Mason didn’t know if it was related, but his older sister was the most talkative person he’d ever met, and she also happened to be the only writer he knew.
That girl could talk and cuss like a rotary gun with infinite ammo, and she had no brakes when it came to who she let loose on. She even went toe to toe with his granddad, arguing with the grizzled war veteran with none of the restraint younger people normally displayed with their elders.
Despite holding her in high regard and wanting to be like her in many ways, her ability to dismantle people with words alone was one thing he didn’t care about enough to want.
To him, words—unless they spurred action—were ultimately useless. They held no meaning and no power.
“Doing things changes things,” as his granddad would say, and almost two decades of living this truth had soaked him in this belief wholeheartedly.
Talking, pleading, trying to convince people of things or for them to change… he found that tiring and ineffective in a way only someone in his shoes could understand. Only direct action was capable of producing the effect you hoped to create by talking.
This naturally made him poor in the area of eloquence in his opinion. He firmly believed if he put his enhanced memory to use right now, it wouldn’t take him long to count the number of words he’d said in his lifetime.
Of course, he’d miss some of it, but the resulting number wouldn’t be far off from the truth.
Still, the videos he’d recorded and edited were concise and straight to the point. His delivery might be judged harshly, but the things that needed to be in the videos were there, so he didn’t care. Much.
With his heat sense constantly on the lookout, his jumps from building to building never led to a situation where he stumbled onto a rooftop smoking session or something of the sort.
The fact that he always went out at night also helped. Today however, he’d gone out during the day.
Morning was in full swing, and it was a few minutes before NNC went live with the latest news. He hadn’t gone through all this trouble to watch the fruits of his hard work in a stinky motel room.
He was in fact, on his way to find the tallest building so he could watch the news from there.
That spur of the moment decision quickly changed to another when he sensed a lone heat signature on top of a high rise apartment building. Not just at the tippy top, but standing right on the edge and wobbling.
A moment passed while he played out how best to respond. In the end, he gave up and landed on the building, silently making his way to the edge the woman stood on, sitting on it but keeping enough distance between them.
“Hi,” he said and raised his hand amidst the sobbing.
To his surprise, the woman had a pretty good grip with her feet, so he didn’t need to save her from fright.
Her tears stopped flowing as confusion wormed its way heavily onto her face. She looked at him like “what the fuck,” and it was so intense it prompted him to take a look at himself.
He quickly noticed the mask around his face and pulled it down.
“Sorry.” His voice came out clearer. “Hi.”
For once, he had nothing direct to say. No threat or ultimatum to give this woman who had probably reached an end he was all too familiar with.
“You’ve got to be shitting me…” The woman uttered and looked away, straight up at the sky. She threw her arms wide and began to laugh and cry even harder, again, wobbling so much it put him on edge.
With nothing at all to say and utterly confused by her behavior, he simply sat there and waited. Thankfully, whatever crazy spell took hold of her lost potency after about a minute.
She turned to face him afterward and said, “Aren’t you—aren’t you gonna say anything?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m just here to watch.”
The woman did a double take. “What?”
“No one should be alone when they die.”
A choked sound left her. She looked him up and down multiple times, as if to brand him into her mind. “That’s it? You were gonna let me jump? Without saying anything? What are you, some kind of monk?”
“No. I would’ve offered to help you with whatever led to…” he waved at her standing on the ledge.
“Oh really? How?” She jumped down onto the roof, thankfully, putting Mason’s worries to rest and giving him a proper look at her.
Her dark, semi curly hair and light chocolate skin alluded to a mixed heritage, but something in her features pointed to something else. It was either Indian or Arabic, or maybe both. Who knew? He was a genetic rarity himself.
“You clearly don’t need it anymore,” he said in response to her question.
“The hell I don’t.” She crossed her arms.
Taking his eyes off of her, he took out his phone when it buzzed. The time read 7:59 am so he opened the browser with the NNC website already loaded and checked into the starting news stream.
‘Yes!’ He silently pumped his fist when the newscaster wasted no time and directly opened with the Compound V exposé.
“Do you always approach strange men you meet on rooftops?” He said to the inquisitive woman leaning over and looking at his phone screen.
“Who gives a fuck? You'd probably be doing me a favor if you took those big hands and—”she performed a neck twisting gesture. “Besides, have you… seen what you look like?”
She looked around the roof while waving a hand around. “Where am I gonna go if you come after me? Be serious.”
‘Lady…’ He grew exasperated. Did she know nothing about personal space? No sooner had he asked himself this did she grab the hand holding the phone and reposition it so she could see the news better.
She took things even further and turned the phone sideways, putting the stream in landscape mode.
From there, it took only a few seconds for her to know what he and everyone who had tuned into NNC now knew.
She stayed silent, entranced, at first. That period of silence only turned out to be the countdown for a bomb. Hold that, multiple bombs.
“What the fuck?!” Her scream rolled off the rooftop, leading the one at ground zero of the eruption to close his eyes and weather the storm. “Are those babies? Ah! Why do those guys have guns?!”
“Oh my fucking god! This… this is insane. No! It actually makes sense. That’s why… that’s why all supes are born in fucking America. Ohmygod! It was so fucking obvious!”
Glancing at the giddyish woman from the corner of his eye, Mason wondered about her reaction and how she knew that off the top of her head. Perhaps it was related to her job, if she had one, or if she’d heard it somewhe—
“AH!” Her sudden scream pierced his ear like a nail being driven by a sledgehammer. “That’s you! That’s you! What. The. Hell. Is. Happening. Today?!” she yelled, punctuating each word.
Discomfort from the ear assault vanishing rapidly, he focused on the news stream. The caster mentioned him by name as the source of the information, adding his before and after images side by side as part of the picture evidence.
“Ohmygod!” Reality finally dawned on her like a long awaited sunrise. She let go of his hand and stepped back, assuming a guarded demeanor while finally regarding him with eyes appropriate for this situation.
“You’re a supe. You’re… the supe.”
A dry look got sent her way in response before she got ignored entirely. Mason opened the social media apps on his phone one after another, launching the posts he’d prepared.
For the long form videos, he’d already uploaded them, so all he did was change the visibility from Unlisted to Public, choosing the current date and time for the release. Internet searches would take the reins from this point onward.
“Wait? You’re postin—oh. Why though?”
He looked down at the woman bursting at the seams with questions and considered if poking her with the answer was worth it. He sighed and gave in. What’s the worst that could happen?
“To get my side of the story out.”
“Oh… this is great. This is amazing,” the woman said, a wild and excited energy having overcome her.
“Let me interview you,” she placed herself right in front of him, hands held in a pleading gesture over his chest. “I have a podcast… you can reach more people that way.”
“Please,” she added when he displayed hesitation.
“...What’s it called?”
She got shy all of a sudden, waving away the question. “Oh don’t worry. It’s an underground podcast. You won’t find information about it online.”
“Right.” He drawled and gauged her reaction. She seemed pretty desperate.
“Your name.”
“Huh?” She broke out of the mental deadlock.
“I’m Mason.”
“Oh.” She chuckled with a little bit of shame. “Right. I'm Lexi. Lexi Wyngarde.”
“Nice name.”
“Uhh… you too.”
“Really?” He gave her a look that said “stop lying.”
“Yeah. Sloan sounds badass and Mason can be shortened to Mace, like the weapon.”
He chuckled and sent the last post on twitter, putting away his phone.
“Tell you what, I’ll agree to the interview. But I gotta ask, will you be doing it smelling and looking like that?”
“!!”
Startled, Lexi looked down at herself, shame and embarrassment taking hold of her posture and movements. She shrugged them off and assumed a confident demeanor in seconds, looking up at him with an unimpressed stare.
“…Nice try. You just saw me try to neck myself. You think telling me I smell like ass is something? Come on.”
‘Well, it almost worked.’
“Where are we headed?” He asked when she took off.
“To my apartment.”
.
.
.
.
To enter her madam’s office minutes after the incredibly busy woman arrived at work and without her morning coffee to boot would have seen Ashley on the receiving end of a stare that spoke nothing good about her job’s longevity.
The reveal of a secret like Compound V would do that to a person.
Someone like her, someone who loved their job so much she understood its intricacies and had made so little mistakes at it she could count them on one hand, had momentarily lost all competence and barged into her boss’s office with nothing but demanding questions primed and ready in the chamber.
“Is it true? Ma’am. Is what they’re saying…”
She trailed off, her tone and volume dropping at Madelyn’s apparent horror while the tv in her office showed the shocking news.
“It is true.” Ashley concluded based on the evidence before her.
Her declaration jolted Madelyn out of her stupor and the woman lowered her remote.
“Ashley…”
“Ma’am.” The assistant hurried over to her boss, still eager to please as ever. “We need to get a strategy together with Crisis Management and PR—”
“No. You go out there and deal with them—”
“Them who?” Ashley pulled her clipboard and documents closer to her chest.
“You know who. The overgrown babies who just found out there’s nothing special about them.”
“But—”
“I’m depending on you Ashely. Don’t disappoint me.”
“...Yes ma’am.”
Head low and staring at the doors of the office like they led straight to hell, Ashley mustered up what little courage she had and forced herself to put one foot in front of the other.
GASP!
She jumped at the sight of Homelander when the door swung open. She stayed frozen to the spot, thankful for the fact that he treated her like a piece of furniture and simply breezed past her.
The ice keeping her in place thawed once her survival instincts screamed “safe,” allowing her to rush down the hallway.
On both sides, she encountered multiple small clusters of employees huddled silently, all of them watching the news on their devices.
They eventually thinned out the closer she got to the meeting room of The Seven, and she quickly found out why.
Noir sat right outside of it on the bare ground. He had his back against the wall, and his intense sobbing was obvious despite being fully covered by his usual getup.
Then and there she made an executive decision and did an about turn, heading for the elevator so she could go to a floor where there were no supes.
Meanwhile, back in her office and unaware that her orders had been thrown to the wayside, Madelyn lowered the phone after her call to Mr. Edgar went unanswered.
“Who’re you calling?” Homelander took off his gloves, tossed them onto the couch and grabbed his cape, moving it out of the way so he could sit. He dropped himself on the couch and crossed his legs, looking very pleased with himself.
Madelyn caught the abnormality immediately, and she betrayed it enough that Homelander read the sentiment in her expression.
“Oh come on.” He waved a hand at the muted TV. “This is not that bad.”
Utilizing every iota of caution she could scrape from the deepest depths of her being, Madelyn drew closer to him, stalking almost, and asked, “What... did... you... do?”
She sounded afraid, and anyone who wasn’t the person sitting right before her would see that.
“Oh, I saved us.”
She leaned her head to the side, letting her confusion speak for itself.
“Oh come on.” He threw both hands up. “Is it that hard to figure out?"
Homelander sighed in exasperation and shook his head, like he was explaining organic compounds to an art student. Still, this was Madelyn, so he didn't leave her hanging.
"I borrowed some Compound V and had A-Train run it all over the globe, supercharging some jihadis. I feel like I’m downplaying my effort here but using the V on adults…“ He tsk tsk tsked and shook his head. "Nasty stuff."
“The results can be quite messy. There’s a reason Vought doesn’t do it, and I’m pretty sure that’s why they turned that fucking… nuthouse into their personal testing ground, trying to get the formula right.”
He stood up and drew closer to Madelyn, so close they could sense each other’s warmth.
“Anyway, some of it took and some of it didn’t. But,” he raised his index finger. “Enough survived for the operation to be a huge success. And right now, there are villains all over the globe. Villains, that only we can fight. See? Now no matter what happens, Vought will remain standing. I saved Vought. I saved us. I. Saved. You. Now do you believe me when I say I can help?”
Madelyn found her will and bodily control stretched to limits that weren’t even possible. This was bad. Really really bad, and the worst of it was she couldn’t explain to him why what he’d done was supremely bad, how it wasn’t necessary… not without going out exactly the way she feared.
The mental images of how he’d slice her in half with his lasers or outright tear her to pieces caused the tight, slipping grip she had on her horror to slip even further.
Her heart began to race and so did her mind.
Fortunately for her, she didn’t get to where she was by anything other than pure merit. She displayed her ability to think on her feet and rushed the waiting and expectant Homelander, taking his lips in a big, needy kiss.
She stopped after a while and cradled his face with a smile. “My boy. My amazing boy.”
Keeping in mind her actual place in this “relationship,” she gently pushed him onto the couch after feeling up his crotch and finding exactly what she expected.
“No… wait.” She said when he pawed at her with neediness. Vividly aware of the gaze burning into her back, she went to lock the door, schooling her expression before turning around.
On her way back to him, she hiked up her skirt with one hand and pulled down her shirt with another, once again flashing him a wide, toothy smile that was the complete opposite of her actual feelings.