Music strongly recommended for this chapter: "Chicago"
(The daily limit is ten thousand characters, and this chapter has over four thousand. Remember to read it! It's explosive!)
After the mangrove incident came to a close, Butcher gave himself a rare few days off.
He owed Becca far too much time, so much that he had no idea where to begin repaying it.
So he first accompanied Becca to a private hospital for a full physical, then took her shopping for new clothes.
He even found time to give the long-vacant old apartment next to the safe house a quick coat of paint.
But five-year-old Ryan was temporarily excluded from this romantic picture.
Which brought up another matter.
Ever since Butcher learned from Becca that Ryan was Homelander's offspring, he had felt as though someone had clubbed him, choked with frustration.
It wasn't as though he hadn't guessed. From the first time he saw Ryan's blond hair and blue eyes, he had vaguely suspected.
But guessing and knowing for certain were two different things.
That night, he cornered John in the alley behind a bar, crowbar in hand, and demanded to know why he hadn't made things clear beforehand, his breath reeking of booze.
John leaned against the wall with both hands in the pockets of his old leather jacket, watching Butcher lose his mind without any change in his expression.
Honestly, he had already gone as far as kindness and duty demanded.
As if it weren't enough that your wife couldn't resist temptation first, you then had to fucking pin the cuckold's cap on someone else's head. Where in the world did such absurd logic exist?
If not for Jonathan, John might as well have slapped Butcher dead and been done with it.
So only when Butcher had cursed himself out and paused for breath did he abruptly say:
"Saving Becca was just part of the deal. If I could bring her out, naturally, I can send her back."
Butcher knew that since John, this "copy" of Homelander, had said it, he could definitely do it.
He really had that ability.
So from that day on, Butcher wisely never mentioned the matter in front of John again.
What could he do?
All he could do was keep Ryan at his home for now and steel himself each day to bond with the child alongside Becca.
He taught Ryan how to use the remote, how to spread peanut butter on bread, and how to check the traffic lights before crossing the street.
Perhaps because he had previously been cut off from the world, Ryan was especially interested in these unfamiliar things. He learned quickly, and his relationship with Butcher gradually warmed.
While Butcher played dad, the Boys Squad temporarily lost one of its main players, though the impact wasn't too great.
Work on analyzing the formula progressed in an orderly fashion under Frenchie's direction.
The chromatograph ran around the clock, and the data charts it spat out had already piled up across half the lab bench.
The toughest bone to gnaw through was still cracking the synthesis formula, but the more samples they had, the faster they could decipher it.
So the most important task fell to A-Train, who had agreed to join them.
He needed to haul back enough raw materials for Compound V in the shortest possible time.
The day they worked out the synthesis formula was a Friday, John's fourteenth day back in this world.
The outskirts.
The repair shop's metal roller door was halfway down, white fluorescent light spilling through the gap.
John ducked inside and saw A-Train, dressed in casual clothes, squatting in a corner and opening a pile of old cardboard boxes one by one.
Then he took out bottles of raw materials wrapped in Styrofoam and sorted them onto the metal shelves Frenchie had set up temporarily.
His left leg had almost fully recovered. The splint was off, his squat was steady, and his movements were nimble, without any trace of a limp.
"I've cleaned out that warehouse in New Jersey. Five crates of Compound V, plus the other materials...
Frenchie gave me a list, and I took everything on it, item by item."
A-Train placed two bottles on the metal shelves and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve.
Afterward, he pulled an inventory sheet from his waist pack and handed it to John.
Every item on it had a check beside it.
"Good. We've got all the resources."
That afternoon, the Boys Squad rented an abandoned garage next to the safe house's warehouse.
The garage had once been an auto repair shop, and traces of motor oil and broken glass still littered the floor.
Butcher pulled up outside in his beat-up Chevrolet and unloaded folding tables and chairs from the trunk, with Hughie helping carry things beside him.
Mother's Milk moved the chromatograph over from the safe house, hooked up an old computer as a monitoring terminal, and ran an extension cord from the warehouse next door to power the chromatograph.
Once everything was ready.
Frenchie stood at the lab bench and spread out the molecular formula The Deep had obtained from inside Vought.
Then he circled several key points in the synthesis formula with a red pen.
In another area, the raw materials A-Train had hauled back had already been fed into the centrifuge in batches. The first few rounds of purification results were out, and the impurity content was higher than he had estimated.
But the molecular structure of the core precursor compound was intact. They could absolutely use the raw materials for Compound V as a base, then reverse-engineer the synthesis formula after purification.
As the stock solution seeped in.
The machine began humming, and centrifugal force spread the liquid inside the quartz column into an extremely thin molecular film.
Frenchie stared fixedly at the shifting waveforms on the screen, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he entered parameters.
"If the molecular structure stabilizes this round, we can run two synthesis pathways at once.
One is the unstable initial version, and the other is the original version with the impurities removed."
Before long, the centrifuge stopped.
Frenchie leaned toward the screen and stared at the frozen molecular structure diagram in silence for quite a while.
Then he swore excitedly in French, straightened up, pushed his goggles onto his forehead, and turned to John in excitement.
"Fuck! I pulled it off!
Both pathways worked! The molecular structure of the original Compound V is completely identical to Vought's mass-produced batches!
That means we can now produce Compound V independently, and a version without impurities at that.
So anyone who's already been injected with Compound V can use the upgraded version to consolidate or strengthen their powers."
"As for the other, unstable version, its biocompatibility covers every known Compound V receptor type.
Unfortunately, it has limitations and randomness.
Anyone injected with this version might gain special abilities for a short time, but they aren't permanent. They have a time limit."
"In other words, it might make your dick bigger for a little while, but you could go limp in less than two hours."
(The rest is explosive. Remember to read tomorrow!)
John lowered his head and looked at the two test tubes on the lab bench.
The liquid in the first was red, giving off a faint fluorescence beneath the fluorescent lights, like diluted lava.
The second was an extremely pale fluorescent color, clear enough for him to see the graduation marks on the other side of the tube.
The original version and the upgraded version.
If John wasn't mistaken, this fluorescent compound had already existed in his previous life. It was called Temp V, and its effects were exactly as Frenchie had described.
Hughie's naked teleportation and Butcher's laser-eye ability had both come from Temp V.
The only difference was that both versions of V, with their different effects, had now come from Frenchie's hands.
Not becoming a researcher at Vought really was a waste of his talents...
John glanced at Frenchie, who was excitedly hugging Hughie, and the corners of his mouth lifted.
He picked up the two test tubes and turned them slightly beneath the fluorescent light.
The liquid slid slowly along the glass walls, leaving extremely fine trails.
So this was world weight...
Then, with a thought, John summoned the information panel.
A translucent interface appeared over his retinas, and the numbers in its upper-left corner bore out his guess.
They were jumping, flickering.
25%, 30%
Every time the number jumped, John's tense fingers tightened a little more around the test tubes.
53%, 55%, 56%
The number stopped.
The final distortion rate settled at 56.
[World Distortion Level: 56%]
Suddenly!
The whole world seemed to slow before his eyes in an instant.
What followed... was his hearing.
It seemed to have been blocked by something.
It was a silence deeper and more complete than a vacuum, as though someone had turned the entire universe's volume knob down to zero.
Next to be stripped away was his sight.
It was like someone had suddenly thrown open every curtain in a dark room, blinding light pouring in from every direction.
In a fraction of a second, his cerebral cortex was flooded with vast quantities of information that did not belong to this world.
No, rather than saying it didn't belong to this world.
It was more that an "audience" outside the world was browsing it from the most godlike perspective.
This was the "fourth wall"!
John saw screen after screen, saw phones and tablets held in countless hands.
Different rooms, different time zones, different late nights and afternoons.
Someone wore headphones in a dorm room, the screen's cold light reflected in their glasses.
Someone on the subway turned their phone sideways, the signal cutting in and out as they anxiously tapped the screen over and over.
Some were students, some were office workers, and there were even sentimental women crying into tissues.
Without exception, those people were watching him, talking about him, teasing him, pitying him.
Who was he?
He was Homelander, the subject of videos and edits, the soul of a novel.
The first image that crashed in was a video thumbnail.
The video's background was entirely dark red, his profile rendered as a black-and-white silhouette, with a title that read:
"The man most starved for love died on the day most filled with love (5/20)"
John didn't know who had made this video, nor why anyone would be stupid enough to spend time editing something like this.
But he saw the scenes in the video.
There he was as a child, clutching the corner of his little blanket and rubbing it back and forth against his face.
It was the only thing he had in the laboratory, nothing more than a gray blanket worn ragged around the edges.
Later, a Vought stylist said it was too old and ugly, that it damaged the brand's image, and pulled it from his hands before throwing it in the trash.
That night, he secretly searched every trash can in the laboratory, retrieved the blanket, washed it clean, and hid it beneath his mattress.
He had never told anyone about this.
But the video contained not only the blanket, but surveillance footage of him secretly pulling a corner out from under the mattress and stroking it over and over.
It had been recorded by a hidden camera Vought's security department had installed in his room, footage whose existence even he had never known about.
He stood in front of the laboratory's surveillance monitor, watching his four-year-old self curled up on the mattress, pressing the little blanket to his face, his lips moving.
Only after watching for a long time did he recognize it. He was unmistakably saying "Mommy."
But he had no mother, no family at all.
Then the scene cut to the white house during the final battle.
He wore that torn cape, blood running from the corner of his mouth, pinned dead by Butcher's crowbar.
Bullet comments scrolled madly across the screen, so densely packed that almost none of the footage was visible.
He stopped to read the tightly packed words.
"Don't die, please." "I can't accept this. He can die, but not in such a humiliating way." "He just wanted someone to love him." "Ryan, you animal."
When the last bullet comment drifted past, he stared at the screen for a long time.
It read:
"He hid his blanket under the mattress for most of his life.
No one ever tucked him in, so he learned how to drape a cape over himself."
Although John had briefly lost his five senses, tears welled up involuntarily after he saw that comment.
In his previous life, countless cameras had filmed him. He had smiled at the whole world from the giant screens in Times Square and played out "a hero's coming of age" in Vought's carefully produced documentaries.
Yet these people, whom he didn't know at all and who had nothing whatsoever to do with him, sat before screens in another world.
Using words and expressions he didn't understand, they unearthed, frame by frame, the things he had hidden all his life and laid them in the light.
Besides the videos, there were also people having fun at his expense.
A group of college students crowded into a dorm room, using the clip of Soldier Boy choking him as a projection background, while someone imitated his voice and shouted, "Father, please don't do this."
Another crawled out from under the covers and hit the impersonator with a pillow, and everyone rocked back and forth with laughter.
But once the laughter ended, someone suddenly said, "If he'd really had a dad like that, maybe he wouldn't have gone crazy."
The dorm room immediately fell silent.
The stream of information kept pouring in.
"The Boys' conceptual gods compilation"
The thumbnail was an outrageously doctored photo: Soldier Boy riding on Homelander's back, his chest cannon still charging.
"The Boys: a complete analysis of Homelander"
The latest installment of this video series was playing, over an hour long, with a thumbnail of him and Ryan standing together in front of the White House.
The progress bar jumped to the middle, where the narrator was reading a quotation from a psychology paper:
"Children deprived of attachment relationships over a prolonged period will exhibit extreme narcissistic personality disorder in adulthood, but this is not a moral choice.
It is the physiological result of irreversible damage to the brain's limbic system during development.
Simply put, he had not been born rotten. He had been broken.
And beyond the videos, John also saw countless document windows.
Documents with black text on white backgrounds, writing software glowing in dark mode late at night, cursors still blinking on the screens.
The title bars read "The Boys: Reborn Homelander" and "Homelander Fights Through the World."
Thousands upon thousands of people were watching him.
They cut from his childhood to his adulthood, placing every choice he made under the microscope of moral philosophy to examine it over and over.
They argued bitterly. Some slammed their desks and cursed him as a demon; others fell silent for a long time before saying, "I actually understand why he did that."
These people were understanding him in a way he had never experienced in his previous life.
Understanding was precisely what John had spent his entire life craving, yet could never obtain.
As his memories continued to synchronize, the stream of information began to ebb like the tide.
Those videos, bullet comments, comments, arguments, tears, jokes.
All those voices from another world were slowly retreating from the forefront of his consciousness.
Like a moonlight-covered sea carrying broken shells off the beach as the tide receded, leaving behind fine foam and damp traces of salt.
His five senses returned to normal.
John saw himself reflected in a test tube.
Tears were already streaming down his face.
He quickly glanced around. Frenchie was still celebrating with Hughie, and Mother's Milk was on the phone sharing the good news...
No one was looking at him.
Seizing the moment, John discreetly wiped away his tears and snot, took two bottles of the compound, and headed out.
He wanted to get some fresh air and process his emotions.
Just as he was about to open his mouth and give the Boys Squad some instructions.
He abruptly sensed a chill unlike anything he had ever felt suddenly emerging from his mouth.
What was going on?