Chapter Text
By the time they all reconvene at Mallory’s forested estate, some kind of silent, precarious peace seems to have been achieved. Butcher fractures it briefly with a tantrum about Lamplighter’s continuing survival, grabs the supe by the shirt, pushes him against the wall. When Lamplighter doesn’t respond, just glares up at him, daring him, Butcher releases him and stomps off to sulk.
Talking round in circles about what to do lasts for hours, stuck in the sitting room, Lamplighter cross-legged in an armchair in his borrowed jeans, Mallory opposite him in an upright dining chair, everyone else in relative levels of sprawled across the furniture. The crux of it is that Mallory wants to do things the legal way, have a big hearing, everything out in the open. Lamplighter’s already shot it down about twelve different ways, staring down at his socks, voice low and level. Truly most of the Boys agree with him, but they’re unwilling to voice opposition to Mallory too strongly.
‘If we assassinate Homelander and Stormfront in cold blood, if such a thing were even possible, we would be making them martyrs.’ Mallory says again, it feels like the hundredth time.
‘If we take this public, we all die.’ Lampligher says, picking at a stray thread on his jean hem. ‘And that’s fine with me, but it seems like a bit of an anti-climax for you guys, what with all the effort you’ve put in up to now.’
‘That’s true.’ Butcher says.
Mallory purses her lips at him. ‘But we still need to bring proof of their wrongdoings to light, otherwise Vought and the Seven will just start again.’
‘That’s also true.’ Hughie supplies.
And on it goes, until Lamplighter finally runs a hand through his hair, tips his head back and exhales loudly. ‘Ok, can I please have my phone. I think I know someone who can help.’
There’s a brief argument. Butcher says ‘no, the cunt cannot have his phone’, but Frenchie’s halfway to giving it to him before Butcher's finished, waiting for Mallory to agree, and she does.
‘On speakerphone,’ she demands.
Lamplighter agrees, shuffles forwards and more upright and picks a contact. The dial tone goes for several long rings before it’s answered.
‘Hello?’ A male voice says.
‘Hey,’ Lamplighter says, ‘it’s me.’ There’s a scrabble and a thud on the other end of the line. Lamplighter’s face twists in confusion. ‘Hello?’
‘I dropped the phone.’ The voice on the other end of the line announces breathlessly. Annie screws up her face, elbowing Hughie. Hughie frowns at her. The mystery voice keeps talking. ‘Liam? Is it that really you? Why are you calling? I mean not that I don’t appreciate you calling, but it’s just really unexpected.’
‘That’s The Deep.’ Annie interrupts. The rest of the room reacts accordingly. Butcher and MM almost draw their guns. Mallory holds up a hand to quiet them.
‘Am I on speaker?’ The Deep asks. ‘I just heard something.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Lamplighter reassures him. ‘Look, Kevin, I need to talk to you about something, but I can’t do it over the phone. Can you meet me somewhere? If I give you an address?’
‘Oh,’ The Deep sounds surprised, ‘well I mean, yeah, sure, I guess. No one really seems to care what I do out here anyway, soooooo, sure.’ The last is petulant.
Lamplighter almost smiles a little, then. He rattles off the address of a diner in a town an hour away. Mallory looks at him askance at his familiarity with the area, he raises a shoulder enigmatically. ‘Can you rent a car and drive out here?’ He asks The Deep.
‘Yeah,’
‘Don’t wear your suit, ok?’ Lamplighter cautions the other supe. ‘Do you have some other gloves to wear?’
‘Yeah, I think I can find some.’
‘You wrote the address down, yeah? You can call me if you get lost, just don’t –’
‘I can drive two states over without help, Liam.’ The Deep snaps. ‘Anything else?’
The corners of Lamplighter’s lips twitch upwards again. ‘Did you really get married?’
‘Oh,’ The Deep hesitates, ‘I mean I don’t know if it’s like a legal marriage. They just said I should pick someone. But then I didn’t really pick her, actually.’ He trails off.
Lamplighter rolls his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Well did you sign a piece of paper?’
‘Oh yeah,’ The Deep says emphatically, ‘I signed like loads of papers, but I don’t know what they were.’
‘KJ, what have we said? You don’t sign anything legal hasn’t read, right?’ Lamplighter sounds more animated at that than any time since the Boys had met him.
‘There is no legal out here,’ The Deep gets a little whine in his voice, ‘I’m all by myself. I’m doing my best, ok?’
‘Was anything you signed to do with money? Have you –’ Mallory motions and he cuts himself off. ‘Alright, we can talk about it later. The address I gave you is a Denny’s, so just wait in the parking lot.’
‘And you’ll be there?’ The Deep asks quietly.
Lamplighter looks up at Mallory, makes eye contact as he says, ‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’
They say goodbye, The Deep sounds reluctant, and Lamplighter hangs up, handing his phone back to Frenchie. Mallory fixes him with a hard stare.
‘Why did you call The Deep?’ She asks him.
Lamplighter shrugs again. ‘He knows everything there is to know about what goes on at Vought Tower, or at least he did until a few months ago. He can get gossip out of anyone.’
Mallory nods. ‘Right, but why did you call him?’
Lamplighter leans away from her, back into his chair.
Butcher stands up with a nasty smile. ‘I think I know.’
He picks up Mallory’s tablet and flicks across the screen for several moments. Eventually, triumphantly, he turns the screen around for the rest to see. The image is certainly of Lamplighter. He’s engaged in sexual activity with another person, face intense and eyes blazing, thrusting forwards into someone. The other figure is almost entirely obscured, on his stomach on the bed with his face pushed into the comforter by Lamplighter’s firm hand. Nothing particularly shocking, two adults fucking, salacious perhaps. But the other person is definitely a ‘he’.
Butcher trails a finger over the prone man’s abdomen on the screen. ‘Do I see,’ he asks in mock surprise, ‘a gill?’
Everyone leans forwards, except Lamplighter. He glowers. ‘Do you just keep those photos lying around?’
Mallory takes the tablet, pinches and drags to zoom in on the area Butcher indicated. Her lips quirk. ‘How interesting. It seems that five years ago we failed to realise we had caught not one but two of the Seven in our net.’
‘That was the secret you were so desperate to keep?’ Hughie blurts. Lamplighter grimaces, returns his gaze to his lap, keeps unravelling his jean hem. ‘Would it really have been so bad?’ Hughie asks earnestly. ‘I mean yeah, five years ago, coming out probably would have sucked, but would it have been as… as what you did?’ He trails off uncertainly, already regretting bringing up the subject they’d all been avoiding.
‘It wasn’t –’ Lamplighter hesitates, each word like pulling teeth. It’s already apparent to everyone that he hates explaining himself, explaining this particularly. ‘It wasn’t about keeping a secret, necessarily.’ He stops again. Butcher grunts, irritated, a little menacing. ‘It was Homelander, alright?’ Lamplighter snaps like he’s been pressed.
‘What?’ Butcher taunts, smirking around the room, like everyone’s in on his personal enjoyment of the situation. ‘Homelander doesn’t like queers? That it?’
‘Fuck you.’ Lamplighter snarls.
Butcher guffaws. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, sweetheart?’
Lamplighter’s fingers twitch like he’d very much like his lighter. ‘Butcher!’ Mallory warns. ‘Enough!’
‘Does any of this matter?’ Lamplighter directs hotly at Mallory. ‘Does it matter who I was fucking five years ago.’
Mallory stares back at him, cold as steel. ‘If I say it matters, it matters.’ She replies. ‘Now please, explain what you said about Homelander.’
Lamplighter’s face goes through a series of emotions before settling on blankly bad-tempered. ‘Fine. He found out about us. Me and Kevin, that is. He’s always hated KJ, it’s a thing he has. He doesn’t like the gills, thinks all supes should embody the perfect human being or some shit. I don’t know. I don’t know how he found out, it wasn’t like we were obvious about it, but he was furious. He trashed my room, lasered a hole in the wall. And he told me that if we didn’t stop right away, and if anyone ever found out what we’d done, he’d rip Kevin into pieces so small fishing boats would be using him for chum.’
The room is silent for a moment. They’re all familiar with the casual terror Homelander inspires.
‘And you believed this threat?’ Mallory clarifies. Her eyes bore into Lamplighter as though she could detect the truth of his words by sight.
Lamplighter laughs hollowly. ‘Well yeah. He had his hands right up in Kevin’s gills at the time, so, pretty convincing.’ He makes a hand gesture to go with his statement, palms facing in and fingers thrusting skywards. It’s a bizarrely unsettling image on all fronts, and the rest of the room shift uncomfortably.
Mallory begins taking notes on her tablet. ‘He threatened The Deep, did he threaten you?’
Lamplighter snorts. ‘He’s not stupid, he knows what works.’
Butcher looks at him speculatively. ‘Could you hurt him?’ He mimics the hand gesture that Lamplighter uses to direct flame. ‘With your fire?’
‘Maybe,’ Lamplighter’s noncommittal, ‘I don’t know. Nor does Homelander. My fire gets pretty hot. Could definitely mess up his all-American good looks. He wouldn’t want to take the risk. Kevin’s an easy target.’ He slants a nasty look at Annie. ‘Always more a lover than a fighter.’
‘Fuck you, asshole.’ Annie hisses, moving to get up.
Hughie puts a hand on her arm. ‘Let’s just, let’s just get the story out, alright? And then we can, whatever you want, all have a big fight.’ She shakes him off, but subsides. Lamplighter gives his little smirk of triumph.
‘So, you believed him. Did you stop?’ Mallory asks.
Lamplighter looks down again, resentment once more directed inwards. ‘If we’d stopped, you wouldn’t have those pictures.’ He swallows. ‘After, well,’ everyone knows after what, ‘after, we stopped. I stopped. I told him we couldn’t, anymore.’
‘Did you tell him what you’d done?’
He shakes his head. ‘Just that I’d done something bad. The worst. That it was over. Then I avoided him.’
There’s silence, the whole story told, out in the open.
‘So he was the reason.’ Mallory says thoughtfully.
Lamplighter looks at her sharply. ‘Those photos were the reason. As soon as I saw them, I knew. It didn’t matter if you were blackmailing me to come light your barbeque, the fact you had them meant Kevin was dead. When I… when…’ he still doesn’t say it, ‘I was terrified for months that you’d use them. That I’d wake up one day and they’d be on my newsfeed. It wouldn’t matter if no one else recognised Kevin. Homelander would know. He’d know we didn’t do what he said and he’d follow through.’ A moment more silence. Lamplighter’s such a discomforting combination of bursts of fierce intensity and lapses into sullen indolence, blazing eyes and short, economic movements, that no one wants to speak.
‘Do you really think that Kevin,’ Mallory inflects the name the way everyone does, except Lamplighter, ‘will be able to help us with our little conundrum?’
Lamplighter sits back, fire gone. ‘I suppose in eight hours we’ll find out.’