy stepped back half a pace almost on reflex, irritation still burning across his face.

Edgar walked in with that surgeon’s calm he always seemed to wear, his eyes moving between the two of you with such precise attention it made you want to wipe the room down out of respect for his neatness. And if you weren’t imagining it, there was a nearly imperceptible kind of amusement in his expression.

Interesting.

“Well, I see you’ve met,” Edgar said, as if this were some charming coincidence at a charity cocktail hour.

Soldier Boy turned to him, still wearing a trace of confusion on his forehead.

“You know each other?”

Edgar tipped his glass slightly in your direction.

“You could say that.”

You said nothing.

Not because you had nothing to say, but because, suddenly, you felt something odd in Soldier Boy’s face. Not just annoyance. Not merely wounded pride. Something else. Faster. More animal. A reaction that hadn’t finished taking shape and was already turning poisonous.

Stan Edgar, with the calm of a man who enjoyed nudging pieces on a board they still hadn’t understood, took another step onto the balcony.

“Ben,” he said, using his name like a key sliding into an inconvenient lock. “We were talking about her the other day, remember?”

Ben.

The way he said it had almost a physical effect.

Soldier Boy blinked once. The smile vanished. His eyes sharpened.

He looked at you with a new intensity, focused now, like he’d just clicked together a piece he hadn’t expected to find. His face emptied of amusement and filled with a colder, more exact kind of rage. The sort of rage that doesn’t need to raise its voice because it’s already deciding what to break.

That was when you recognized the moment.

The realization.

Not all of it yet. Just the edge of it, but enough.

Enough to make his neck go taut. Enough to make his hand, still half-idle near his waistband, close up suddenly. Enough to make something in the way he was looking at you change irreparably.

Stan Edgar watched that change with something almost like polite interest.

“It’s one of the commentators from the program we watched,” Edgar said, unhurried. “Now do you remember?”

You let the smoke out slowly, fixing Soldier Boy with a studied calm that cost you less than it would have cost someone else. Inside, you didn’t feel fear. You felt tired. That thick, ancient tiredness that sometimes felt too much like peace.

The supe stared at you like he was trying to figure out exactly when you had become a mistake to him. And you, through the smoke and the empty glass and the exhausted body, knew with absolute clarity that this night was not going to end like a party, or like a conversation, or even like a threat.

This had just started.

“Have you all been talking about me?” you asked, smiling with absolute bullshit innocence. “Aw, that’s sweet, Stan. You put my shows on for the boys? I’m fucking flattered.”

Edgar only pressed his lips together in something remotely close to a smile, while Soldier Boy was still trying to work out what the hell you were supposed to ring a bell for. You could almost measure the exact moment when his two half-baked brain cells made contact, because his eyes widened and his brow furrowed in a flash of contained fury.

“Oh, of course,” he sneered. “You’re the mouthy internet cunt, the fuckin’ commie ball-buster dyke who won’t shut the fuck up, right?”

The way he said it clearly expected a different reaction. Maybe indignation. Maybe a flinch of embarrassment. Maybe the same tiny physical recoil he’d managed to wring out of so many people over the years, that minuscule defensive gesture that confirmed he still ran the show even when he didn’t.

But you only raised one eyebrow and smoked the cigarette down until your fingers were almost burning.

“Man, you’re real obsessed with lesbians. What’s your problem with them?” you asked, studying the glowing tip like the topic didn’t deserve any more ceremony. “Is it because they eat more pussy than you?”