Chapter 1: The Afterparty Mistake
The penthouse air was thick with the smell of expensive perfume, spilled champagne, and unspoken threats. Hughie leaned against a wall of cold black marble, the glass in her hand holding the dregs of something amber and stupidly old. Her head swam, a pleasant, blurry buffer between her and the glittering nightmare of the after-party. They were celebrating, of all things. A movie. A goddamn movie about The Seven taking down Stormfront, while the real memory—the acid smell of burnt circuitry, the screams that weren’t in the script, the weight of a body that wasn’t Robin’s but might as well have been—played on a loop behind her eyes.
She’d lost count of the glasses. The wine, then the whiskey, a liquid courage that felt more like a liquid demolition ball. It swung inside her chest, knocking down the careful walls of ‘be polite’ and ‘don’t make a scene’ she’d built since joining The Boys, since… everything.
Across the room, a laugh cut through the murmur. It was a perfect, polished sound. Homelander.
He stood in a beam of soft light, a god holding court, his arm around some executive’s shoulder. His smile was a weapon of mass approval. Everyone near him basked in it, preened for it. Hughie’s stomach turned, a hot rush of nausea that had nothing to do with the alcohol. That smile was a lie. It was the last thing you saw before the laser beams.
Annie was talking to Maeve, her starlight glow looking strained at the edges. Her best friend. The only real person in this whole chrome-plated hellscape. Seeing Annie’s forced smile did it. The demolition ball swung one final time.
Robin. A-Train. Just red confetti on brick. The fucking Boys, Butcher’s manic grin, Frenchie’s worried eyes, all of them pawns. Stormfront’s sneer, her words about evolution, about cleaning the gene pool. The weight of the gun in her hand. The weight of all of it.
It was a chemical reaction. Grief plus rage plus a bloodstream full of 80-year-old Scotch. Logic evaporated. Before she knew what her feet were doing, they were carrying her across the penthouse, through the clusters of beautiful, empty people. She moved with a drunk’s singular focus.
She didn’t stop. She walked right up to him as he was dismissing the executive. His blue eyes found hers, a flicker of mild, amused surprise in their impossible depths. He opened his mouth, probably to say something devastatingly condescending.
Hughie grabbed his wrist. Her fingers didn’t even wrap all the way around. The muscle and bone under the perfect blue sleeve felt like carved steel.
“We need to talk,” she slurred, the words tripping over each other. “Now.”
His smirk was instant, predatory. He didn’t pull away. He let her pull him. “Is that so?”
“Shut up,” she muttered, tugging him toward a hallway marked ‘Private.’ He came, easily. Of course he did. What was she to him? An ant trying to drag a bulldozer. The spectacle of it probably tickled him.
She pushed open the first door she found—a vast, cold office, all sharp edges and dark wood. The desk was the size of a car. A presidential seal was embossed on the wall. She let go of his wrist, the phantom heat of his skin burning her palm.
The door clicked shut, muffling the party. The silence was immediate, a vacuum.
“Well,” Homelander said, his voice a low purr in the quiet. He adjusted his cuff, a casual, infuriating gesture. “This is cozy. To what do I owe the pleasure, Hughie? Finally ready to thank me for saving the world?”
“You didn’t save anything.” The words burst out of her, a dam breaking. “You don’t save. You just break things and let people like me clean up the pieces.” She was trembling, the adrenaline fighting the alcohol. “Robin. My girlfriend. She was just… there. Buying a fucking smoothie. And A-Train turned her into… into nothing. And he’s still up there, on a poster, because of you. Because of all this.”
He just watched her, head tilted, like she was a mildly interesting insect.
“And The Boys,” she continued, her voice cracking. “Butcher’s a monster you made. Everyone’s a monster you made! Stormfront was your… what, your girlfriend? And she wanted to kill everyone. And we stopped her. We did. Not you. And now you’re making a movie about it?” A hysterical laugh escaped her. “Do you even remember her name? Do you remember any of our names?”
He took a step forward. She didn’t back up. The space between them crackled.
“I remember everyone’s name, Hughie,” he said softly. The charm was gone, stripped away, leaving something flat and metallic underneath. “I just don’t care. Your pain, Butcher’s little vendetta, Annie’s… idealism. It’s all just noise. The beautiful, chaotic noise of the food chain.”
“You’re not a god,” she spat.
“Aren’t I?” He was in front of her now. She could smell the clean, ozone scent of him, see the perfect pores of his skin. His hand came up, not to strike her, but to brush a strand of hair from her forehead. The touch was ice-cold. “I decide who lives. Who dies. Who gets to be a hero. Who gets to be a memory. That sounds like a god to me.”
Her rage peaked, white-hot and useless. She wanted to hurt him, to scratch that perfect surface and see what bled out. But her fists were clenched at her sides, powerless. The frustration was a physical ache, a scream trapped in her ribs. It mixed with the whiskey, with the dizzying proximity of him, with the devastating, awful truth that he could erase her with a thought.
The energy between them twisted, morphing from confrontation into something else, something dense and charged. His eyes weren’t mocking anymore. They were assessing, curious. He saw the tear tracks on her cheeks, the heave of her chest, the raw, open wound of her being.
“You’re so full of feeling,” he murmured, his thumb tracing her cheekbone. “It’s almost pathetic. It must be exhausting.”
And then he kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a claim. An answer. His mouth was hard and demanding, and every protest in Hughie’s mind short-circuited. This was the worst idea in the history of ideas. This was the enemy. This was death wearing a cape.
But for the first time in years—since Robin, since the chaos, since feeling like a ghost in her own life—she wasn’t thinking. The noise in her head, the grief, the fear, the constant, grinding anxiety, it all just… stopped. Replaced by a shocking, overwhelming physical present. The cool press of his lips, the impossible strength of the hands that slid down to her hips, the sheer, terrifying reality of him.
She kissed him back. A hungry, furious, mess of a kiss. It was a fight. It was a surrender. It was gasoline on the smoldering wreck of her nerves.
He walked her back until the edge of the massive, polished desk hit her thighs. Paperwork scattered. A pen clattered to the floor. He didn’t ask. He just lifted her, the movement effortless, and sat her on the cold wood. His breath was hot against her neck.
“Heroes don’t ask for permission,” he whispered, echoing the terrible, thrilling logic of a world without consequences.
Her hands fumbled with the clasp of his cape. It pooled on the floor, a star-spangled puddle. This was wrong. This was a crime scene in the making. This was the most alive she’d felt since she could remember.
It was fast, and brutal, and completely devoid of tenderness. The leather of his uniform was rough against her skin. The surface of the desk was unforgiving. He was a force of nature, and she was just terrain being reshaped. There was no love here, not even a cheap imitation of it. There was only power, and her voluntary, furious submission to it. She matched his ferocity, her nails scraping against the indestructible fabric of his suit, her teeth sinking into her own lip to stop from making a sound he didn’ deserve.
When it was over, he pulled away with the same casual ease with which he’d entered the room. He didn’t look at her with affection, or even satisfaction. He looked at her with the interest of a scientist observing a completed reaction.
Hughie slumped, her dress rumpled, her body humming with a strange, spent energy. The cold of the desk seeped through her clothes. She felt wrecked. She felt clear.
Homelander picked up his cape, fastening it with a neat, precise motion. He was once again the perfect picture, untouched.
“Feel better?” he asked, his tone light, conversational.
She looked up at him, her breathing still ragged. The drunk rage was gone, burned away. A hollow, clean quiet had taken its place. For the first time in a long time, Hughie actually felt satisfied. Not happy. Not absolved. But, for a fleeting moment, full.
He left without another word, the door sighing shut behind him, leaving her alone in the dark office of the President of America. She slid off the desk, her legs unsteady, and stared at her reflection in the black window, a ghost superimposed over the city lights.eason
She slid off the desk, her legs unsteady, and stared at her reflection in the black window, a ghost superimposed over the city lights.
The clarity didn’t last. The next week was a haze of static. She functioned. She showed up at The Boys’ makeshift HQ—a dusty electronics repair shop front—and nodded along to Butcher’s rants about next steps. She listened to Kimiko’s silent communications, fetched coffee for Frenchie, and pretended her hands weren’t shaking. She avoided Annie’s calls. The sound of her best friend’s voice would have been a detonator on the explosive secret now rotting inside her.
The nausea started in the mornings. A sharp, metallic rise in her throat. She blamed bad food, stress, the general toxicity of her life. But her body had always been a reliable, if anxious, machine. It had grieved for Robin with a weight loss she could track. It reacted to fear with a rabbit-quick pulse. This was different. A deep, systemic wrongness.
MM noticed first. He noticed everything. He was the team’s anchor, the one who remembered to buy toilet paper and first aid kits and who carried the weight of a daughter he couldn’t see. His observation was a quiet, constant thing.
“You’re green,” he said one afternoon, not looking up from cleaning his gun. “And you’ve been jumpier than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“I’m fine,” Hughie mumbled, chewing on a saltine cracker she’d dug out from the bottom of her bag.
“You’re not fine.” He finally looked at her, his eyes soft but unyielding. “You’ve been ‘fine’ since you wandered back from that Vought party looking like you’d seen a ghost that also kicked your ass. Talk.”
She couldn’t. The words—desk, cape, the taste of ozone and power—were a radioactive core in her chest. Speaking them would contaminate everything.
Two days later, he was waiting for her outside her apartment. He leaned against his car, arms crossed. In one hand was a small, white paper bag from the pharmacy.
“Get in,” he said, his voice leaving no room for argument.
“MM, I—”
“Get in the car, Hughie. Now.”
She got in. He drove in silence to a rest stop off the highway, a bleak, empty concrete square. He put the car in park, killed the engine. The only sound was the distant whine of trucks. He handed her the bag.
“What is this?” she asked, though the shape of the box inside was unmistakable.
“You know what it is. Go into that bathroom over there and take it.”
“This is insane. I’m not—”
“Hughie.” He turned to her, and his face was all hard lines of worry. “Your body is screaming at you. You’re either sick, or you’re pregnant. Given the look on your face, it ain’t the flu. So eliminate the option. For my peace of mind. Please.”
The ‘please’ broke her. It was the kindest word anyone had said to her in weeks. She took the bag, her fingers numb, and walked across the asphalt. The women’s bathroom was cold, tiled in a depressing beige. She fumbled with the box, her breath fogging in the air. The instructions were a blur of diagrams and tiny text. She did it mechanically, a mission. Place the stick on a square of toilet paper. Set a timer on her phone.
She sat on the closed lid of the toilet and waited. Three minutes. The longest three minutes of her life, stretching out like a void. She stared at a crack in the wall, tracing its path. She thought of nothing. She thought of everything. The timer buzzed.
She looked.
Two lines.
A plus sign.
The world didn’t end. The fluorescent lights just hummed a little louder. She picked up the plastic stick, her hand perfectly steady. She walked out of the stall, out of the bathroom, into the flat grey daylight.
MM was leaning against the hood of his car. He saw her face and his own shifted, the prepared arguments melting into something heavier. She walked up to him and held out the test.
He looked at it. A long, slow breath escaped him. “Okay,” he said, a word meant to steady a situation that had no steady ground. “Okay. We’ll figure it out. We’ll… get you to a doctor. A real one. Not some Vought quack.”
He was trying to be practical, to be the rock. It made the next part worse.
“Who, Hughie?” he asked, his voice gentle. “Just tell me. We’ll handle it. Was it someone from that party? Some… publicist guy?”
She shook her head. The tears were a hot pressure, but they wouldn’t fall. She was frozen from the inside out.
“Hughie. Who did you sleep with?”
The dam broke. A sob ripped out of her, raw and ugly. She wrapped her arms around herself, rocking slightly. “One person,” she choked out. “Just once. One time.”
“Who?” MM pressed, his hand coming up to her shoulder.
She squeezed her eyes shut, as if that could erase the word. It came out in a frantic, wet rush, a confession meant to be expelled before it poisoned her completely. “Homelander.”
MM’s hand froze on her shoulder. Then it dropped away.
The silence was absolute. No trucks, no wind. Just the void where his reaction should have been. She opened her eyes.
He had taken a full step back. His face, usually a masterpiece of controlled composure, was blank with pure, unprocessed shock. His mouth was slightly open. He stared at her, then at the test in her hand, then back at her, as if trying to force the two irreconcilable facts to make a new, coherent picture. They wouldn’t.
“You…” he started. Stopped. Blinked. “Homelander.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a reconfirmation of a nightmare.
The word hung in the cold air between them, a biological weapon all on its own. MM took another step back, as if the mere sound of it was contagious. His brain, usually a tactical computer running scenarios and contingencies, had flatlined. All he could see was the poster-boy smile, the laser eyes, the casual way he’d milk a crowd one second and eviscerate a man the next.
And Hughie. Small, breakable Hughie, standing in a highway rest stop holding a plastic stick that connected her to that.
“How?” was the only syllable his stunned mouth could form.
“It doesn’t matter how,” Hughie whispered, her voice shredded. She was hugging herself so tightly she might vanish. “It just happened. One time. I was drunk and angry and… it just happened.”
MM’s practical mind rebooted with a jolt. He surged forward, not to comfort her, but to grasp for a logical handle. “Okay. Okay, but… the morning after. Hughie, tell me you got the pill. The emergency contraception. You could have gone to any pharmacy, any clinic—”
“I did!” The snap in her voice was sudden, sharp as a twig breaking. She looked up at him, her eyes blazing with a furious, helpless truth. “I took it. The next morning. I bought the strongest one they had. I swallowed it in the bathroom of a goddamn bus station. So this… this wasn’t supposed to be possible. That’s why I never even thought… I thought I was just sick. Or losing my mind.”
The new information didn’t help. It made the pit in MM’s stomach bottomless. The pill failed. Against a normal guy, that was astronomically bad luck. Against Homelander… His sperm was probably little fucking superheroes, bulletproof and determined. The implications were a tidal wave, threatening to pull them under.
He leaned against the car, the cold metal seeping through his jacket. The world tilted on its axis. This wasn’t a problem they could solve with C4 or a hidden syringe of Compound V. This was cellular. This was a timeline stretching out eighteen years into a future that suddenly looked like a dystopian hellscape.
“He can’t know,” MM said, the words tasting like iron. “He can never, ever know.”
Hughie let out a wet, choked sound that was almost a laugh. “And do what, MM? What’s the plan here? I’m just supposed to… have it? Raise the son of a psychopath in a studio apartment while Butcher plans his next attempt to blow him up?”
“I don’t know!” The frustration burst out of him, raw and loud in the empty lot. He slammed a fist softly against the roof of the car. Thud. “I don’t know, Hughie. But him knowing is worse. You understand that, right? If he finds out, you become a thing to him. A possession. A vessel. You lose every last shred of choice you have left.”
He pushed off the car and moved closer to her, forcing his voice down into something calmer, something that could maybe hold the two of them together. “First thing is a real doctor. Not for… for that.” He nodded at the test. “But for you. We need to know what’s happening in there. If it’s even… normal.” The word felt inadequate. Nothing about this was within a hundred miles of normal.
Hughie just stared at the asphalt, her breath coming in shallow puffs. The initial shock was hardening into a grim, terrifying reality. The nausea, the dizziness—it wasn’t a bug or a stress reaction. It was a fact. Growing. Inside her.
MM’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. It buzzed again. And again. A relentless, insistent vibration.
With a numb hand, he pulled it out. The screen was a cascade of alerts from the secure channel Butcher used. News clips, headlines, all screaming the same thing.
He clicked one. The video loaded, showing Homelander on the steps of the Vought Tower, his cape swept back by a breeze he probably generated himself. He was smiling, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were fixed on the camera with an eerie, possessive intensity.
“…and in these trying times, what America needs is a reminder of its strength,” Homelander’s amplified voice boomed from the tiny speaker. “Its purity. Its future.”
He paused, letting the crowd’s roar swell. Then he leaned into the microphone, his voice dropping to a intimate, chilling register.
“The future is, after all, what we make it. And I’m starting to think about legacy. About what comes next.”
MM’s blood ran cold. He looked from the phone screen to Hughie’s pale, stricken face. It was probably a coincidence. A standard issue narcissistic rant.
But the timing felt like a punchline from a cruel god.
The phone kept buzzing. The future, demanding their attention.cou
The future, demanding their attention.
MM stared at the phone, then at Hughie’s ashen face. The video kept playing, Homelander’s voice a tinny echo of megalomania. He silenced it with a jab of his thumb, the sudden quiet louder than the noise.
“We need to move,” he said, his voice low and final. “Now.”
The drive back to the city was a silent movie. Hughie watched the blur of dead winter trees and graffiti-covered walls, her hand resting unconsciously on her stomach. It felt no different. It felt like everything had changed. MM drove with a focused intensity, his eyes constantly checking the mirrors, his jaw a tight line.
He didn’t take them to her apartment. He drove to the back alley behind Bass’s Electronic Repair, the shopfront that hid their war room. He killed the engine and sat for a moment, the weight of what they were about to do pressing down on the dashboard.
“You don’t have to say anything,” he said, not looking at her. “I can do the talking. But they need to know. For your safety. For all of ours.”
Hughie nodded, a tiny, mechanical movement. “Okay.” A pause. “Just… tell them.”
The basement air was a familiar cocktail of stale coffee, ozone from soldering irons, and the faint, sweet smell of Frenchie’s Gauloises cigarettes. Butcher was leaning over a schematic, a red marker clenched in his teeth. Kimiko was sharpening a set of throwing stars with a terrifying, rhythmic schick-schick. Frenchie was at his workbench, a disassembled electronic tracker glowing under a magnifying lamp.
“Well, if it isn’t the dynamic duo,” Butcher grunted, not looking up. “Get the milk, then? You were gone long enough.”
MM closed the heavy door behind them. The click of the lock sounded like a full stop.
“We need to have a team meeting,” MM said. His tone shut down Butcher’s next quip before it could leave his mouth.
Butcher straightened up, popping the marker from his teeth. “Right. What’s the disaster this time? Vought patented the common cold?”
“It’s about Hughie.”
All movement stopped. Kimiko’s hands stilled. Frenchie looked up, his playful eyes turning serious. Hughie found a stool and sat, her legs unable to hold her anymore. She focused on a coffee stain on the concrete floor, a continent of brown in a grey sea.
MM took a breath, steadying himself. “Hughie’s pregnant.”
The silence was absolute, broken only by the low hum of a server rack.
Butcher blinked. Once. Twice. A slow, reptilian processing. “You’re having me on.”
“I wish I was.”
“Who?” The word was a bullet. Butcher’s gaze swung to Hughie, then back to MM. “Some idiot from accounting? A bartender? Who’s the lucky fucking dad, Hughie?”
Hughie didn’t look up. MM answered for her. “It’s not an accountant.”
“Then who, Marvin? Spit it out before I lose my—”
“Homelander.”
Butcher’s face went perfectly, dangerously blank. Frenchie slowly put down his tiny screwdriver. Kimiko’s eyes widened, her head tilting in a gesture of pure, uncomprehending horror.
“You’re lying,” Butcher whispered.
“I saw the test. Two lines. She took the morning-after pill. It didn’t work. Probably because his fucking swimmers are indestructible.” MM’s voice was flat, reciting facts to keep from screaming.
Butcher took a step toward Hughie. Not a threatening step, but the step of a man approaching a sudden, shocking abyss. “Is this true?”
Hughie finally met his eyes. Hers were dry, hollowed out. She just nodded.
Butcher exploded. He didn’t yell at Hughie. He spun and kicked a metal trash can, sending it clanging against the wall. “FUCK! FUCKING HELL!” He raked both hands through his hair, pacing like a caged animal. “One job! One job you had, to keep your head down and not get yourself… impregnated by a bloody weapon of mass destruction!”
“Butcher,” MM warned.
“No! You don’t get to ‘Butcher’ me! This isn’t a whoopsie-daisy! This is a global fucking security crisis growing in her uterus!” He stopped, pointing a shaking finger at Hughie. “How? Was it a fucking mission? Did he force you?”
“No.” The word was small, but it cut through Butcher’s rage. “It was after the premiere. I was drunk. I was angry. I… I went to him. It was my choice.” Saying it out loud to all of them was a kind of excruciating surgery. “A stupid, terrible, fucking choice.”
Butcher stared at her, his chest heaving. The anger didn’t vanish, but it mutated, mixing with a dawning, nightmarish understanding. He’d seen Homelander’s cruelty, his possessiveness. This changed every calculation.
Frenchie, ever the pragmatist in a crisis, broke the tension with a soft, logical question. “Does he know?”
“No,” MM and Hughie said in unison.
“Are we sure?” Frenchie lit a cigarette, the flame trembling slightly in his hand. “He has resources. He could have her under surveillance. He could have… I don’t know, super-hearing for heartbeats.”
MM shook his head. “He doesn’t know. If he did, she wouldn’t be here. She’d be in a Vought lab under glass.”
“He’s right,” Hughie murmured. “He’d have taken me already.”
Frenchie took a long drag, his brows knit in thought. He exhaled a plume of smoke that coiled in the still air. “Then we have a small window. And his little speech today… it tells us something.”
Butcher snorted. “It tells us he’s a wanker with a god complex.”
“Oui, but specifically,” Frenchie said, tapping his temple, “it tells us his mind is not on the present. Not on hunting for a missing… connection. He is talking about legacy. About the future. He is, how do you say, building a narrative.”He looked at Hughie, his expression uncharacteristically gentle. “Chérie, he is not looking for you because he is not thinking about a woman. He is thinking about a son. An heir. A ‘Boy of Tomorrow.’ He is pushing the idea of the boy into the future instead of looking for the woman in the present. It is a narcissist’s prophecy. He is so in love with the idea of his own continuation, he cannot see the real person who might provide it