Or, at least, it began on the same day John had been scheduled to be punished in the Bad Room. The small white-tiled isolation cell that he privately called the Bad Room looked nothing like the terms the scientists used for it when they forgot he could still hear them even through half a foot of reinforced steel. John had called it the Bad Room because that was where they put him when he frightened people. The reinforced red door sealed with a hydraulic hiss every time the scientists decided he needed âcorrection.â Unlike the testing chambers, the room itself didnât harm him physically. Heâd realized that was not the point of keeping him there. He had learned early that the real punishment was silence: no voices, no touch, no reassurance that anyone was coming back at all. No footsteps in the corridor. No return once the door shut. Only waiting that stretched so long it stopped feeling like time and started feeling like being left behind while still awake. The adults in lab coats called isolation important for behavioral correction. They said this while avoiding his eyes.
Sometimes they left him inside the Bad Room for hours. Sometimes longer.
The room itself remained aggressively bare: four white walls, a drain in the floor, fluorescent lights overhead that never switched off, and no windows. There was nothing soft, nothing sharp, and nothing he could break without effort. The silence inside it always became the worst part eventually. Nobody spoke to him there. Nobody touched him. Sometimes they forgot to answer when he asked how long he would stay. Sometimes they ignored him on purpose to see how he reacted.
But the day before his isolation period began, John was undergoing thermal endurance testing in the adjacent containment chamber. The thick white heavy door had sealed shut behind him. Once it closed, the room became a large walk-in oven. Thermal systems embedded behind the walls hummed faintly as heat bled steadily into the chamber while men and women behind observation glass measured how much his body could withstand before he started screaming. The air always smelled scorched and chemical-sharp: bleach, overheated metal, burning circuitry, and sterilizing agents cooked hot enough to dry his throat raw and sting his nose as the temperature climbed.
The oven door had been sealed thirty-seven minutes ago. John knew because he counted whenever things hurt. Orange light glowed faintly through the seams of the chamber walls. His thin hospital gown clung damply to the back of his neck while he curled barefoot in the corner furthest from the vents, counting cracks in the white floor tiles to distract himself from the feeling of the air growing thinner and hotter every time he inhaled. His lungs burned. Sweat crawled slowly down his spine as the heat pressed heavily against Johnâs skin.
Somewhere outside, scientists monitored his vitals while pretending not to flinch whenever the chamber temperature rose another increment. Frank, the scientist supervising the experiment, disliked it whenever John floated to avoid contact with the heated floor. He had ordered John to keep his feet planted throughout the trial so the researchers could test the upper limits of his durability. If he refused, they simply restarted the procedure and left him inside longer.
Beyond the reinforced observation glass, scientists drifted past with clipboards tucked against their chests. None of them looked directly at him for long. Through the white door, John could see Frank outside once again amusing himself by playing wastepaper basketball, tossing paper balls toward a wire wastebasket. Every time he scored a shot, Frank cranked up the temperature.
So when the air pressure inside the chamber shifted and another body occupied the room without any alarms sounding, John looked up sharply.
A stern-looking dark-haired man stood only a few feet away from him inside the sealed chamber.
That was impossible.
No one entered during heat trials. Not ever. The scientists were too frightened of accidental exposure, too frightened of him, and far too protective of their own skin to willingly remain trapped inside once the chamber sealed shut. Yet the stranger stood there anyway as if the oppressive heat did not concern him at all.
He looked wrong against all the whiteâdark, solid, out of placeâhis heavy frame swallowed in a long wool coat entirely unsuited for sweltering temperature. Sweat should have been pouring off him already, yet it wasnât. Despite the fine wrinkles spidering from the corners of his eyes and the exhaustion carved deep into his face, John noticed immediately that the man was handsome in a rough, weathered way that did not belong in a place like this. A thick dark beard shadowed his jaw. Deep grooves bracketed his mouth like disappointment had settled there permanently.
The exhaustion clinging to him did not resemble ordinary tiredness. It felt old. Bitter. Like violence and resentment had worn him down into something perpetually hostile. More importantly, he didnât look like a scientist. The heavy muscular build beneath his tiger-striped T-shirt set him apart sharply from the rail-thin researchers and soft-bodied administrators John was accustomed to seeing. His silhouette reminded John of the strength-enhanced Vought guards he had been forced to fight before.
The stranger completed a slow sweep of the chamber before his gaze drifted to the only other person inside it. Then his eyes remained rooted on Johnâs face.
The expression on the strangerâs face made John startleâhe nearly recoiled into the wall. His pulse jumped violently, because he recognized the emotion immediately.
Hatred.
Not clinical discomfort. Not nervous caution. Real hatred. Strong and personal, like the ugly resentment that occasionally surfaced in the psychologists when they forgot he could see through their fake smiles. Like the resentment John himself felt whenever adults slowed their voices to speak to him like he was a dumb baby.
That was the first impossible thing. John had never seen this man before. Yet the stranger looked at him as though he had been searching specifically for him and had already decided he despised what heâd found. His expression remained tense, fierce, and openly malevolent.
The second impossible thing was that no one outside reacted at all.
John waited for alarms. For armed guards. For Dr. Vogelbaumâs clipped voice barking orders over the intercom. Instead the researchers beyond the observation glass continued working normally. Frank laughed at something another scientist muttered. A technician adjusted a dial. Two orderlies continued talking beside the monitors. Dr. Vogelbaum was standing outside with two assistants, speaking into a clipboard recorder. No one acknowledged the stranger standing directly inside the sealed chamber with John while the heat continued rising.
ââŠChrist,â the man muttered under his breath.
The strangerâs eyes dragged slowly over him: the oversized hospital gown hanging off his thin frame, the bruises darkening beneath pale âindestructibleâ skin, the blisters forming along his arms and feet, and the long blond hair damp with sweat where it stuck against his forehead and neck. One of the attendants had cut his hair badly last month after John snapped sterilized scissors in half during a tantrum. Now they no longer dared cut it short. The scientists called him difficult whenever they assumed he couldnât hear them.
Something ugly flickered briefly across the strangerâs face while he took him in. Rage, maybe. Disgust. Then it vanished again beneath restraint.
The stranger clicked his tongue against his teeth. âFuckâs sake. Stop lookinâ at me like that.â He jerked his chin. âMakinâ me feel like Iâve got me cock out.â
John stared back silently. Then he blinked. âYou can say bad words here?â
That seemed to catch the man off guard. âKid,â he said, incredulity cracking through his expression, âIâm a grown fuckinâ adult. Iâll say whatever I bloody well want.â
John stared at him for another second before admitting quietly, âNobody talks to me like that.â
The stranger immediately looked like he regretted engaging in conversation at all.
His accent sounded strange to John. Old recordings sometimes sounded like that. Except every sentence of his landed somewhere halfway between sarcasm and threat, edged with enough contempt to make Johnâs pulse skip strangely in his chest. The way he spoke made words sound different somehow, low and scratchy but nice to listen to. John decided he liked hearing him talk.
The scientists never spoke to him like this. They spoke in instructions and evaluations. Clinical observations. Behavioral notes. Many of the female tutors over the years spoke in fake reassurances that felt sugary sweet and performative, like a script rehearsed beforehand.
The stranger sounded irritated instead, like someone perpetually seconds away from hitting someone and starting a fight.
Outside the chamber, the doctors continued documenting his reactions without looking up. One commented that elevated temperatures appeared to increase the subjectâs emotional volatility. Another recommended extending the test duration. The strangerâs expression darkened further with every passing second.
John frowned slightly. Sometimes he heard voices when the isolation lasted too long. Meaner versions of himself whispering awful things through the dark. Sometimes his reflection talked back to him. The scientists had called it a hallucination. A stress-induced dissociation.
Maybe the man was another figment of his imagination.
âYouâre imaginary,â John concluded.
The manâs mouth twitched faintly. Humorless. âThat your professional diagnosis, Baby Spice?â
Baby Spice? âYou appeared but nobody else noticed.â He didnât care if the scientists noticed him talking to empty air, even though some small part of him still knew he wasnât supposed to do thisâtalking to something no one else reacted to, speaking without instruction or permission.
There had been a time when he cared about seeming normal enough that the adults might someday treat him like a real boy instead of a problem to manage, but that feeling had long since started to rot away into something thin and distant. Silence and observation had never spared him from punishment before, and being watched only meant they were deciding how to classify him afterwardâwhether as a behavioral anomaly, a stress response, or simply another excuse for whatever they had already decided to do to him. John approached him.
The strangerâs attention snapped downward immediately, tracking Johnâs movement with reflexive alertness, like someone whose survival depended on recognizing danger before it struck. His stare lingered a fraction too long, not with curiosity but with hard calculation, as though deciding whether John was dangerous, unstable, or lying. Something tightened subtly in his face, like he hadnât expected the answer to be real.
He smelled wrong for the facility. Nothing about him resembled antiseptic sterilityâno latex, no disinfectant, no recycled air. Instead, John smelled cold weather trapped in fabric, cigarette smoke soaked into heavy wool, distilled spirits, gun oil, rainwater, sweat, and something coppery beneath it all.
Bloodâold, faint, but unmistakableâlingering beneath everything like it had never fully washed out.
Nobody inside Vought smelled like this. Nobody talked like this either. The adults here scrubbed themselves clean before entering his containment level, terrified contamination from the outside world might touch the experiments. This man smelled alive in a way the facility never did: dirty, violent, and real.
âWhy canât they see you?â John asked.
Hallucinations had never smelled like anything before.
The strangerâs gaze cut toward the observation deck with visible disdain. âMaybe theyâre all fuckinâ idiots.â
That almost made John smile.
The stranger noticed immediately, and his expression hardened again as though even accidentally amusing John irritated him.
As the heat inside the chamber continued climbing, Johnâs attention went to the tarnished silver chain the stranger wore around his neck. A small medallion rested against the hollow of the strangerâs throat, dulled with age and touched so often the edges had gone smooth. Sweat dampened the strangerâs collar slightly now despite how motionless he remained.
John kept staring at it until the stranger caught him looking.
âWhat?â
âItâs shiny.â
The man exhaled a short laugh through his nose. âSpot on. Brilliant deduction.â
John ignored the sarcasm. âWhat is it?â
The medallion reminded him of the rosaries and cross necklaces some of the more devout scientists and doctors carried around their necks or tucked beneath their shirts like protective talismans.
The man glanced down at the pendant. Embossed in sterling silver was an icon of a heavily bearded man carrying the baby Jesus on his shoulder across a rushing river, a wooden staff braced in his hand. For the briefest moment, something shifted in his faceânot softer, exactly, but distant, like the object belonged to a memory he did not particularly want to touch. He murmured, ââŠNothing important.â
That was obviously a lie.
John knew lies. Adults lied to him constantly. They lied when they said the experiments were necessary. They lied when they promised something would not hurt. They lied whenever they smiled too much.
The stranger exhaled quietly through his nose and dragged a rough hand across his mouth before letting it fall away again, as though he already regretted saying anything at all. âYou should stop lookinâ at me like that.â
âLike what?â
âLike a kicked puppy.â
John frowned faintly. âWhy would I look like a kicked puppy when Iâm genetically superior?â
The stranger went completely still. Something ugly crossed his face in quick succession: revulsion first, sharp and instinctive, followed almost immediately by something worse that John could not properly identify. Anger. Pity, maybe. Horror. One of his hands flexed once at his side, the tendons tightening sharply beneath scarred skin as though some violent impulse had briefly passed through him before being forced back under control. His expression collapsed inward a second later, becoming cold. He grunted, âForget I said anything, yeah?â
Over the next several weeks, he continued appearing without warning.
Sometimes during examinations. Sometimes in the recreation room while handlers encouraged âhealthy socializationâ between the younger test subjects. Sometimes during educational lessons while instructors forced John to memorize patriotic slogans and marketability statistics.
Sometimes he stood silently in the corners during socialization drills while instructors attempted to teach John appropriate emotional responses using cue cards and staged interactions. John would sit with impeccable posture in a tiny chair bolted to the floor, his eyes tracking every movement with unnatural focus while the stranger watched from the edges of the room like a threat no one else could perceive.
Sometimes he lingered behind reinforced observation glass during behavioral evaluations while doctors asked John questions about empathy and recorded his responses like laboratory data on a clipboard. Sometimes John glimpsed him leaning against the far wall of medical corridors during post-procedure transfers, hands shoved deep into his coat pockets while John still stumbled from sedation with the kind of slow, drug-heavy wobble that made younger technicians avert their eyes and older ones pretend not to notice anything at all.
The man never spoke when others were present. Never acknowledged the tests. Never reacted when John was made to stand, to float, to burn a pencil in half, to read words that blurred deliberately on the page. He simply existed at the edges of the room, as though he had been left there and forgotten.
Sometimes he lingered outside the endurance testing chamber, visible through layered safety glass while technicians monitored Johnâs vitals and argued quietly over readouts that never spiked the way they expected. Sometimes John would be strapped into a chair while electrodes tested the limits of his nervous system, and the stranger would stand just beyond the technicianâs shoulder reading lab results with an expression of mounting disgust.
Sometimes he sat in the recreation room late at night while old Vought cartoons and propaganda reels flickered across projector screens, pale light striping across his face whenever he muttered something contemptuous beneath his breath at particularly patriotic scenes, as though optimism itself personally offended him.
Sometimes in the evenings, when the facility fell quiet except for the endless hum of fluorescent lighting and distant ventilation systems, he became a towering dark shadow leaning against the corner of Johnâs containment room, his thick forearms folded over his chest, watching John who curiously peered back at him from his small cot. The fascination on Johnâs face remained naked and unguarded whenever he looked at his constant silent companion, like he still couldnât quite believe the manâs enduring presence hadnât been discovered, questioned, and taken away from him yet.
The stranger was always nearby somewhere.
Nobody ever acknowledged him. Nobody ever reacted when the dark-haired man stood openly in the room watching Vought employees discuss John like an investment portfolio.
At first he barely spoke.
Mostly he observed.
Sometimes hatred surfaced when he looked at John directlyâsharp and immediate before the man forced it back down hard enough to tense the muscles in his jaw. More often the stranger simply watched with the strained vigilance of someone waiting for something terrible to happen, like he expected John to become a monster midway through a lesson or another physical examination.
Sometimes John still wondered whether the stranger was another voice like the ones he heard in the dark, the crueler versions of himself that whispered ugly things into his ear whenever the isolation stretched too long. But the stranger did not speak like those voices. He was mean, but never in a way that pushed John toward becoming worse. He sighed like everything John said exhausted him, but was still worth tolerating anyway. He was as blunt as a brick to the face and twice as unpleasant about it, cutting through things without any concern for delicacy or social convention. He swore beneath his breath like every other word had personally ruined his life at some point and he was still carrying the grudge.
Most of all, he looked tired in a deeply human way John had never seen before, like someone who had long since stopped expecting the world to make sense and continued existing purely out of spite.
He wasnât comforting, and he wasnât kind, but he didnât feel like a lie Johnâs brain had invented either, which somehow made him harder to ignore than anything else in the facility.
John considered other possibilities. He had once been given medicine that made the walls breathe and the lights talk, so it could have been that again. Maybe there was an odorless gas leak in the facility. He had also wondered, briefly, if this was another part of him made visibleâsomething his body had started producing like heat vision or strength. He even thought, for a moment, that the stranger might be an actor that the scientists had hired to interact with him, pretending that they couldnât see him while this man tested Johnâs socialization skills. Or that this man could be a mental projection caused by another research subjectâs powers.
Over time, John eventually ruled each one of those possibilities out.
So if he was not a mistake, and he was not a trick, then there was only one explanation left. Thus John concluded, with the simple logic of someone who had never been taught otherwise, that the man must belong to him.
An imaginary friend was easier to understand than a ghost that was haunting him.
Most importantly, the stranger sometimes reacted to things John had not said aloud, like none of his thoughts could ever be truly hidden from him.
One afternoon, during a psychological assessment, John had intentionally snapped his pencil in half because heâd disliked the psychologist touching his papers. The psychologist had scolded him while replacing the pencil with visibly strained patience.
Across the room, the stranger had snorted quietly. âThatâs one way of tellinâ someone to fuck off.â
John stared at him. âYou saw that?â
âBit hard not to, innit.â
âBut I didnât say anything.â
The strangerâs eyes flicked toward the evaluator before returning to him. âYour face did. Loud as anything.â
John had thought he had learned to hide things better than that, but for the first time, he realized a stranger read him more easily than any of the specialists Vought had ever put in front of him. He thought about it for a long time afterward.
Little by little, he inched closer to the stranger each time. The man always watched John approach with visible suspicion, like getting too close to him was something that was always going to end badly, and John was still too bloody young to understand that.
In front of this older man who hardly ever smiled at him, John wanted to seem tough. Tougher than he actually felt sometimes deep down inside. He was not a baby.
But the one time John couldnât hold back and cried in front of him, when the masked orderlies restrained him in their silver aluminized fireproof suits and held his arm inside the roaring furnace to test the upper limits of his skinâs invulnerability, the blast of heat so intense it seared straight into the nerves beneath his flesh, the skin glowing raw and blistered as though it might finally be forced past what it was made to endure, something sharp and violent broke across the strangerâs face.
Another time, after theyâd locked John inside the overheated steel chamber as punishment for injuring an orderly, the stranger had appeared outside the door.
John had been sweating through the thin hospital scrubs by then. The chamber temperature climbed high enough that the air itself began to shimmer. His skin felt too tight over his bones. Salty sweat dripped into Johnâs eyes while technicians monitored his vitals on the other side of the reinforced white metal door. He curled instinctively against the corner furthest from the heating vents, holding back tears.
The stranger watched the chamber quietly through the glass pane in the door. Something dangerous settled over his faceânot anger alone, but something that looked tightly controlled and frighteningly calm. He interrogated quietly, âThey always cooked you in this bloody thing?â
John shrugged. He did not know which answer was correct. It seemed like the answer should be obvious, so he did not see why he should bother responding to a stupid question.
Instead of saying something like he deserved it, which John knew the man was constantly itching to say to him, the stranger turned away and abruptly slammed his fist into the wall hard enough to shatter ceramic tiles.
John startled.
Someone had noticed the sound. There was a brief excited commotionââdid Subject John manifest telekinesis?ââfrom the scientists observing outside.
The man stared at the fractured wall for several seconds before dragging a hand over his face like he regretted losing control. âYou lot are fuckinâ animals,â he hissed. His gaze swept briefly toward the observation deck before he crouched in front of the chamber door. His voice remained gruff, rough as gravel. âOi, you still with me?â
John nodded.
âGood.â His voice sounded different nowâless sharp, worn down by something recent. He met Johnâs gaze directly. His eyes were a striking hazel, greener toward the centre and catching the light whenever he moved, too vivid to resemble the dull mud-brown eyes most ordinary people hadâtoo vivid to belong in this place. âLook at me. Donât think about anything else. Just me.â
A tongue swept nervously over Johnâs thin, dry lips. âButââ
âItâll hurt less if you keep starinâ at me instead of thinkinâ about it. Just anchor on me. Let me be your canary, yeah? Means I go first. If I stop singinâ, somethinâs wrong. You watch me so you donât drift.â He exhaled sharply through his nose, like he didnât much care for how gentle that sounded. His tone roughened immediately afterward, compensating for it. âThatâs it.â He hesitated for half a beat, then encouraged, quieter but unmistakably deliberate, âGood boy, ay?â
The words did not register as language at first. They landed as sensation before meaning, like pressure behind Johnâs ribs, like something warm being pressed into a place that had never been touched properly and did not know how to reject it. His breathing stalled for a fraction of a second as his attention snapped and locked onto the manâs face with sudden, almost alarming precision, as if his body had decided without permission that this was where safety was.
âKeep those pretty blues on me.â The manâs expression hardened again, as though he regretted the softness. But he said, ââŠAttaboy.â
John listened and did what he was told, not looking away from him. The words stayed with him longer than they should have, repeating faintly in the space behind his thoughts even after the man stopped speaking. Good boy. Something in him crowded around the phrase without permission, and he repeated it under his breath as if testing it. The shape of it felt wrong in his mouth when he said it himselfâflat, hollowâlike something important was missing from it. But thinking of how the stranger said it, his chest felt warm and heavy, softening in a slow, melty way beneath his ribs. Such a simple instruction. Yes. John would be good. For him.
The next day, Frank disappeared.
John learned about it by eavesdropping. Scientists always assumed he wasnât paying attention whenever he sat quietly. They forgot how well he could hear through walls. Two researchers whispered nervously near the elevators while the head researcher, Barbara Findley, reviewed paperwork nearby, her sharp voice cutting through theirs every few seconds. Frank had apparently failed to report for work that morning. Security footage had mysteriously corrupted itself sometime during the night. There had been blood found inside one of the lower maintenance corridors.
At first, John wondered if he had somehow done it himself. The thought lodged suddenly and hard in his chest. The scientists already believed he was unstable. Maybe he had sleepwalked. Maybe he had burned through the facility without remembering. People whispered about melted metal embedded in the corridor walls, about burn patterns and flesh cauterized black around the wounds. The hallway had reportedly smelled like ozone and cooked meat for hours afterward.
The injuries sounded wrong in a familiar way. But no. John remembered falling asleep alone in containment. Besides, if he had escaped his room, alarms would have triggered. The facility would have gone into lockdown. Dr. Vogelbaum would have been furious.
The stranger, however, had been able to appear inside sealed rooms before without anybody noticing.
John sat perfectly still through the conversation afterward, staring at the Soldier Boy military propaganda film projected across the recreation room wall while something warm and vicious curled pleasantly inside his chest. His fingers dug shallow grooves into the metal chair. His pupils remained slightly dilated, his gaze fixed on the flickering screen without truly seeing it.
The stranger must have done it. The realization should have frightened him. Instead, it made him feel strangely lightheaded. Important. Chosen.
Frank had hurt him. Frank, with the large forehead and limp wheat-blond hair always drooping across one eye. Frank who laughed while they locked John inside the overheating chamber. Frank who called him unstable after John screamed and hammered his fists against the door hard enough to warp the metal while they stood outside and cooked him alive. But now Frank was gone.
Johnâs gaze drifted instinctively toward the observation glass afterward. Toward the stranger sitting beyond it with a permanent expression like the world had personally offended him. A thought nagged quietly at the back of his mind before John finally asked, âCan you do it too?â
The strangerâs eyes lifted slowly from the stack of newspapers spread across his lap. âDo what?â
âThe eye thing.â John pointed vaguely toward his own face. He whispered, âThe lasers. Do you have a superpower too?â
For one brief moment, something inscrutable crossed the manâs expression. Then it flattened instantly back into irritation. âBloody hell,â he muttered, âyou ask too many fuckinâ questions.â
John waited anyway.
The stranger held his stare for several long seconds before looking away first, jaw tightening faintly. âDrop it.â
The answer wasnât really an answer at all. But John recognized the barbed warning beneath it immediately. People got sharp around the edges when he kept pushing after they stopped wanting to answer him. Tutors did it. Doctors did it. Scientists did it. Their smiles always went thinner first.
The stranger had not gone cold yet. John did not want to ruin that. So he let the subject drop. He still wanted to be a good boy for him.
Later, more details spread through the facility in frightened whispers. What remained of Frank had been discovered scattered across a maintenance corridor three floors below containment. The distribution of the remains suggested violent disassembly rather than a single impact, as though the body had been broken apart with overwhelming force and precision. Parts of the skull had been crushed so completely that bone fragments were embedded in the surrounding wall paneling, and several technicians reportedly vomited at the scene before they could complete a full investigation.
Other injuries were harder to categorize. Sections of tissue had been cleanly divided as though cut by an instrument so hot it sealed the edges instantly, leaving smooth blackened margins where flesh and bone had been cauterized mid-severance. Some limbs had been displaced rather than torn, suggesting impacts strong enough to drive them deep into fractured metal panels along the corridor walls. The corridor itself showed streaks of heat damage along the lower surfaces, as if something had passed through it in a controlled burst rather than chaotic violence, leaving scorched lines that did not match any known weapon profile in the facilityâs arsenal. The air remained acrid for hours afterward, heavy with the smell of burnt protein and heated metal despite full ventilation attempts.
There was only one asset in the facility capable of producing injuries resembling heat vision rays. Yet Subject John had never left containment. No footage showed any recorded entry into the corridor before Frank died.
People started lowering their voices after that. Security guards began travelling in pairs. Some researchers refused to enter Johnâs level alone anymore. Nobody wanted to say too much aloud.
Afterward, the facility changed.
Not openly. Not enough for the public-facing tours or corporate investors to notice. But the atmosphere shifted in tiny ways that John immediately recognized. More cameras were installed, especially in previous blind spots. Scientists who once snapped at John now spoke too carefully around him, forcing smiles onto their faces. Handlers stopped grabbing his wrists unless absolutely necessary. The orderlies became visibly tense whenever John entered a room, cold sweat breaking out along their foreheads. Some personnel avoided looking directly at him altogether, their fear pungent enough for John to smell in the air if he even so much as stared in their direction. They were scared out of their wits.
The stranger himself never acknowledged any of it.
John felt a small, bright flutter in his stomach whenever he looked at the stranger now, because he knew, with absolute certainty, that the man had done this for him specifically. Not because John mattered to Vought, and not because the scientists suddenly believed he deserved protecting. It was because one person strong enough had looked at what was happening and decided somebody deserved to suffer for it. The stranger had taken all the fire in his heart and vented it outward for Johnâs sake, delivering retribution while everyone else had only ever made excuses or explained why they could not.
Then came the extra food.
Dinner trays always arrived to his containment room the same way. A slot beneath the reinforced door would open with a click, and an orderly would slide the tray inside before the slot sealed shut again. Plastic utensils. Covered compartments. Measured portions calculated down to the calorie. Sometimes a scientist sat beyond the glass and wrote notes while John ate.
That routine never changed. Except now, every so often, something extra began appearing beside the regulated portions. Not larger meals, because Vought monitored caloric intake too precisely for that. Just small things that did not belong there. A cookie wrapped in plastic. A second pudding cup. Once, there was an entire slice of vanilla-and-chocolate Fudgie the Whale ice-cream cake tucked carefully beneath a square of foil.
John stared at it for a long time.
He recognized the cake immediately. Staff members always brought them in for birthdays and retirement parties. He had watched scientists laughing together over slices through reinforced observation windows while he remained locked on the other side of the glass. Lab subjects were never offered any. Ever. Sometimes he heard distant laughter through the ventilation system during mealtimes, along with trays scraping against tables and chairs dragging across floors. He had once asked Dr. Vogelbaum where the noises came from, and the man had only told him not to worry about it.
Yet someone had given him a slice anyway.
His eyes lifted automatically across the room. The deranged British serial killer sat outside the containment glass, drinking terrible black coffee from a styrofoam cup, visibly miserable that the staff canteen had apparently run out of proper tea for the third time that week. His chair balanced lazily back against the wall beside the observation window while Johnâs dinner tray sat untouched in front of him inside the containment room. He did not look at John. He did not acknowledge the tray at all. But one corner of his mouth twitched upward when John peeled back the foil and uncovered the frosting.
John broke off a piece of the cake and ate it slowly. The frosting was cold and sharp against his tongue at first, then softened into a deep, lingering sweetness that seemed to settle behind his teeth and stay there.
Something hot and pleased unfurled inside Johnâs chest when he glanced toward the older man again, almost shy, searching for the manâs reaction. John kept watching him until every bite was gone, unblinking, even as he licked the last of the white cream frosting from his thumb.
His gaze did not waver even after the sweetness was gone.
And for a little while, it felt like things were changing.
But the problem was that Vought always filled empty spaces. For every missing scientist, another appeared within days. Someone new rotated into the position. The face changed. The voice changed. Everything else stayed exactly the same. The clipboard remained. The detached clinical language remained. Sooner or later, every new person looked at him and saw a little blond boy right up until the moment they saw something that frightened them. After that, they stopped seeing a little boy at all, and sometimes they looked at him like he was not even human, especially when the facility lights went dark and all they could see in the blackness were two glowing red eyes staring back at them from the dark.
The stranger never commented on the replacements. But John noticed other things.
He noticed how the manâs gaze lingered coldly on certain staff members during examinations. He noticed how technicians sometimes vanished after particularly cruel sessions. He noticed the ugly bruises splitting the knuckles of the strangerâs hands every few days, appearing and fading without explanation.
Every time a new staff member appeared beside the examination room glass, the strangerâs expression darkened almost imperceptibly. His jaw locked harder. His silences stretched longer. Sometimes his knuckles slowly whitened around his cup until the styrofoam creaked softly beneath the pressure. Once, after an especially invasive procedure involving metal clamps forcing Johnâs eyelids open beneath glaring surgical lights while orange-suited technicians prepared instruments for another heat-vision enhancement trial, he heard glass shatter somewhere inside the operating room. Alarms started blaring almost immediately afterward. Doctors shouted over one another, and the procedure ended early while staff rushed frantically in and out of the now-contaminated room.
It was then John began understanding something important. The stranger could kill people. He was a boogieman who could terrify the facility. He could make scientists disappear badly enough that Barbara Findley herself had started traveling with additional security personnel. But none of it actually changed anything. People disappeared. New people arrived. The facility kept moving forward like nothing had happened. And every time it did, the stranger looked angrier for reasons John did not yet fully understand.
âWhy canât you take me out?â
The stranger went quiet. For a moment, John thought he might ignore the question entirely.
ââŠBecause nickinâ you outta here ainât the hard part.â The admission sounded dragged out of him against his will. His thumb scraped slowly against the side of the styrofoam cup. âYou reckon I ainât considered it? Smashinâ the head of every worthless cunt in this facility into paste, bombinâ this place to hell and back, and walkinâ you straight out the front doorâjust capital?â
His eyes flicked toward the observation deck. âAlright. So then what?â Silence stretched briefly before the stranger answered himself. âYou kill one bastard, another takes his place. Burn this place down, they build another somewhere else. Different walls. Same bloody machine.â His jaw tightened faintly. âAnother lab. Another kid. Another version of you.â
âBut there wonât be another me,â John protested immediately. âIâm irreplaceable.â
Something in the strangerâs expression twistedâlike the thought had arrived faster than he could stop it, and he hated that it made sense. ââŠAye,â he muttered at last. The agreement sounded reluctant. Almost bitter. âThatâs part of the problem.â
The stranger leaned back slightly in the chair, dragging his gaze away as though the conversation itself had become irritating, his expression settling into something older and worn down. âMaybe youâre just a rotten egg from the start. Maybe I drag you outta here and you still grow up into some right evil little cunt anyway.â
John frowned. That wasnât fair. It felt unfair in a way he couldnât fully articulate, which made it worse. But underneath the irritation, something warmer flickered inside his chestâstrange and secretly thrilled. The man had kept thinking about him this entire time. Planning around him. Like he mattered enough to be included in things.
The stranger stared into the coffee for several long seconds, his expression as murky as the dark liquid inside the cup, before speaking again, quieter this time. âAnd if I dragged you outta here tomorrow, what then?â His thumb pressed harder into the styrofoam cup until it creaked softly inward. âSome agency lot gets their hands on you? Government shoves you in another cage and turns you into some Stars-and-Stripes attack dog? Some poor bastards get told theyâre adoptinâ a lonely little boy and wind up housinâ a blue-eyed nuclear warhead who can punch through concrete if he throws a strop? In the end, win or lose, youâll just end up as someone elseâs dog.â He scoffed harshly. âThatâs not savinâ you, son. Thatâs just movinâ the problem.â His gaze dropped back to the coffee as he muttered, almost reluctantly, ââŠTruth is, I wouldnât know what comes after if I did that.â
The worst thing about the strangerâs honesty was that it did not sound like a refusal but something worseâlike a line he had walked up to too many times in his head and never crossed because he hated whatever waited on the other side. Like some part of him believed John might already be safer in this cage.
Johnâs breath hitched faintly. Then his face tightened with sudden anger, as though the feeling itself had betrayed him. He snapped his gaze away from the glass, his shoulders stiffening and his pupils ignited into glowing red pinpricks, turning his back on the conversation like he could physically shut it out. He ignored him for the rest of the night.
After that, things changed between them.
The stranger began staying longer. Sometimes they talked, though nothing about anything important. He dodged personal questions with sarcasm, profanity, or silence. But he complained a lot. About fluorescent lighting. About America. About the food. About Vought. About indoctrination. About superheroes most of all.
Especially superheroes.
âYou donât even know any superheroes,â John had pointed out to him once.
The stranger gave him a long, unreadable look. âYouâd be surprised.â
The first time the stranger voluntarily touched him happened because of an accident.
An experiment had gone wrong.
John never remembered afterward what had triggered it exactly. Only the screaming. The alarms. The nauseating smell of burned flesh filling the chamber while red emergency lights flashed overhead. Someone had been forcing him to maintain sustained heat-vision output beyond safe thresholds, and eventually his control had slipped. The beams carved violently through everyone trapped inside the room with him, leaving behind mutilated torsos and limbs.
By the time they dragged him into the Bad Room as punishment, his head throbbed and every muscle in his body ached. He sat curled against the wall in the corner of the room, trying very hard not to cry because crying only made the adults write longer reports. Today he had disappointed everyone. He had ruined the experiment early. He didnât know when they would let him out this time.
The stranger appeared a few minutes later. He took one look at Johnâs face and went still. His gaze flicked once toward the security camera bolted into the ceiling corner, then over the bare white walls, before his expression hardened into something controlled and sharp. His jaw tightened hard enough to show beneath the dark stubble shadowing his cheeks. âCourse theyâre running it like a black-site,â he muttered under his breath, the words slipping out like something he had not meant to say aloud. He sent John a brief, assessing look. âArenât you meant to be their prize asset? Youâre always locked up like this.â
Johnâs eyes stung unexpectedly. He whispered, âI didnât mean to.â
The strangerâs expression shifted, but not at him. The muscle in his jaw twitched once. âYeah,â he said quietly. âI know.â
No scientist had ever said that before.
He remembered the exact moment afterward because it had been the first time someone chose to stay close to him. The man lowered himself onto the floor beside the wall with a weary exhale, one knee raised loosely while fluorescent light carved harsh shadows across his face.
John looked up at him through damp lashes.
âDonât start,â the man warned.
John hesitated before inching forward carefully, like approaching a nervous animal. Then, acting entirely on instinct, he pressed his face against the strangerâs chest and grabbed fistfuls of his coat.
The stranger went rigid instantly. Every muscle locked beneath the heavy wool coat.
For one terrible second, John thought he had ruined everything. He expected the man to shove him away. But slowly, like it physically pained him, the stranger relaxed again with a rough exhale through his nose. âChrist,â he hissed through his teeth. âYouâre strong enough to snap me in half.â
John stayed there anyway, cheek pressed against the coarse wool while he listened to the heavy, steady beat beneath it. Tentatively now, his grip loosened from the fabric just enough for his hands to slide higher instead, fingers curling around the strangerâs side and back like he was testing how much closer he was allowed to get.
The stranger did not break. Did not panic. Did not recoil.
That was new.
John studied him intently. With complete sincerity, he asked, âDo you love me?â
The stranger stared at him like he had genuinely started speaking another language. For one long moment, incredulity cracked through the hostility and exhaustion on his face. âWhat the fuckâre you on about?â he said at last.
John frowned slightly. âI asked somebody else once.â
That made the stranger pause. Wariness crept in as he interrogated, âAnd?â
âShe said yes.â
John had remembered the wet sound, the way the tutorâs body had folded wrong when he hugged her too tightly because he had been happy and wanted to test her. She had sounded frightened right before her spine broke beneath his arms. Afterward, the scientists no longer allowed tutors to be near him unsupervised or make physical contact.
But this man was still here. He hadnât exploded into red pulp and shattered bone.
The strangerâs expression shifted subtly at the silence that followedâlike he understood far more from it than John meant to say. His eyes flicked once toward Johnâs arms still wrapped partly around him before returning to his face again. A moment passed, and the stranger sighed like a man surrendering to a fate he deeply resented. A mocking smirk surfaced as he scoffed, âThatâs not how any of this works, yeah? You oughta buy the lady dinner first.â
John disliked the answer immediately. So he tightened his hold around him instead.
The stranger sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth, somewhere between pain restrained through sheer stubbornness and disbelief, as the force of the hug nearly lifted him off the floor. He hissed, âBloody hellâeasyââ But he still did not flail or shove him away. Instead, against his own judgement, he shifted an arm around Johnâs back and steadied him there. Very carefully, clumsily, like he expected this to end badly for him somehow, he pulled John closer instead.
The warmth hit immediately.
Real warmth. Not heated blankets fresh from sterilization units or the artificial temperature control systems inside the facility. Human warmth. The steady pressure of another heartbeat beneath layers of fabric. The rough weight of arms that held him without trembling. The way Dr. Vogelbaum used to let John cuddle against him before heâd turned five or six, before the man became colder and started keeping his distance. There were long stretches in the Bad Room where nothing touched him at all, where even sound felt distant and unreliable, and his mind learned to track time by sensation instead of clocks, clinging to the smallest changes in sound or contact as proof that anything outside the walls still existed. In those stretches, he could not switch his awareness off at all, because stopping meant losing track of whether anything was still there.
Johnâs breathing changed, becoming more shallow at the thought of being left in that kind of silence again. He melted against the stranger instantly, burying his face against the manâs chest and inhaling him deeply. The man smelled nothing like the laboratory staff. No antiseptic. No bleach. No latex gloves. He smelled like cold rain, cigarette smoke soaked into old fabric, distilled spirits, stale tea leaves, gunpowder residue, and outside. Johnâs fingers tightened reflexively in the fabric. The heat of the manâs body became the only thing John could focus on, as though it were the only proof he had that he was still here. He could not afford to loosen his grip, in case the man left him without meaning to.
The man stiffened again but did not let go. âClingy little pissant, arenât you?â he muttered roughly near the top of Johnâs head. âThere you go. Youâre not dying. Youâll heal. Easy now.â One rough hand lifted uncertainly, hovering like he had forgotten where human contact was supposed to go before settling awkwardly against Johnâs back. His other hand tangled in the darker blond roots of Johnâs shoulder-length hair, the calloused pad of his thumb stroking the sensitive fine hairs at his nape.
The warmth felt unbearable. Wonderful. Safe. Addicting. Much better than the tutor or Dr. Vogelbaum, because this time he didnât have to worry about breaking anything.
John liked it.
After that incident, it became a pattern neither of them acknowledged aloud: the stranger appeared; John gravitated toward him automatically.
It had become instinct to seek his friend out after difficult examinations. Sometimes the man stood behind his chair while scientists discussed Johnâs pain tolerance like they were reviewing machinery specifications. Sometimes he sat beside him during drills, one arm draped idly against the back of the chair while the most recently hired female tutor forced John through another endless set of social conditioning exercises projected across a screen.
Sometimes, while the man made cutting, sarcastic remarks at the screenâmocking everything on it as if personally offended by American patriotism, God, superheroes, and the entire Vought facilityâJohn would sneakily snatch his hand and lace their fingers together so it could pass for nothing more than a muscle spasm to anyone watching. The man never interrupted it. He only glanced down now and then with a faintly unreadable look, continuing his commentary as though nothing at all had changed, though his fingers never quite pulled away as quickly as they used to.
And sometimes, on the worst nights after particularly brutal experiments, John fell asleep curled against his side while the man muttered colorful profanities and low, mean threats under his breathâbut never actually made him move away, even when he grumbled that this was a terrible fucking idea and that John was suffocating him. The complaints always sounded thinner by the end of the night anyway, worn down into ritual more than resistance, accompanied by a million irritated excuses about why he apparently couldnât be bothered enforcing it properly again. Sometimes John would wake to find a thin blanket dragged back over his shoulders, as if it had been adjusted there without him noticing. If he was lucky, the first thing he saw upon waking was the man still there beside him, half-asleep and breathing steadily, his body still warm from where John had spent the entire night wrapped around him like an octopus clinging instinctively to heat.
In sleep, all the fight drained out of the man, and John could stare for hours at the sharp line of his mouth, the rough shadow of dark stubble, the exhaustion carved permanently into his hollowed cheeks, feeling something tight and possessive seize painfully inside his chest at the sight of someone so vicious allowing himself to become defenseless beside him. Nobody else got to see this version of him. Nobody else even knew that he existed. The thought filled John with a strange, secret thrill, because this was something only he had been given. The stranger belonged nowhere inside the facility except beside him, and John had already started thinking of that as a fact instead of a hope. The idea of someone else discovering him first produced a hot, immediate resentment John did not know how to explain. Whenever the orderlies entered the room and interrupted them to escort John away for routine tests, irritation immediately flared. The notion of someone else discovering his friend, speaking to him first, taking his attention away for too long, or making the man leave produced a sharp, ugly feeling that coiled hot and tight inside Johnâan instinctive hostility toward anything that threatened to separate them.
On those half-awake early mornings, warm from the shared body heat and reluctant to move, John found his mind drifting sleepily toward thoughts he usually tried not to examine too closely. He had spent years watching happy families in advertisements and training films press themselves together on couches or lean into each other across kitchen counters, all of it looking artificial and overlit and fake. None of it had ever felt convincing until now. For the first time, John understood why people kept reaching for each other all the time. Why they climbed into each otherâs laps. Why they shared beds. Why they sounded so desperate whenever someone threatened to leave. He understood why ordinary people seemed so frightened of being alone.
This looked nothing like the polished little performances of the American nuclear family from training films and advertisements. Theirs was rougher, meaner, full of sarcasm, cigarettes, exhaustion, and long silences. The man looked permanently one bad day away from killing somebody, yet John still wanted to stay curled against his side every morning anyway, greedy for the rare moments when the stranger let him close while still soft with sleep. To John, they never felt like permission so much as small conquered victories, things the man simply failed to stop in time.
Sometimes John caught himself wanting to stay there long after waking, even when he was supposed to move, simply because the manâs hand resting absently against his back made something deep inside him go painfully soft. He noticed things he did not mean to notice: the slow drag of the manâs breath against the top of his head, the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath him, the hard shift of muscle when the stranger readjusted his position under Johnâs weight without fully waking, the involuntary tightening of his arms whenever John shifted even slightly closer, like his body responded before thought could intervene.
John noticed it happened before he understood why: his body always grew warmer when the stranger was close, as if it recognized something his mind had not yet named. The heat of him sometimes lingered long after contact, clinging to Johnâs skin in a way he found difficult to ignoreâa warmth that stayed beneath his skin like a second presence, making his nerves come alive and leaving him briefly disoriented once it disappeared, as though something essential had been removed without warning. Even when they werenât touching anymore, John still retained the impression of it, a phantom sensation that blurred the line between âtogetherâ and âapartâ until the distinction no longer felt entirely real to him.
The stranger grumbled every time John climbed onto him, complaining that he was âcrushinâ me balls,â but he still opened his arms anyway, as if some reflex deeper than thought had already decided this was where John was supposed to fit. John would half-sprawl over him or curl into his lap without thinking, arms cinched tightly around his broad shoulders and legs wrapped stubbornly around his waist, draped over him with the careless certainty of someone who no longer questioned whether he was welcome there. Sometimes the boyâs grip lingered longer than it should have, fingers tightening unconsciously in the thick fabric of the manâs coat or pressing just a little too firmly into the hard muscle beneath it, as though checking he was still solid, still real, still there beneath Johnâs hands. John touched him constantly without thinking about it. His fingers drifted toward the rough bristles along the manâs jaw, fascinated by the prickling scrape against his fingertips. Sometimes he hooked his hand around the back of the strangerâs neck just to feel the coarse warmth there beneath dark hair dampened faintly with perspiration. Other times he dragged curious fingers across the broad slope of his shoulders or rested absentmindedly against the heavy warmth of the manâs chest, feeling the steady vibration of his voice through bone and fabric whenever he spoke. The stranger would exhale sharply every time, annoyed but unsurprised now, shifting beneath the attention with the weary resignation of someone who had already adapted to being treated this way, like accommodating Johnâs clinginess had become a routine his body performed before his mind could object.
Sometimes Johnâs face ended up close enough to feel the strangerâs breath when he spoke, warm and edged with irritation against his cheek, the exhale brushing his skin in a way that made him go still without understanding why. His focus narrowed instinctively to tiny physical details: the movement of the manâs mouth between words, the faint drag of breath through his teeth, the scrape of dark stubble whenever Johnâs temple brushed too close to his jaw, the dense heat trapped beneath layers of wool and cotton. Sitting across the manâs lap like this, John could feel the hard spread of powerful thighs beneath him and the subtle flex of muscle whenever the stranger shifted position under his weight to alleviate the numbness in his legs. Sometimes John resented the thin cotton fabric of his own uniform and the heavier layers the stranger wore, irrationally frustrated by the barrier between their skin. He did not fully understand why he wanted the contact stripped down to something more direct, or what the stranger thought was so inappropriate about the notion of their bodies touching skin-to-skin, firmly rebuffing John in the few rare occasions he managed to muster enough courage to boldly ask the stranger if they could. The warmth never felt close enough once John became aware of it.
Even wrapped around the stranger like this, with his cheek pressed against the rough wool of his coat and the steady beat of his heart thudding beneath them both, some irrational part of him still wanted more. The feeling never resolved cleanly in his mind; it only circled back to the same impossible conclusion that bodies were not built to be as close as he wanted. Sometimes, in the blunt, monstrous logic of his mind, he imagined solving the problem physically. He could pry the manâs ribs apart and crawl inside the space beneath them, nesting somewhere in the warm pulsating red tissue and tendons, pressing his cheek close to the heartbeat he already listened for more than his own. But then his friend would die, and John did not want that, a hard instinctive rule that stopped him every time the thought threatened to become real.
He only wished it was possible for their bodies to be interconnected even more, but he didnât know how to make it happen.
The space between them always felt too small and yet never small enough.
The stranger would lean his head back every time Johnâs nose and blue eyes loomed a little too close for comfort, a habitual avoidance more than rejection, yet he never pushed John off properlyâonly shifted slightly, settling him back into place in a way that felt less like refusal and more like begrudging maintenance, as if his hands already knew where Johnâs body belonged even when he pretended otherwise. He barely even twitched now when John nosed his jugular.
He came closer than anything else John had ever been given, and that alone made it difficult for John to imagine a version of himself that did not eventually end up here again, wrapped tightly around this man with his cheek pressed against the warmth of his throat and his legs tangled over the strangerâs. Sometimes their breathing gradually synchronized without John realizing it had happened until he noticed the rise and fall beneath him matching his own. Sometimes he could feel the strangerâs heartbeat through the exact places where their bodies touchedâslow, heavy, unpanickedâand John would unconsciously go still just to listen to it better. Being held against him long enough made separation itself begin to feel physically wrong, like being peeled away from a source of heat his body had already decided it needed.
John started imagining impossible little things without meaning to. He pictured it in fragments the way he had seen family videos: the man existing permanently in the same spaces as him, just the weight of him beside John every morning and every night, sarcastic remarks aimed only at him, cigarettes crushed out beside half-finished conversations, the strangerâs voice carrying lazily through another room while John followed the sound of him without thinking, no doors closing between them, no one taking him away. Nobody else touching him first. Nobody else becoming more important. Nobody else being allowed close enough to matter. Nobody else learning the shape of him the way John already had. No one else making the stranger laugh under his breath in that rare, unwilling way John had already started hoarding inside himself like hard-won trophies. A life where nothing interrupted them and nobody else mattered. A life where warmth did not require permission, because he was always already there waiting for him.
John had started craving the strangerâs attention with an intensity that embarrassed him whenever he looked at it closely. Not just the comfort of it. The permanence. The idea of waking beside the same person often enough for it to become ordinary. Necessary. Wanted. The thought of someone finding him special made something warm and aching unfurl in Johnâs chest, too intense to name properly, settling low and heavy as he leaned closer instead of thinking about it too hard. Whenever the man focused entirely on himâeven brieflyâJohn felt a vicious pulse of satisfaction he could not explain, like winning something he had not realized other people were capable of taking away.
This didnât feel like the kind of soft affection in any language John had been taught; it felt stranger than that, messier and sharper around the edges, like the accidental collision of two damaged souls that had been searching for each other across the boundaries of logic, space, and time, except it didnât feel equal in his mind so much as inevitable, as if the stranger had simply drifted through everything else until he had no choice but to stop here. Like someone who had found him specifically and, in doing so, had stopped being something that could belong anywhere else except here with him. The stranger was like a stray animal that hissed and batted at him whenever he got too close, only to keep returning anyway, circling back into his space as if it had already decided on him without ever understanding why. It tested its sharp teeth against his hand, found it could not hurt him, and still returned to rub against his fingers anyway, as if returning to his side had become the only shape its existence could takeâeven if it did not know that yet.
The idea arrived with terrifying certainty: if this was what having someone meant, then there was no reason it should ever stop being this person.
Whatever this was, it did not arrive all at once. It rooted itself quietly inside John until every disappearance felt immediate and wrong, like something important had been taken from him without permission.
Heâd started enduring the Bad Room more easily because he now expected, not hoped, that the stranger would eventually appear beside him afterward. Sometimes he sat with John through examinations no one else acknowledged as cruel, his presence steady even when Johnâs body was pushed beyond what it should have been able to tolerate. When John screamed, sometimes it was the manâs accented voice he heard beneath the alarms and the doctors, saying things like takes more than this tâkeep a nasty little cunt like you down, or câmon then, yâstubborn bastard, we ainât done yet, Iâll drag your bleedinâ carcass over the finish line myself if I have to, or there yâare; mean bastardâs still kickinâ. His voice cut through the noise with unnatural clarity, low and rough and impossible to lose beneath everything else, and somehow it always made John hold on harder anyway.
John began looking for his friend without thinking every time the doors opened, listening for footsteps that never came because the stranger never arrived in any normal way. Sometimes he would appear only after John had been left alone long enough for the silence and isolation to start feeling claustrophobic. The older man made a point to complain every single time John dragged him into the steel trap of his embrace or when John greedily burrowed into his lap and wrapped his legs as far as they could go around that solid, sturdy waist like he belonged there, holding on like letting go was optional, though heâd always allowed it.
Sometimes John listened to that stable heartbeat instead of the scientists, instead of his own thoughts or the mean voice inside his head. It had become his favorite sound, tied only with the clipped rasp of the older manâs accent cutting through sterile silence to mock everything in it without discrimination. His BPM never accelerated into panic beneath Johnâs attention like everyone elseâs did, and it never wavered either. It stayed regular, measured, and unbothered, as constant as a clock, as if it had learned to be that way around him alone.
He buried his face against the manâs throat and breathed him in slowly, lingering there longer than necessary simply because he could. Salt from sweat lingered faintly against warm skin beneath the collar of the wool coat. Cigarette smoke clung stubbornly to the fabric, layered over distilled spirits, cold rain, stale tea leaves, and the unmistakable living warmth of another human body. Sometimes John pressed closer just to feel the rough scrape of the strangerâs unshaven jaw against his forehead or temple when he shifted. Other times he hooked both arms tightly around the manâs shoulders and simply stayed there listening to the steady rhythm beneath his ribs. John memorized every sensation greedily: the texture of rough fabric beneath his fingers, the heat trapped in the strangerâs lap, the weight of heavy arms settling around him, the deep vibration of his voice through his chest whenever he spoke too close. If he learned it well enough, repeated it often enough, some irrational part of him believed he might eventually make the stranger permanent.
Over time, John began noticing changes. At first, he thought he was imagining it.
The man continued growing younger.
Maybe not dramatically. Nor did it happen all at once.
But it was enough that John began anticipating it every time he appeared.
The differences were small enough to doubt. A detail here or two that almost didnât stay consistent between visits. Some of the gray threaded through the manâs dark hair seemed to fade strand by strand. The heavy beard sometimes shortened into stubble, as if time couldnât decide how long it was allowed to remain. The deep exhaustion in his face retreated little by little, though it never disappeared entirely. The rigid tension in his shoulders loosened on certain days before locking back into place, like his body was always braced for violence even in silence. Sometimes he arrived bleeding. Sometimes he arrived looking older and furious enough to kill somebody. Sometimes staring at John with an expression that felt almost haunted. Other times he looked younger. Less ruined. Like time itself could not settle on what shape it wanted him to wear.
But what changed most wasnât just on the surface.
The stranger frequently glanced at him when he thought John wasnât paying attention, or when he didnât realize John was peeking at him in return. The hatred in the manâs eyes never fully vanished whenever his gaze landed on John, and it never softened into anything too kind or gentle, nothing close to pity or sympathy. What replaced it, when his gaze sometimes lingered too long, was much more complicated. He had stopped looking at John like he wanted him dead. A new precedent took shape instead, a new kind of attention that made Johnâs stomach do several strange, bright little somersaults once he recognized it for what it wasâreluctance, like someone trying very hard not to care but failing spectacularly anyway.
This meant his friend was starting to care about him.
John noticed because he noticed everything that stayed long enough with him to matter.
One night, while sitting beside him on the floor of the Bad Room, John remarked, âYou keep changing.â
The stranger glanced sideways at him warily. âYeah?â
âYou look younger everytime.â What he didnât say was, Maybe youâll get to be around my age one day. Then he could have a true friend. A real playmate. John was almost giddy with anticipation for it.
The man had frozen in place. Only briefly. Then the stranger barked out a quiet laugh that sounded genuinely unhappy. âFantastic.â
John frowned. âWhy is that bad?â
The stranger stared at the opposite wall for several long seconds before speaking, like the answer had already been half-buried and he was digging it back up out of spite. âYou ever lose somethinâ important?â
John immediately thought about the blanket the scientists had confiscated after he accidentally tore it in half. âYes.â
The stranger gave another short, humorless laugh. âCourse you have.â Then he stared ahead again, jaw working faintly like he was chewing on the thought. âI donât mean toys or nothinâ like that. I mean thisâimagine losinâ bits of yourself. Little things. Stupid things. Memories you didnât even realise you were holdinâ onto. One day you wake up and thereâs a gap where somethinâ used to be,â he continued, voice roughening, âand you can feel itâs wrongâlike a piece of the puzzleâs missinââbut you canât remember what it was meant to be, or why you should even care.â
Another lull settled between them, longer this time.
John didnât fully understand what the big deal was. They were only memories. They could always make new ones. Better ones.
The scientists said that when John was ready to âgraduate,â he would be allowed outside the facility, to see the stars properly instead of through textbooks or films projected onto a wall. They said his body would not react like a normal humanâsâthat Compound V had altered him at a cellular level, making his tissues resistant to decompression injury and his cardiovascular system capable of sustaining oxygen saturation for far longer than baseline human limits. They called it âextreme altitude survivability under vacuum-adjacent exposure,â as if dressing it up in language made it less like what it really was.
In practice, it meant pressure did not crush him the way it crushed other people. His blood did not behave correctly under low oxygen. His lungs did not fail in the expected sequence. They said he could survive outside the atmosphere for controlled durations with monitoring systems stabilizing his internal chemistryâlike he was something designed for a place where people were not meant to live.
He had already passed the high-G training, the spinning chamber tests that crushed his body into the seat until breathing felt optional, and the pressure simulations that made even the adults vomit and black out behind observation glass. They said it proved what they already knewâJohnâs body didnât behave like other peopleâs.
After that, they told him he would be able to go higherâinto orbit.
He would be able to look down at Earth the way the first astronauts had, except this time it would be so much easier. A natural-born spaceman, what he had been made for. He wouldnât need oxygen the way normal people needed in space, only carefully controlled reserves and stabilizing injections to keep his blood from destabilizing in thin atmosphere.
And he would not go alone.
He would take his special friend with him. The thought felt so obvious to John that it barely qualified as a decision. The stranger would be there beside him above everything else, where nobody could watch them or take anything away or put things back the wrong way. A secret place, just the two of them, where nothing could disappear unless John decided it did. Somewhere quiet enough that the world couldnât reach in and change him again.
No fear. Just space and silence and the planet turning slowly beneath their heels like something small enough to understand.
Then they could fly to London. Then wherever else he wanted. Anywhere he decided. Anywhere they allowed him to go. Like the world would finally open up and make sense once he was big enough to hold all of it at once.
But something about his friend showing distress made John feel wrong inside anyway. John leaned forward and tugged lightly at the strangerâs wool sleeve. âBut you remember me.â
The man didnât answer immediately.
Johnâs voice softened, though the insistence underneath it remained absolute. âYouâre not allowed to forget me. You can forget everyone else. But I am the most important person in your life.â
Silence stretched.
Then the stranger exhaled roughly through his nose. The sound was neither a laugh nor agreement, but something caught painfully between the two. ââŠWhat a riot,â he muttered at last, eyes still fixed ahead. His mouth hooked into a mirthless smirk. âNow thatâd be a fuckinâ disaster, wouldnât it?â
Over time, the medallion around the manâs neck vanished. John noticed the absence immediately, because the stranger almost never changed anything else about himself. Now, instead of the St. Christopher medallion, there was a heavy gold ring on his left hand.
The gold caught beneath the fluorescent lights first, too clean to belong to this place. It was set with blue sapphires, dark rubies, and flecks of diamond that looked almost like stars pressed into metal. The rubies sat embedded in the gold like tiny droplets of dried blood. It looked beautiful in an eye-catching, flashy way, at once personal and expensiveâunlike anything inside Vought.
Red, white, and blue.
John could not stop staring at it.
The stranger noticed immediately and seemed almost unsettled by its presence. He curled his fingers inward sharply, like hiding it had become reflexive. His voice went curt. âDonât.â
John ignored him completely and reached forward anyway.
The stranger flinched hard enough that John felt it travel through his entire hand, like he had cornered him somehow. But he still didnât pull away.
âDid somebody give it to you?â
A long stretch of silence followed.
John waited patiently while the man stared down at the ring like he had almost forgotten it was there. Anger flickered across his face first. Then something infinitely sadder followed after it. Grief, maybe, or denial, raw enough to change the air in the room. His thumb brushed once across the sapphires, not affectionately, but like someone pressing into an old bruise just to confirm it still hurt.
âYou were married?â
The stranger looked at him intently then. Really looked at him. For one strange moment, something almost painful entered his expression.
John waited patiently.
ââŠSomethinâ like that,â he said eventually, the words sounding dragged out of him. âCanât confirm, but Iâve got a strong sneakinâ suspicion.â
John frowned. âHow would you not know who you got married to?â
The stranger let out a short, disbelieving laugh under his breath. âItâs someone who shouldâve fuckinâ known better. The pillock ruined my life.â
John still didnât think that answered the question properly. He looked back down at the manâs hand. âIf someone gives you something beautiful, that means they care about you.â
âYou never know how to mind your own business, do you?â the stranger muttered. âYouâve got no bloody idea what care looks like.â
âI know it suits you more than the necklace you used to wear.â
For a brief moment, the stranger looked genuinely caught off guard. His eyes snapped toward Johnâs face, as though reevaluating every decision that had led him here. âIs that right?â
John nodded seriously. âIt looks prettier on you. I like it.â
Something unreadable moved across the manâs face then; grief tangled with disgust and a kind of sickened disbelief, like the compliment itself had landed somewhere it shouldnât have. He went completely silent for several long seconds before muttering, sounding faintly appalled with himself for reacting at all, âChrist aliveâŠ.â
John kept holding his hand.
The stranger let him.
And every single time afterward, Johnâs attention drifted back toward the ring first. Toward the sapphires the same color as his own eyes. Toward the gold that reminded him faintly of his hair. Toward the rubies embedded into the band like blood trapped beneath sunlight. The whole thing looked dangerous and beautiful.
John liked dangerous things.
The ring suited the man better than the medallion ever had. The old necklace had looked small and ordinary on him. This didnât. This looked expensive. Important. Like something meant to belong to somebody powerful.
He did not understand why that seemed to upset the stranger so badly.
Once, while John rested half-asleep against his chest, he heard the stranger mutter something so quietly it barely reached him.
âYou were supposed to be a monster.â
John tilted his head upward sleepily. âWhat?â
But the stranger only stared at him strangely, blue eyes reflecting in hazel ones. Something almost mournful flickered there before it disappeared. Then his handâscarred, rough, impossibly gentleâsettled briefly against the back of Johnâs hair.
âIâm goinâ need you to remember a couple names for me,â he murmured, his accent rumbling against Johnâs cheek. âThese are the people yâshouldnât kill. And the tossers yâoughta avoid trustinâ, if yâcan help it. Repeat after meâŠ.â
John repeated every name obediently, warm and drowsy beneath the steady weight of the manâs heartbeat.
Another night, curled half-asleep against the strangerâs chest while fluorescent lights hummed overhead, John whispered, âWill you always come back?â
The stranger went completely still.
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The only sound was the slow, steady rhythm of his heartbeat beneath Johnâs ear. John felt it shift under his cheek, a brief uneven stutter before settling again, as if something in him had momentarily slipped out of place.
ââŠYâknow what the bloody irony of all this?â the man muttered at last, not quite speaking to John. His eyes had gone somewhere distant, his gaze glassy and unfocused. His voice sounded bitter and hollow. âYâspend long enough huntinâ monsters, you start believinâ thereâs always one clean solution no one elseâs seen. Maybe itâs just one clever diabolical virus. One miracle cure. One crowbar to the skull of one invincible caped cunt and suddenly itâs all over.â His arms around John tightened without him noticing. âYâtell yourself youâre puttinâ down a rabid dog. That itâs a mercy kill at that point. Some proper fuckinâ justice that was a long time cominâ. Like it makes everythinâ after worth a damnâand wipes the slate clean.â His voice came out harsher now, like the thought itself curdled in his mouth. ââŠExcept it doesnât.â
John frowned sleepily and tilted his head up. âWhat?â
The stranger blinked once, as though remembering he was not alone. The tension in his face reset into something controlled. His hand moved automatically, brushing blond hair back from Johnâs forehead, thumb lingering for a fraction longer than necessary at his temple. âNever you mind, dove,â he said more gently, his tone smoothing into something almost careful, deep and velvetyâexactly the way John liked hearing the manâs voice. He watched as John predictably melted under it. âYouâre alright. Thatâs all you need to know. Nothing for you to carry.â
His fingers slid back into Johnâs hair, scratching lightly at his scalp near the nape of his neck in a slow, absent rhythm. John immediately leaned into it before he could think, the sensation spreading pleasant tingles down his spine until his thoughts began to soften and drift.
ââŠTo answer your question,â the man added after a moment, quieter now, like it cost him something to say it, âyeah, kid. I always come back. Somebodyâs gotta make sure you donât go off the deep end and start believinâ your own bollocks about beinâ the second coming or some shite like that.â
His hand did not leave afterward. It stayed, steadying, as his thumb moved in slow circles against the sensitive skin at Johnâs nape. John nestled closer without thinking, arms tightening loosely around his shoulders and pressing his face against the dark whorls of chest hair beneath the open collar of his shirt as the motion of fingers in his hair anchored him in place.
The drag of fingers sifting through tangled blond strands, the steady throb of his heart, the smell of him, and his body heat surrounding himâeverything about this moment pushed every question from Johnâs mind one by one, until thought dissolved beneath a vacant, fuzzy haze. His eyes drooped as a feeling of contentment spread through him like a warm blanket. No outside noise reached him clearly anymore. Nothing intruded. Nothing demanded anything from him. All he had to do was remain here, petted and held and spoken to in that low and scratchy, velvety voice.
This was Johnâs piece of heaven.
And John, touch-starved and aching with it, decided he never wanted to let go of this comfort. The idea of him leaving became even more intolerable. Much more inconceivable.
So when the stranger stopped coming, John did not understand it at first.
There was no warning. No goodbye.
One day John endured an entire cycle of tests alone. His friend had failed to appear. Not even when they strapped John in the restraints. Not when he was guided into the endless white rooms, or when the voices discussed him like a prototype that needed to be fine-tuned. The stranger never appeared beside the observation glass again. Never materialized in the corners of the room. Never interrupted the silence with a sarcastic mutter or a low insult aimed at the scientists.
John waited longer. Then longer stillâuntil the silence became unbearable.
He called out once.
No one answered.
He called again, louder this time, until the scientists finally pressed the intercom to check what was wrong.
Nothing was wrong, John insisted, his voice beginning to crack. But someone important was missing. He did not know how to explain properly, because theyâd never seen his friend.
By the time the realization settled properly inside him, something in him had already started fraying apart at the seams.
The incident that followed began as an escalation of ordinary noncompliance. John became less docile. He refused instructions during testing, then escalated further when containment staff attempted to restrain him, and the situation rapidly destabilized beyond usual procedural control. He was not displaying defiance so much as panic, a mounting, disoriented terror that someone important to him had just been taken from him and he was alone again. For a split second, the thought surfaced that the stranger had left himâthat he had been abandoned after all despite everythingâand the idea landed like a physical blow before being violently rejected a heartbeat later as impossible, because he had been good, he had been right, he had done everything correctly and someone must have taken him instead. No, no, no! Get your hands off me! Stop touching me! He didnât want them. Not them. Not now. Not when he was gone. The person that he wantedâhe wantedâ!
Give him back!
A sonic scream shattered the observation glass first. Observation windows burst outward in glittering sheets. Restraints snapped apart. The reinforced steel door warped under a pressure it had never been designed to survive. Alarms erupted too late across the containment level while his heat vision carved molten scars through the walls of the Bad Room, and the adjacent thermal chamber to the left of it flared and buckled as structural heat bled into the shared wall, turning the entire section into a furnace of collapsing steel and screaming metal. The air filled with smoke and the acrid stink of burning metal.
Scientists shouted over one another somewhere beyond the smoke. Guards rushed the corridor. Sprinkler systems hissed uselessly against temperatures hot enough to warp steel.
Somewhere inside the chaos, John thought he heard the strangerâs voice one final time, distant and fraying apart like a memory unraveling at the edges.
Then even that disappeared.
And then, just as suddenly, it stopped.
When his fit finally ended, the Bad Room barely resembled a room anymore. John sat alone in the wreckage breathing hard, surrounded by twisted metal and shattered glass, still waiting for somebody who never came back.
He did not understand absence yet.
Only loss.
Eventually, the facility cleaned the damage, documented the casualties, and filed the incident away beneath containment reports and behavioral evaluations. The days continued. New scientists rotated in. The destroyed part of the building was renovated. Tests resumed. Time inside Vought moved forward the way it always did: cold, efficient, indifferent.
And eventually, because children survived by forgetting what hurt too badly to carry forever, the stranger faded the way all things inside the facility eventually did. Not gone. Just distant. A memory that no longer bled every time John touched it.
But sometimes, late at night when the fluorescent lights hummed too loudly and the isolation pressed close around him, John still curled instinctively toward the empty space beside him before remembering there was nobody there. Sometimes he could almost feel the phantom weight of an arm settling around his shoulders, or hear the low rasp of that exhausted British accent muttering insults into the dark like it had never left at all. The impressions always vanished the moment he tried to focus on them directly, leaving only cold sheets and silence behind.
Even so, he kept listening for him.
And for a few aching seconds, he would wonder whether his imaginary friend had ever really been imaginary at all.
It was at Homelanderâs superhero debut when William was noticed by him.
In fact, Homelander could not pinpoint what exactly compelled him to spot him. (Of course, in interviews years later, heâd insist now that their reunion had been predestined.)
It was a packed crowd at Vought International. The limelight had shifted from Homelander to Black Noirâthe Current No.1 Super on Voughtâs leaderboardâwho was on stage, soaking up all the adoration.
Peering over the sea of reporters and journalists crowded in what used to be the auditorium, it was a relentless cacophony of noise and camera flashes. Yet, it was a cameraman in the back who had snatched Homelanderâs attention. A tall, hooded figure. Dark-haired. Handsome. Unimpressed, his features resembled a sourpuss observing the large 3D-mapped projection.
Homelander couldnât put a finger on it but he thought heâd seen him before. Cloaked in the shadows, even with the blinding stagelights and their distance, he could smell it: the scent of penniesâdried blood. It was infused into the personâs clothes which smelled of laundry detergent and bleach.
Activating his X-ray vision, Homelander could see the scars on his body. The professional Panasonic camcorder and the hooded parka could not hide the fact that the person was built like a brickhouse, strong and fit.
There was a concealed firearm holstered under his clothes. It looked real.
Ex-soldier? Other worst-case scenarios flew across Homelanderâs head. Mercenary? âŠTerrorist?
Raking his sight over the manâs body, his focus stilled at the identification badge which immediately looked authentic:
Special Agent William J. Butcher.
Active CIA Operations Officer. Department: Clandestine Service.
Oh shit. Homelander was taken aback. The CIAâs here?
(TBC)
(A/N) - Oooh, a certain someone had developed an innocent little puppy crush on âhis imaginary best friend.â How sad when you think about the implications though; a young John forms an unhealthy, codependent instant attachment on the first stranger who had been âthe nicestâ to him and gave him the emotional validation that he needed (which ups the dramatic irony of it all since a young John had grown attached to his would-be murderer from the original future timeline (S5)) during this pivotal period when the frontal lobe of Johnâs brain hadnât fully finished developing yet and he still craved protection/ tender affection (*coughs* bro, Billy killed a bunch of Vought personnel during this time to see if their deaths would make everything betterâand John misinterpreted it as protection and âchoosing him.â I like to think the emotional irony lands hard when we see Billy accidentally becoming Johnâs safe place while talking to him like a gruff bastard who absolutely does not realize heâs acting nurturing. Yâcan guess some new traumas, complexes, and behavioral reprogramming & a glimpse of HLâs newly-established early attraction to older (wo)men weâre seeding in here for present-day Homelander (you can bet Billyâs British accent, scent, and heartbeat are gonna be what HL fixates on), esp. the good olâ abandonment issues Billy had inadvertently saddled Homelander with because, in Johnâs mind, his good friend âhad randomly left him behind for no good reason when heâd been so good for himâ)âŠ. Well, whaddya think? I hope it was actually a little emotionally devastating. *chuckles* This entire flashback sequence is new and definitely not from the original Fix-It AU threadfic. What can I say? Watching the first seven episodes of S5 lit the fire under my butt outta some head shaking disappointment from a couple script decisions which made me churn out this completely brand new scene from that passion. đ (Though I did see a theoretical S5:E8 leak, and I gotta say, if itâs true, I donât hate it. Iâll be content with that kind of ending. It actually fits nicely for the premise of this Fix-It AU.) You can think of this flashback scene as the establishing prelude to transition into the main story, and is here mainly for context, set-up, and foreshadowing when Billy and Homelander reunite in the present as adults.
As always, please keep in mind that this sneak peek is taken from an earlier draft. You may or may not see some small changes when the final draft is uploaded to AO3.
(You can read the original Twitter threadfic here!)
An important reminder:
If all goes well, chapter 1 of the Fix It AU will be posted in a couple weeks. All thatâs left is changing the tenses to past tense, revising the abbreviations Iâd used, and adding a teeny bit more detail because I am a perfectionist and a try-hard. (I would like to post it by next week when the season finale ep airs, but itâs unlikely considering the scene where Iâd like to end the prologue. I might change my mind to post faster, but weâll see!)
UPDATE: Ch1 has been posted to AO3! You can read it here!
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4.9K New Wordcount Added to 'Simple Causality' ch1
(đ Yâcan read ch1 of the butchlander timetravel Fix-It AU on AO3!)
(Excerpt Context: the stranger = William Butcher)
Inevitably over time, John began to imagine impossible little things without meaning to. He assembled them from fragments borrowed from training films, educational videos, and stock photographs used during his socialization lessons: a small house with a white picket fence, a neatly trimmed lawn, a dog sleeping somewhere in the yard, and the stranger returning through the front door every evening exactly when he was supposed to. He imagined him shrugging off his coat onto the same chair every day, crushing out cigarettes on the porch, and complaining under his breath about work while John listened nearby. Sometimes there were other people in the happy domestic picture too. A woman appeared occasionally, smiling from a kitchen doorway or sitting beside the stranger on a sofa. Children appeared as well, borrowed from advertisements and old family sitcoms, laughing in the background while they played fetch with the dog. Neighbors waved from across the street. Yet whenever John tried to focus on the scene, his attention drifted stubbornly back to the stranger. The woman blurred first, her face becoming harder and harder to remember, until it was somehow John himself seated beside the stranger on the sofa. He sat beside the stranger at dinner. He rode in the passenger seat of his car. They watched the stars with his head resting against the strangerâs shoulder while fireworks burst somewhere beyond the backyard fence. If the neighbors intruded, eventually they disappeared too. There was never much reason for them to be there. Before long, only the stranger and John remained standing together outside the house.
Even in his imagination, John could not tolerate being pushed to the outskirts for long. The daydreams of the picture-perfect family restructured themselves around this. If the stranger laughed with someone else across the dinner table, the scene shifted until John was the one making him laugh. If he put an arm around someone, sooner or later that person faded from the picture and John found himself tucked against his side instead, as though they had only been keeping the place warm for him. If the stranger came home eager to see someone, it became John waiting for him. It was John who occupied the empty side of the bed at night. John who remained when the rest of the picture quietly fell away. Whenever someone occupied a place John wanted, he replaced them and happily continued the daydream.
These daydreams felt less like wish fulfillment than corrections, as though the world had made some sort of mistake and he was harmlessly putting everything back where they were supposed to be in his imagination. John had never lived in a house. He had never celebrated a birthday that was not orchestrated for observation. He had never sat around a dinner table with people who remained afterward. Yet he found himself returning to the fantasy again and again. He imagined eating meals seated across from the stranger every day. He imagined the stranger helping him carve a turkey at Thanksgiving, grumbling the entire time while John stood beside him stealing pieces from the cutting board. He imagined being shaken awake before dawn to watch the Fourth of July parade, both of them wrapped in blankets on the front porch while the neighborhood slowly came alive around them. He imagined standing in a hardware store aisle while the stranger spent twenty minutes comparing two nearly identical screwdrivers and insisting there was a difference. John never cared about the screwdrivers. He only liked that the stranger kept turning to show him each one anyway, as though his opinion mattered.
He imagined hearing the stranger swear from another room because a jar refused to open, then being summoned solely because nobody else in the house possessed super strength. He imagined standing beside him in the checkout line at a grocery store, listening to him complain about the price of tea while John leaned over and informed him that register seven would open in thirty seconds because the manager was already sending someone to relieve the cashier. The stranger never seemed surprised when he did things like that. He just muttered a distracted, âGood lad,â steered the cart in that direction, and trusted John to be right, as though overhearing conversations through three walls was perfectly ordinary. He imagined being summoned every December to place the star atop the Christmas tree. Not because anyone needed his powers, but because the stranger always insisted on waiting for him before decorating the top.
Sometimes the fantasies drifted toward odder little domestic problems. He imagined being sent outside to hold a flashlight while the stranger worked beneath the hood of a car, only for the stranger to become annoyed when John pointed out the exact faulty component using his X-ray vision and accidentally spoiled the entire exercise. He imagined being sent onto the roof to untangle Christmas lights while the stranger shouted contradictory instructions from the lawn below, then called him a smug little showoff when John finished too quickly; in the fantasy, John would always slow down after that, pretending the knots were harder than they were, because the stranger kept looking up at him while he worked. He also imagined standing in the driveway after a snowfall while the stranger cleared the sidewalk, stubbornly refusing help even though John could have cleared the entire street in seconds. The stranger complained bitterly about the cold the entire time while John strolled behind him grinning unabashedly, floating inches above the snow and carrying mugs of tea that never stayed cold for long because he absentmindedly kept them warm with his heat vision.
He imagined hearing that rough clipped accent drifting lazily from another room and following the sound without thinking, words dropping consonants and flattening together in ways John still did not entirely understand. He imagined hearing the kettle whistle from the opposite side of the house and already knowing tea was ready before anyone else did. Sometimes he imagined answering before the stranger even finished speaking, simply because he already knew what he was going to say, the way people who belonged to each other seemed to in films. He imagined television light flickering across the strangerâs face while they occupied the same space in comfortable silence, the stranger absently ruffling his hair, draping an arm across his shoulders, or simply reaching for him without needing a reason except wanting John close. He imagined the weight of the manâs presence becoming so ordinary that John stopped noticing it altogetherâjust the certainty of him somewhere nearby every morning and every night, making sarcastic remarks aimed only at John, crushing cigarettes out beside half-finished conversations, existing so consistently that the idea of losing him stopped feeling possible.
The stranger occupied every role at once. Sometimes he resembled the father figures from the training films, the protectors who came home from work, who fixed things around the house, and made everyone feel safe. Other times John cast him into the role reserved for the most important person in every photograph, every holiday gathering, and every happy endingâthe loving husband whom everyone waited for. The person everyone wanted. The person everyone was happiest to see walk through the door. John lingered on that detail more than any other. The people in those films always looked happiest at the moment someone came home. They smiled before a word was spoken. Before explanations. Before achievements. Before anyone had earned anything. They were simply happy that person existed and had returned. John could not stop thinking about that.
And in every version, John somehow became the person the stranger loved best. Sometimes he was the child being praised. Sometimes he was the brother, best friend, and confidante. Sometimes he was the person waiting at home while the stranger was away. Any role built around being loved, trusted, chosen, needed, or missed eventually became Johnâs.
Sometimes John became the strangerâs wife. Being the wife made perfect sense; imagining somebody else in the role did not. The wife was the person the stranger loved most, and John could never quite understand why that person wasnât already him. He imagined standing in the doorway when the stranger came home from work, listening for the familiar sound of his boots on the porch. He imagined the front door opening and the strangerâs face softening the moment he saw him. Sometimes the stranger crossed the room immediately, sweeping John into his arms before he had even put down the groceries and pecking his lips. John imagined setting aside a second cup of tea without needing to ask whether the stranger wanted one. He imagined hearing the stranger come home before anyone else could. The distant rhythm of a familiar heartbeat. Boots on the pavement. A muttered curse when the key caught in the lock. Sometimes John would already be opening the door by the time the stranger reached it. The look of startled amusement that followed never changed. He imagined knowing which side of the bed belonged to him and which side belonged to the stranger. Sometimes John imagined waiting up for him after dark, the television humming softly while red light leaked between his lashes. He would tilt his head and listen beyond the walls of the house, beyond the street, searching through a city full of voices and heartbeats until he found the one that mattered. He imagined recognizing that heartbeat instantly among millions of others and feeling relieved every time he found it. Then he would sit perfectly still and listen to it draw closer.
Other times John found himself occupying the other side of the picture. He became the one returning home instead, carrying groceries through the front door while the stranger waited for him. Sometimes John imagined coming home to find the stranger already waiting on the porch. The stranger always claimed he had simply stepped outside for a cigarette, but John knew better. He had been listening for him. Listening for the distant crack of a sonic boom somewhere beyond the horizon and pretending it wasnât the highlight of his day. John liked that version best. John sat at the head of the table while the stranger listened to him talk about his day. Sometimes the stranger interrupted only to ask questions, not because he needed answers, but because he wanted to hear John keep talking. Sometimes John fixed things around the house while the stranger followed him from room to room, pointing out what needed repairing and looking to John to handle it. Other times the stranger simply appeared beside him with a mug of tea and stayed there while John worked, content to watch. Sometimes the stranger was the one who rested his head against Johnâs shoulder while they watched television together. Sometimes he fell asleep there. John always remained perfectly still until he woke up.
In those versions, the stranger looked at him the way people in the training films looked at heroesâproud of him, certain of him, trusting him completely. He looked at John as though nothing bad could happen while he was there, as though every problem had already been solved the moment John walked into the room. As though John was not something to be studied, managed, tested, or observed, but someone worth depending on. Someone whose judgment could be trusted. Someone whose presence made the world feel safer. Someone people were relieved to see come home at the end of the day.
Most of all, the stranger looked at him as though he had never once doubted that John was good.
The thought of it made something warm and painful unfurl inside Johnâs chest. In those versions, the stranger never questioned him. Never watched him carefully. Never seemed to be waiting for him to disappoint him. He looked at John as though trust came naturally. As though belief came naturally. As though John had already proven himself and never needed to do so again. As though the stranger had looked at everything John was and found nothing to fear.
After a while, John stopped wanting to imagine him any other way.
Whatever role either of them took up, the ending remained the same. They came home to each other. They looked for each other first. They were happiest when they were together. Nobody else belonged at the center of the picture with them.
Sometimes, though, John caught himself lingering on the wife for a moment, trying to imagine her properly. He never got very far. Any effort never lasted. Sooner or later he found himself wondering why she was even there at all. Why she was sitting beside him when John could have been sitting there instead. Why she was the one waiting by the door when the stranger came home. Why she was the one the stranger kissed goodbye before leaving, and why she should have it simply because sheâd gotten there first. Why she was the one the stranger returned to at the end of the day. Why she deserved any of the strangerâs love and attention when John wanted it more, and why wanting it more wasnât enough to make it his.
What mattered was that they were a perfect family. A loving one. Sooner or later the stranger returned to John, sat beside John, shared a pillow with John, and chose John. Everything else rearranged itself around that outcome. Anyone else who tried to occupy that place, John gradually pushed aside. Whenever the strangerâs attention lingered too long on someone else, John found himself nudging that person farther from the center of the picture. A little farther. Then farther still. Onto the edge of the room. Out of the conversation. Out of the house. Until eventually they simply ceased to exist. Sometimes he did not even realize he was doing it until he looked back and discovered they were already gone. Before long, every road led back to the same destination: John sitting where they had sat, standing where they had stood, receiving the warm smiles and devotion that had originally belonged to someone else.
John regarded each disappearance as an improvement. Nothing important was lost. The stranger never seemed troubled by any of it. He turned toward John instead, and the world was made right again.
Every daydream arrived at the same conclusion eventually. If the stranger had a favorite person, why wouldnât it be John? If he had someone he loved most, why shouldnât that be John too?
If there could only be one person at the center of the strangerâs world, John never understood why anyone imagined it could be somebody else other than himself.
Like a child rearranging dolls in a dollhouse, John moved people wherever he pleased. The wife disappeared first. Then the children. Then the friends. Then everyone else. Sometimes only the dog stayed. Whenever someone stood between him and the stranger, John simply nudged them aside until they slipped out of view entirely. He never felt guilty. Guilt would have required believing they had as much claim to the stranger as he did. Once they were gone, it was difficult to remember why they had ever been there at all.
John never noticed anything unusual about his fantasies. He never questioned why everyone else disappeared, or why every family in that picture-perfect idyllic life eventually became a family of two. John only recognized what belonged to him and stopped seeing any reason for the rest to remain. The details hardly mattered. What mattered was that the stranger stayed every time. He was there when John woke up. He was there when John went to sleep. No locked doors or walls separated them. No observation glass stood between them. No one removed John for testing. No one escorted him away. No one else became more important. No one else learned the strangerâs habits, his moods, or the rare unwilling half-breaths of amusement that John had already begun collecting and hoarding like treasures. Piece by piece, the stranger had become more familiar to John than anything else in the world.
John even caught himself feeling homesick for it sometimes, before remembering none of it existed anywhere except inside his own head.
Whatever this was, it did not arrive all at once. The feeling rooted itself quietly inside John until every disappearance felt intolerably wrong, like something important had been taken from him without permission. Each absence left him hollowed out and restless, his attention snagging helplessly on the empty space where the stranger ought to have been until he finally returned to Johnâs line of sight.
Somewhere along the way, John had started craving the strangerâs attention with an intensity that embarrassed him whenever he examined it closely. Not just the comfort of it. The permanence. The idea of waking beside the same person often enough for it to become ordinary, to feel necessary, like he wanted to stay. The thought of being the most important person in someoneâs world made a strange ache unfurl in Johnâs chest, too intense to name properly. Whenever the stranger focused entirely on Johnâeven brieflyâhe felt a vicious pulse of elation he could not explain, like the world had been restored to its proper shape, and John occupied the exact place of importance he was meant to hold.
This didnât feel like the kind of soft affection described in his lessons. It felt even stranger than that, messier and harder to define, like the accidental collision of two damaged souls that had been searching for each other across the boundaries of logic, space, and time, as if the stranger had simply drifted through everything else until he had no choice but to stop here. Like someone who had found him specifically and, in doing so, had quietly become Johnâs. The stranger was like some half-feral stray dog that snarled and hissed and bared its teeth whenever John got too close, only to keep returning anywayâcircling back into his space as if it had already decided on him. It tested its sharp teeth against his hand, found it could not hurt him, and still returned to rub against his fingers, as if returning to his side had become the only shape its existence could takeâeven if it did not know that yet.
The idea arrived with terrifying certainty: if this was what having someone meant, then there was no reason it should ever stop being this person.
John started enduring the Bad Room more easily because he now expected, not hoped, that the stranger would eventually appear beside him afterward. Sometimes he sat with John through examinations no one else acknowledged as cruel, his presence steady even when Johnâs body was pushed beyond what it should have been able to tolerate. When John screamed, sometimes it was the manâs accented voice he heard beneath the alarms and the doctors, saying things like takes more than this tâkeep a nasty little cunt like you down, or câmon then, we ainât done yet; Iâll drag your broken bleedinâ carcass over the finish line myself if I have to, or there yâare; mean bastardâs still kickinâ. His voice cut through the noise with unnatural clarity, low and rough and impossible to lose beneath everything else, and somehow it always made John hold on harder anyway.
John also started looking for his friend impulsively every time the doors opened, listening for footsteps that never came because the stranger never arrived in any normal wayâbut with that tiny snapping sound, quick as a magician finishing a trick. Sometimes he would appear only after John had been left alone long enough for the silence and isolation to start feeling claustrophobic. The older man made a point to complain every single time John dragged him into the steel trap of his embrace or when John greedily burrowed into his lap and wrapped his legs as far as they could go around that solid, sturdy waist like he belonged there, holding on like letting go was optional, though heâd always allowed it.
Sometimes John listened to that stable heartbeat instead of the scientists, instead of his own thoughts or the mean voice inside his head. It had become his favorite sound, tied only with the clipped rasp of the older manâs accent cutting through sterile silence to mock everything in it without discrimination. His BPM never accelerated into panic beneath Johnâs attention like everyone elseâs did, and it never wavered either. It stayed regular, measured, and unbothered, as constant as a clock, as if it had learned to be that way around him alone.
He buried his face against the manâs throat and breathed him in slowly, lingering there longer than necessary simply because he could. Salt from sweat lingered faintly against warm skin beneath the collar of the wool coat. Cigarette smoke clung stubbornly to the fabric, layered over distilled spirits, cold rain, stale tea leaves, and the unmistakable living warmth of another human body. Sometimes John pressed closer just to feel the rough scrape of the strangerâs unshaven jaw against his forehead or temple when he shifted. Other times he hooked both arms tightly around the manâs shoulders and simply stayed there listening to the steady rhythm beneath his ribs. John memorized every sensation greedily: the texture of rough fabric beneath his fingers, the heat trapped in the strangerâs lap, the weight of heavy arms settling around him, the deep vibration of his voice through his chest whenever he spoke too close. If he learned it well enoughâif he repeated it often enoughâsome irrational part of him believed he could make the stranger stay.
Over time, John began noticing changes. At first, he thought he was imagining it.
The man continued growing younger.
Maybe not dramatically. Nor did the changes happen all at once. But it was enough that John began anticipating it every time he appeared.
The differences were small enough to doubt. A detail here or two that almost didnât stay consistent between visits. Some of the gray threaded through the manâs dark hair seemed to fade strand by strand. The heavy beard sometimes shortened into stubble, as if time couldnât decide how long it was allowed to remain. The deep exhaustion in his face retreated little by little, though it never disappeared entirely. The rigid tension in his shoulders loosened on certain days before locking back into place, like his body was always braced for violence even in silence. Sometimes he arrived bleeding. Sometimes he arrived looking older and furious enough to kill somebody. Sometimes staring at John with an expression that felt almost haunted. Other times he looked younger. Less ruined.
But what changed most wasnât just on the surface.
The stranger frequently glanced at him when he thought John wasnât paying attention, or when he didnât realize John was peeking at him in return. The hatred in the manâs eyes never fully vanished whenever his gaze landed on John, and it never softened into anything too kind or gentle, nothing close to pity or sympathy. What replaced it, when his gaze sometimes lingered too long, was much more complicated. He had stopped looking at John like he wanted him dead. A new precedent took shape instead, a new kind of attention that made Johnâs stomach do strange, bright little somersaults once he recognized the change for what it wasâreluctance, like someone trying very hard not to care but failing spectacularly at it.
This meant his friend was starting to care about him. Or at least, starting to fail at not caring. John didnât see much difference between the two.
John had noticed it because he noticed everything that stayed long enough with him to matter.
(...)
đșđžOf the newly added final wordcount, this was the most important addition to seed in:đŹđ§
Once, while John rested half-asleep against his chest, he heard the stranger mutter something so quietly it barely reached him.
âYou were supposed to be a monster.â
John tilted his head upward sleepily. âWhat?â
But the stranger only stared at him strangely, blue eyes reflecting in hazel ones. Something sullenâalmost mournfulâflickered there before it disappeared. Then his handâscarred, rough, impossibly gentleâsettled at the back of Johnâs head, not pressing, just anchoring him there as though he had always known the shape of it. âIâm goinâ need you to remember a couple names for me,â he whispered, his accent rumbling against Johnâs cheek. âThese are the people yâshouldnât kill, alright? And the tossers yâoughta avoid trustinâ, if yâcan help it. Repeat after meâŠ.â
His fingers began to stroke through Johnâs hair, unhurried and steady, each pass loosening something in Johnâs shoulders. The touch was warm and grounding, the faint drag of calloused fingertips combing against his scalp drawing a soft, involuntary sound from John as his eyes drifted heavier with each stroke.
ââŠBecca. Grace. Marvin. Hughie. AnnieâStarlight too, same bird. SergeâFrenchie, or the Frenchman if he starts beinâ dramatic about it. Kimiko.â A pause settled between breaths, and the hand slowed, fingertips still sifting lightly through the soft blond strands. âQueen Maeve. If she crosses your path, donât turn her into an enemy.â
Then his voice dropped further in volume, even lower in register. His fingers stopped stroking. âStanford Edgar. Madelyn Stillwell. Ashley Barrett. Donât trust âem completely.â He murmured, âThereâs a woman called Sage. Clever one. Donât mistake clever for omniscient. Anâ Stormfrontâif she ever finds you, walk away. Donât matter what the bird says or if you find her attractive. Sheâs rotten. Nazi cunt through and through.â His fingers soon resumed their slow, absent caresses through Johnâs hair, as if nothing had changed at all. âGot all that?â he murmured, softer now, the words brushing low against Johnâs ear. âMind repeatinâ what I just said, luv?â
John nodded. He recited every name obediently, warm and drowsy beneath the steady weight of the manâs heartbeat.
(A/N) - This chapter was originally posted to AO3 on 5/23/26, and if youâve been following this story in real time, especially if youâve seen this post, youâve probably seen me sneaking back in to tweak things over the past week. Sorry. đ Perfectionism is a curse, and apparently I am incapable of leaving my WIPs alone even after theyâve been uploaded. For readers who read this chapter before 5/31, there have been some revisions. Altogether, about 4.9K words were added. Most of that is just me polishing prose, expanding a few character beats, and strengthening moments I wanted to hit harder. However, these are the two additions in particular that I consider important enough to call out.
Official ch1 total wordcount (adding +4.9K words for Butcher/Homelander interactions) = 34.4K/?
*cracks knuckles* Alright, boys and gals, the runner-up Fix-It AU is the next to begin the migration over to AO3! Thank you to the 66 for voted!
Iâm working on ch1 as we speak so I anticipate itâll be posted to AO3 in a couple weeks. Iâll share a sneak peek of the prologue on my socials soon!
(You can read the Twitter threadfic here!)
Note: thereâs a new flashback scene Iâm working on for the prologue, thatâs not in the threadfic. Itâs Butcher time traveling back to meet young John (pre-Homelander), with callback references to Diabolical and S4.
Out of all my threadfics thatâll be migrated over, the Fix-It AU is the one that probably has the biggest revision from its original conception to what youâll see on AO3.
Itâs almost here! Ch1 of the butchlander Fix-It AU, Simple Causality, will be posted to AO3 either tomorrow or Saturday! âš
Chapter Status: as it stands, I decided to post a bit earlier because Iâd unexpectedly reached a part of the story where I feel is an appropriate prologue cliffhanger | launchpad to transition into the eventual ch2. Itâs not originally the scene where Iâd intended for the prologue to end at +33K wordcount (a little more, because three scenes are still unedited so the wordcount will pad out more once I polish up the details), but I have about two days to see if I can make my self-imposed deadline. If everything works out, thatâs ideal. If not, well, the chapter ends at a good location Iâm content with. âïž
Timeline the prologue covers (referencing The Boys Presents: Diabolical ep8, a deleted scene from The Boys TV, and The Boys TV S5): Johnâs past (finished) â> Homelanderâs superhero debut (finished) â> the Cruz Chemical incident (unedited, might be moved to ch2) â> Homelanderâs phone call to Billy (unedited, might be moved to ch2) â> result of the threadficâs first Twitter reader interactive poll in the story (unedited, might be moved to ch2)
(You can read the sneak peek of an earlier draft of the ch here!)
(This long fic is based on this Twitter threadfic!)
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