#humdrum chapter two

Chapter 2:

Homelander x reader slow burn that loosely follows the events of the series. The reader is an NYC transplant working as an archivist at Vought.

Story will eventually contain smut, dark themes, heavy angst, detailed descriptions of depression etc. Minors DNI, 18+.

Warnings for this chapter: descriptions of torture consistent with the show. S4E4.

Track list for this chapter:

Neurosis - Oliver Riot

Ptolomea - Ethel Cain

Crack Baby - Mitski

You turned, expecting Sandy. A reprimand, maybe—your filing was moving too slowly, to stop chewing on the eraser of the yellow number two pencil you kept in your mouth…

But it wasn’t Sandy.

It was him.

Homelander.

There was no warning. No footsteps, no sharp clearing of the throat. One moment you were alone in the archives, working well past the rest of your colleagues had left for the night, and the next… he was there. Standing perfectly still, maybe five feet away, as if he’d materialized out of thin air.

You froze, resisting the urge to rub your eyeballs into the back of your skull. You weren’t entirely sure you weren’t hallucinating—what with the daily eye-strain you faced from scanning tiny cursive scribbles all day under the harsh fluorescent laughing.

It took your brain a full ten seconds to even register that homelander was indeed standing infront of you, in the flesh.

You’d seen him before, of course. Everyone had. On TV. In press junkets. His face was plastered all over Vought’s branding, stamped onto cereal boxes, looping through training videos in the upstairs lobby. America’s Son. Bright, smiling, heroic.

But up close—he didn’t look like that.

He didn’t feel like that.

He looked like something carved, not born. Skin too perfect. Hair unnaturally gold under the artificial light. His eyes weren’t blue—they were glacial. Flat. Not lifeless, exactly, but… withholding. Like they could erupt at any second, and you’d never see it coming.

You felt it then. The thing no one ever really talked about. The thing everyone knew, deep down, when they saw him on Vought’s constant stream of promotional videos or up on stage (no matter how hard they tried to hide it). That he could kill you before you blinked.

That no one could stop him.

That he knew it, just as well as you did.

Vought treated him like a prized new puppy, when he was a snarling feral dog at best, no matter how much they dressed him up in stars and shining blue spandex.

He was taller than you expected. Broader. More… there. The space around him felt wrong somehow, like gravity bent differently for him than it did for everyone else. You could feel your heart beating in your throat, hear it pounding in your ears like a drum—you were pretty confident he could hear it too. Fight, flight, freeze.

Is this what the zebra you watched on your nature documents felt like the moment they perked up and felt that a predator was nearby—weighing their options for where they could run and how fast they’d have to be to escape?

You were pretty sure you weren’t getting away from this one.

You didn’t realize you’d taken a step back until your shoulder hit the filing cabinet.

He watched you.

Not like a person looks at another person. There was no warmth. He looked at you like you were an insect that found its way inside and couldn’t figure out that it couldn’t escape through glass… something his hands could break if he pressed just a bit too hard.

He tilted his head slightly, and something in your stomach dropped—like you were standing at the edge of a cliff and suddenly realized the ground beneath you was crumbling.

“Where are the tapes?,” he said. Voice quiet. Calm.

Not a request.

You opened your mouth, but no sound came out.

He blinked, slowly. Not impatient. Just waiting.

And that, somehow, was worse.

“What tapes?” you finally got out—not that you meant to question him. Christ, you hoped he could tell you weren’t, that you genuinely had no idea what tapes he was referring to and anything that brought him down here in person had to be buried under at least three levels of clearance.

Sandy would have lost her mind if she knew he down here. But Sandy wasn’t here, and Homelander certainly didn’t seem like the patient type.

His eyes didn’t move. “From the lab.”

The lab.

Vought had a dozen labs. Maybe more. The archives were flooded with documents from them—drug trials, internal investigations, black bag operations filed under euphemisms you couldn’t begin to understand. You’d cataloged thousands of files you weren’t allowed to read, stacked miles of tapes marked with dates and department codes and clearance levels so high they may as well have been written in another language.

You didn’t know what he meant.

And you couldn’t ask. The way he said it… calm, flat, almost bored… told you everything you needed to know.

He expected you to know. He expected obedience..

Your mouth was dry. “There are… a lot of tapes.”

A breath passed between you.

He smiled.

It was thin. Almost amused.

He took a step forward—not threatening, but deliberate.

“I’ll wait.”

No clarification. No help.

Sandy made it clear enough how replaceable you were, and if you were replaceable to her, you were definitely replaceable to Vought, to Homelander.

You forced your legs to move.

Your fingers trembled as they hovered over drawer after drawer—knowing he was watching your every move and that every second brought you closer to the end of an imaginary rope—actual fucking noose was more like it. Too close.

He hadn’t said a word since asking for the tapes. Just stood there, like a monolith. Watching. You could feel it, the weight of his gaze like static on your skin.

You swallowed. Kept your eyes on the labels.

Pain threshold studies. V stabilization trials. Tissue regeneration.

And then—

Subject J2.01-01

Controlled Environment: 1988–1996

Clearance: Level 7

You froze.

This wasn’t even a file you were allowed to touch. The drawer itself should’ve been locked—biometric. Restricted. And yet, when your fingers brushed the handle, it opened with a soft hiss, dust curling into the air like smoke.

Inside: a row of unmarked VHS tapes. Black spines, white labels. Numbers. Dates… Old.

You reached out and slid one free, hands cold with sweat. The plastic felt heavier than it should’ve.

You stared at it, trying to make sense of what you were holding.

You didn’t even notice you had stepped away from the drawer until your back bumped into something solid.

You didn’t have to turn.

The heat of him was sudden and all-consuming, radiating off him like a furnace. You froze in place as a breath ghosted against your ear—not a sound, just the movement of air—and then his arm reached around you, slow, unhurried.

His hand brushed yours as he took the tape. His skin was dry. Warm. Inhuman.

You didn’t breathe.

He didn’t say thank you. Didn’t say anything.

He just stepped away, and you felt the space between your bodies flood with cold again.

Then: the soft click of the tape sliding into the AV player.

And his voice.

Quiet. Flat.

“Stay.”

—

You didn’t know what you expected him to do once he had the tape.

Maybe leave; vanish the way he’d appeared—without warning, without explanation. A hallucination you could chalk up to too many hours underground and too little sleep.

Instead, he sat down right there. In one of the shitty old metal chairs meant for interns or delivery boys waiting to be signed in. He leaned back like it was a throne, legs spread comfortably, one hand holding the tape like it was nothing more than a mildly interesting magazine.

He pointed to the console.

“Play it.”

Your hand hovered over the machine, unsure.

“You do know how to use it, right?” he asked, voice low and calm.

Like a joke. Like a test.

You pressed the button and stepped back so that you were behind him, out of site, out of mind—and so you were out of view when you saw whatever was on screen.

The player clicked. The tape whirred. You held back the bile rising in your throat.

The screen came to life.

The first image was clinical. Neutral. A sterile white room under harsh lighting.

A child sat cross-legged on the floor. Maybe five. Maybe six. Blond. Pale. So small in the center of the frame, swallowed by the space around him.

You felt your breath catch in your throat.

A man in a lab coat entered frame. Kneeling. Talking. The child didn’t respond, just looking at the man.

He handed the boy a small metal ball.

The boy took it. Held it.

Then his fingers clenched and the object crumpled like a piece of aluminum foil. You were sure it was something much stronger.

Then, a cut, a new scene, a new date in the corner in white numbers. Homelander didn’t say anything, didn’t move. You weren’t sure whether to watch him or the screen.

The boy was standing in a sealed glass chamber, not unlike an oven. The temperature readout ticked up slowly in the corner. A group of people, maybe five of them, stood around the chamber with clip boards, jotting down notes and numbers. There was some chatter in the background, but you couldn’t make out what was being said.

A man walked over and turned the dial to the left of the glass up, the boy on the screen began to scream.

You flinched.

“You know,” Homelander murmured, you couldn’t tell if he was talking to you or himself, “my skin didn’t even char.. hurt like hell, though. My tears sizzled off my cheeks, just dried up almost as quickly as they fell out of my eyes… smelt like hell in there too,” You swallowed, mouth dry. Homelander didn’t look at you, and you could tell he wasn’t looking for a response.

You weren’t sure how long you stood there, too afraid to move and too horrified to look away from the screen. Homelander didn’t move either and didn’t speak aside from the occasional quip.

Where you were tense, the supe in front of you was as relaxed as someone watching a reality tv program; you guessed it was because he already knew what was going to happen next.

You tried to find something—anything—to say. But there was no safe sentence. Nothing that would make sense of this or erase what you were seeing. If this was anyone else, you’d want to comfort them.

He finally looked up at youc but you couldn’t bring yourself to look at him.

You didn’t recognize your own expression, reflected faintly in the glass of the monitor. You felt detached from your body.

Homelander stood slowly, and you didn't move as he picked up the tape and slid it into his coat pocket, walking out without another word.

You stood there long after the door closed behind him, staring at the static on the screen. Your hands were shaking at your sides.

You were going to be sick.

You spend the next hour throwing up in the bathroom toilet.

You washed your face with shitty bathroom foaming soap, scrubbed until the skin went pink and raw.

That night, you lay in bed with your eyes open, staring at the ceiling and hearing the echoes of the little boy’s screams in your mind…John.

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