The Escalade was described as seating seven — eight if you counted the optional second row bench seat, which Hughie did — but for the last hour or so since they left Harriman Park long behind, Hughie Campbell was forced to accept that the original advertising was undeniably accurate.
When the manufacturers said seven, they meant seven.
At the very least, they hadn’t included a six foot tall overbuilt former Marine in that number.
As much as Hughie wanted to complain, he kept his mouth shut and his knees jammed up against Butcher’s seat in front of him, shoulder wedged against the door. It wasn’t the most comfortable setup, but somewhere around the George Washington Bridge he'd stopped his hunt for a position that didn't hurt and just let that ache fade into the background like passing traffic.
“Do you like geography, Mr. Hughie?” Hughie bit down on a grunt at the question, knee knocking hard into the center console as he turned toward the speaker to find a pair of trusting blue eyes waiting on him.“Do I…”Ryan Butcher.
Homelander’s actual literal kid sat there, taking up near a solid third of the legroom Hughie needed for himself — the only buffer between him and Mother’s Milk on the little bench. Those bright eyes slid past Hughie, already distracted as he stared right out the window at the skyline sliding by like he’d never seen a city before, which…Yeah… Honestly, somewhere around Exit 4, Hughie had started to figure that was pretty much the actual truth here. “Uh, I mean, yeah. Sure.” Another unintended laugh left his lips, the sound way too loud in the quiet SUV. “Y’know, geography’s… it’s great. Albany. Tallahassee. All the… the classics.”
Jesus, Hughie. He almost shut his eyes with a wince. The classics?
“Mom said we’re going on a really long trip. I’ve never been on a trip before.” The kid blinked for a moment. “Or an airplane either. Have you?”
"...no, actually.” The reality of how he hadn’t been all that far from his neighborhood before getting involved with Butcher and the Boys was a hard realization all of a sudden. “Have you ever been to New York before?"
"No." Ryan didn't look away from the window, eyes trailing over each passing building. "But I know all the states. Do you want me to say them?"
"I—" Hughie glanced up front on instinct, eyes on the back of Becca’s head as the woman suddenly went still in the passenger seat. His gaze slid to Mother’s Milk, the big man nodding slow. "Sure, yeah, Ryan, buddy. Go for it."
The kid was quick with his knowledge, already rattling through at least a dozen states before he ran out of steam. Not because he didn’t know the rest, but more just the general kind of distraction that pulled momentum from any kid below single digits showing a party trick. All kids were alike that way.Even the ones with superpowers.Hughie found himself nodding along like this was the most normal car ride in the world; just five fugitives, one terrorist, a superpowered kid and his mom-back-from-the-dead riding into the city like it was nothing. "So… how’s…”
He racked his brain for whatever small-talk topics he could find for a kid, forcing himself to fight the cringe as he fell back to old reliable. “How’s school?”
"Mom teaches me math." A small huff left the kid as he finally looked back at Hughie. "I don't like math."
"Yeah, nobody likes math." Hughie's laugh came out easy, the first one in a while that didn't feel like it was riding a manic edge like Frenchie on a bender. "Math's the worst."
"D… Homelander says I don't need it." The kid pursed his lips as the words left him plain. “He says I'm gonna be strong like him, so it doesn't matter.”
Hughie's mouth went a little dry.
Up front, Becca's hand tightened on the door handle — just barely — before the woman turned around and reached over from the passenger seat, a careful hand hovering just above Ryan’s knee. “Sweetheart, let’s not bother Mr. Campbell right now, okay?”
“Oh, no, it’s fine,” Hughie hedged, waving a hand. “I… I could use the conversation. So, uh, do you watch a lot of movies?”“He likes the Blind Side.” Becca answered for the kid, the mom’s response sudden and confusing enough to make Hughie blink as he tried to process… that.“The Blind Side?”“Yeah, it’s my favorite!”If you'd asked Hughie two hours ago whether that movie was any eight-year-old's favorite, he'd have said no, obviously not, but — "That's, uh... wow, that's a great movie."“That Sandra B can act, I tell you what.” Mother’s Milk stare on Hughie had him keep his mouth shut, fighting down the obvious question. Like he hadn’t just been shooting warning glares, the big man was smiling down at Ryan the next second. “Good choice, kid.”“Yeah! I don’t really get to watch a lot of movies, though.” Ryan said that with the same sort of kid-honesty as before, no complaint in it at all. "Mom usually lets me pick one movie a week if I do good at homeschool."
"Right. Homeschool. That's — yeah..." Hughie caught himself nodding way too much and made himself stop. "You got friends out there? Any other kids you talk to?"
"Not really." Ryan's brow furrowed like the question itself didn’t make sense. "It's just me and Mom mostly. And sometimes people come to check on us."
Check on us. Hughie filed that one away somewhere, next to about a dozen other small sentences this kid had dropped in the last half-hour. A bunch of them had even sounded normal enough on their own, but added up with everything else… well, it was all making way too much sense. "Cool. That's real cool."
Not cool. Nothing about that sounded cool, actually.
Realistically, though, what else was Hughie supposed to say to an eight-year-old kid about his own social development? Especially, given the mountain of really really good reasons for the total lack of it. “Not as cool as your flying, though, right?”
He almost dropped his head in his hands as the question left him. Man, Youth Pastor Kenneth made this look so much easier growing up.
"Yeah!" The yell left Ryan as bright as his eyes, like he'd been holding it in the whole ride. "I taught myself."
"That’s…” Hughie blinked. “That’s amazing, Ryan."
"Yeah." A small proud smile broke across Ryan's face, the first real one Hughie had seen out of him the whole drive, only to immediately fall apart into something more complicated. "I watched… I watched Homelander do it and I figured out how."
"Oh, you saw him fly and tried to copy it?" Hughie leaned in a little despite himself, the old supe-nerd part of his brain that never fully died perking up at the mechanics of it.
"A little bit, I guess." Ryan nodded. "Only took me a week after the first time he pushed me off the roof, yeah."
"...oh."
The entire Escalade seemed to lose cabin pressure around the sentence.
Hughie looked up front again, blinking as Becca’s jaw went tight.
A muscle worked there in the woman’s face, twitching for a bit more than a second before she turned to look out the window. Her whole face angled away from the rearview, as if she could physically dodge whatever expression was sitting on Hughie’s face.Even if she could pretend it didn’t exist, Hughie knew he couldn’t and it took another half-minute to fix the look he was wearing until it went away. Okay. Yeah. Not gonna touch that one, Hughie turned his own attention back out the window as a completely unbothered Ryan kept right on going — the conversation taking a quick turn into something Lego-related as Hughie just nodded along and let the kid talk.
Queens came up slow through the windshield, brick and bodega signs and a community center with a hand-painted banner strung across the front — some kind of festival, folding tables sagging under foil trays, a boombox somewhere blasting cumbia loud enough Hughie felt it in his sternum before they'd even found a spot to park.
"Ah." Frenchie's head popped up from the way back, Kimiko rising beside him like a mating pair of meerkats. "We are here."
"And where's here, exactly?"
Frenchie just grinned around an unlit cigarette.