"Can't Take My Eyes Off You"
A classic track, coming right up.
Crash-
The building's thickened reinforced glass shattered at the sound, spraying shards all over the floor.
The secretary outside screamed at the figure that suddenly appeared, clutching her documents as she huddled in a corner, trembling all over.
"Get out of the way."
Homelander did not spare her so much as a sidelong glance as he kicked open the solid wooden door to the inner office.
Clatter-
As he passed, his stars-and-stripes cape swept across the bookcase with a gust, knocking several heavy binders onto the floor.
At that moment, Stan Edgar was sitting behind his ebony desk in an immaculate suit, signing documents.
When the crash had come, he had merely glanced over to assess the situation, then turned back.
His pen paused slightly before steadily completing the final stroke.
Just then, Homelander swaggered in, bristling with aggression, his hands behind his back.
"You're here?"
Edgar raised his eyes to the hostility radiating from Homelander, without a trace of surprise on his face.
He could not even be bothered to raise an eyebrow, as though he had long expected him to barge in this way.
"Edgar!"
Homelander's composure did not last long.
He spread his hands and planted them hard on the desk, abruptly leaning forward, scarlet fury churning in his blue eyes.
"You're giving me an explanation for the Mangrove base today."
"There is no explanation."
Edgar set down his pen and folded his hands over his knees, his tone exceptionally calm.
"That is an undisclosed corporate asset. Your clearance is insufficient. We don't need to report it to you."
"You don't need to report it to me?"
Homelander scoffed as though he had heard the greatest joke in the world.
"I'm the face of Vought, the leader of the fucking Seven! Since when am I not even entitled to know about the company's secret bases?"
Then he leaned another inch closer, lowering his voice, every word wrapped in anger as he spoke through gritted teeth.
"Don't give me that security bullshit, or asset classifications. You know better than anyone what I fucking saw in there.
Becca's coat, a child's crayon drawings, half a can of baby formula.
How much have you been fucking hiding from me?"
That was the true source of his fury.
Being denied access was something he could sometimes understand, but this was the fucking truth about himself, as far as he was certain.
Yet they had kept it tightly under wraps.
Even Madelyn would never have taken something like this so far.
At least she would have found pretty excuses to soothe him and indulge him, but Edgar could not even be bothered to humor him, shutting him out of every core secret outright.
As though he were just a fucking mascot put on display.
Edgar quietly watched Homelander, the faintest flicker of almost pitying contempt passing through his eyes.
He did not respond to the matter of Becca. Instead, he stood and walked slowly beneath the enormous portrait of Frederick Vought hanging at the far end of the office.
"What makes you think Vought can't function without you?"
His back was to Homelander, his voice quiet but every word clear.
"A one-of-a-kind figurehead? The company's most precious asset? So you should be told everything, and every secret should be laid bare before you."
"But that's only what you think."
"No, you don't fucking respect me at all."
Homelander clenched his fists.
"Even Madelyn wouldn't dare play these games, hiding things right to my face.
You know perfectly well how important I am to Vought, to those shareholders, yet you keep leaving me in the dark."
"Important?"
Edgar turned, the faintest sneer curling his lips.
"Then how much do you know about Frederick Vought?"
Homelander frowned deeply, not expecting the sudden change of subject, his tone impatient.
"What?"
Edgar's gaze settled on the portrait, his tone calm.
"He earned his doctorate in genetics in Munich. In 1939, Hitler appointed him to test the first version of Compound V on living people at Dachau Concentration Camp.
In 1944, when the tide of the war turned, he fled to the Allied Powers with his experimental data.
While Oppenheimer was still calculating the parameters of the atomic bomb, his Compound V was already being administered to soldiers in batches."
"Roosevelt pardoned his war crimes, and with that first generation of superhumans, including Soldier Boy, he made Vought a household name across America."
Edgar paused, his gaze returning to Homelander's face.
"So what do you think brought us this far? You smiling and waving in front of cameras?"
"Nice story. A little preachy, too, but you're not my dad, and I don't want to hear it."
Homelander twitched his lips. His patience was already running out.
"What does that have to do with what I asked you? Stop talking in circles, Edgar. Answer my question!
What's going on with Becca and that child? I have a right to know."
"Heh. The point is, you've never understood your place."
Edgar took two steps forward, an invisible pressure spreading with his footsteps.
Homelander involuntarily retreated two steps.
"Vought has never been a superhero company. We're a pharmaceutical company. Our most valuable asset has never been you. It's the formula for Compound V."
"And you-"
He looked up at Homelander, his gaze indifferent.
"Are merely a product we made with that formula."
"Fuck... you fucking..."
At Edgar's trash talk, Homelander's pupils abruptly contracted, the red light in his eyes instantly surging.
If he could, he truly wanted to burn this damned nigger to charcoal.
"Say that again! I dare you!"
"You secretly supplied Compound V to terrorists, hoping to manufacture a crisis and force your way into the defense establishment. I haven't settled that account with you yet."
There was no concession in Edgar's tone. Instead, it became more intimidating, as though he wanted to seize the snake seven inches below its head.
"Your messes, your willfulness, your tantrums-all of that can be tolerated. But if something isn't yours to know, you have no right to know it."
"Who Becca is, who that child is-those aren't questions for you to ask."
Word by word, he sealed off every avenue for Homelander to press further.
"Do your job. Play your role as 'Homelander.' That's enough. You don't need to know the rest."
"You dare talk to me like that?"
His voice trembled with extreme fury, Heat Vision roiling wildly in his eyes, almost bursting through his eyelids.
But Edgar merely returned his gaze calmly, his eyes even carrying a hint of indifference that said, "Are you done throwing your tantrum?"
He could choose to turn this place upside down, but the price... was one he could not afford yet.
This goddamned animal...
Homelander stared fixedly at Edgar, his chest heaving.
A bellyful of vicious words, threats, and furious howls was fucking lodged in his throat, impossible to spit out or swallow.
He had never felt so stifled in his entire life.
"Very good."
Only after a long while did Homelander squeeze those words through his teeth.
"Edgar, very good."
He did not deliver another futile threat. He turned and left.
Night had long since swallowed all of New York City.
Homelander stood at the very top of Vought Tower, his eyes indifferent, the city's sprawling neon lights and headlights beneath his boots, a full moon hanging overhead.
His cape snapped in his ears, and he placed his hand at the very center.
"Why..."
He lowered his head, his voice rolling out of his throat in a roar suppressed to its limit.
"Why hide it from me? Why am I not even qualified to know?!"
Then he abruptly threw back his head, blinding red light bursting from his eyes.
The next second, twin beams of Heat Vision tore straight through the night sky, burning through the thick clouds and leaving two distorted scorch marks across their inky expanse.
"If I fucking want to know something, I'll find out!"
"No one can hide anything from me... I'll do whatever the fuck I want!"
His low roar gradually dispersed in the night wind, carrying uncontrolled hostility, along with a suppressed white texture.
Only when the red glow slowly faded from his eyes did Homelander gradually steady his breathing.
He lowered his eyes toward the boundless city below, his gaze slowly cooling, before a paranoid, sinister sneer suddenly curled his lips.
Edgar wouldn't tell him?
That was fine.
He would investigate it himself.
Becca, that child, every secret hidden in the Mangrove base.
He would dig out every truth with his own hands.
No one could stop him.
(Still at work. I'll post the after-work portion in this chapter a little later. Here's something to tide you over for now. Manually inserted dog-head emoji.)
"Crack."
Frenchie grimaced as he pressed the ice pack against his cheekbone again.
Mother's Milk had bought the ice pack at a gas station convenience store, originally intending to chill beer with it, but drinking meant no driving.
So Frenchie had snatched the ice pack.
If you looked closely, you would have noticed that his left eye socket had already swollen purple, with a Band-Aid stuck to his cheekbone.
The rings of nail marks around his neck had faded from deep red to dark brown, making it obvious that someone had strangled him.
Frenchie returned to the passenger seat of the old Ford, tilted the rearview mirror to inspect his face, then stretched his mouth.
Fuck! The split at the corner of his mouth was fucking bleeding again...
"I really need to file a workers' comp claim..."
Frenchie flipped the ice pack over and studied his face in the rearview mirror for a moment, swollen as though he had been stung by hornets.
"She was actually calm when she killed that guy just now. Can you believe that?"
"Yeah."
Mother's Milk held the steering wheel, his eyes never leaving the road.
"I saw her when she was choking you. Her pupils were completely blank. You just happened to be between her and that guy."
"So I was just a fucking meat shield."
"Don't argue. Being a meat shield is your lot in life."
Mother's Milk turned the old Ford out of Brooklyn's narrow alleys and onto the elevated roadway toward Queens.
In the rearview mirror, Kimiko sat curled up in the back seat, her gaze gloomy, the hood of her canvas jacket pulled low enough to hide most of her face.
She had been following them for a full day and night.
The preliminary assessment was that they were not members of that organization.
Over that day and night, she had eaten two sandwiches and drunk a bottle of mineral water.
She had also slept for a few hours in a corner of the garage, then sat up and resumed staring at Frenchie and Mother's Milk.
Rather than staring, it was more accurate to call it surveillance.
She wanted to make sure those two had not secretly contacted that organization while she slept.
Frenchie had also tried to communicate with her more than once, hoping to make a deal: they would help find Kenji Miyashiro, and Kimiko would join the Compound V experiment.
But Kimiko insisted on finding Miyashiro first. Otherwise, there was nothing to discuss.
There was nothing they could do. They couldn't beat her in a fight, and had to cater to her like a living ancestor.
Left with no choice, Frenchie could only discuss it with Mother's Milk and call Butcher.
"So you want information on her brother?"
"Japanese... that's a bit tricky. Let me think."
Butcher remained silent on the other end for quite a while before giving them an address.
"Flushing, Queens, at the intersection of 47th Street and Parsons Boulevard. There's a private agency with no sign."
"The owner's called Saike. Former CIA intelligence analyst. Since retiring, he's specialized in digging up old files Vought doesn't want made public for private clients."
"The old bastard owes me half his life. Just give him my name."
Soon, the old Ford stopped outside a shuttered laundromat on 47th Street.
Beside the laundromat's roller shutter was an extremely narrow iron door with no street number.
Knock, knock, knock!
Frenchie knocked three times, paused for quite a while, then knocked twice more.
Before long, the iron door was pulled open a crack from inside. A cloudy gray-blue eye studied them through the gap for a few seconds, then the door opened.
"Come in. Butcher told me everything."
Saike was much older than the fifty Butcher had claimed. He had graying hair and a hunched back, and wore a plaid shirt washed pale.
His workshop was hidden in a partitioned room behind the laundromat.
The walls were covered with organizational charts of the Vought Security Department, file photos of superhuman criminals, and old newspaper clippings circled in red.
Saike glanced at Kimiko without asking any questions, then took a kraft-paper envelope from a drawer and set it on the table.
"This is the boy you wanted me to look into. K-16, Kenji Miyashiro.
Vought marked his file 'discarded,' but didn't say he was dead.
He was transferred once before the Black Creek Company outpost was cleared out, but the transfer records were scrubbed clean. Still, I found this."
As he spoke, he pulled several photos from the envelope and laid them out on the table one by one.
The photos were blurry, taken with a telephoto lens from an extreme distance.
A frail Asian boy crouched in the corner of some abandoned building, wearing an ill-fitting dark hoodie with the hood pulled low.
The second photo showed him standing under the fluorescent lights of a gas station convenience store, the shadow of his hood hiding his eyes.
But the outline of his chin really did bear some resemblance to Kimiko's.
Trembling, Kimiko picked up the second photo and gently brushed her fingertip over the blurry half of his face beneath the shadow of the hood. The corners of her eyes grew wet.
"See? We weren't messing with you."
Frenchie scratched his head with the hand holding the ice pack and muttered.
But Kimiko ignored him, staring blankly at the photo for a long time before putting it down.
Then she turned to Mother's Milk and signed a rapid string of gestures.
Her movements were forceful.
"What's she saying?"
Mother's Milk watched her finish, pondered for a moment, then turned to Frenchie.
"She says, I'll go with you, and you'll help me find him. If you lie to me, or if he's dead, I'll kill you."
"Fuck, is that supposed to be reasonable? We're here to help!"
"I..."
"Stop, stop, stop. Your phone's ringing. Answer it first."
Mother's Milk heard the ringtone and stopped Frenchie, who didn't know his own limits.
Frenchie irritably pressed the answer button, and soon Butcher's voice came through the earpiece.
"Tell John... I fucking found it.
There's a passage beneath the base of that bronze statue at Godolkin University. It leads to a lab in the deepest part of the third basement level.
Not the place Cate went to. It's another, more secret lab. The place had clearly been abandoned for a long time, but there were obvious signs of activity."