Chapter Text
Soldier Boy was floating in abject nothingness. A black, endless void without any sense of time or space. He didn’t exist. Not physically. Not cognitively. Not even subconsciously.
Perhaps this was what death was like. Just an eternity of oblivion. No afterlife, just a total cessation of any thought, feeling, or movement.
But then, suddenly, someone—something—turned on a light.
Violently, he was thrust back into consciousness like there was an anchor chained to his ankle and he was plummeting to the ocean floor. His stomach lurched nauseatingly with the force of the movement.
Then, he was upright, standing beneath a spotlight. One small bulb flickered like a beacon in the ink-spill of utter darkness, enveloping him like a life-preserver.
The abyss around him was damp and oppressive. He felt like a broken machine suddenly made whole again, held together with duct tape and rubber bands against its will.
He examined his hand. Long, tapered fingers. How many people had this hand ended? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? He tried to dig into the recesses of his memory to recall, but the answer laid in some deep cavity that evaded him.
Out of the darkness, there was a voice.
“Soldier Boy.”
Unsettlingly melodic. Feminine.
He looked up to see a figure. As it stepped within the arc of illumination, its features began to come into focus. Raven-black hair. So dark it had a bluish sheen where the light bounced off it. Clad in a black pencil skirt and periwinkle-colored blouse, the same exact shade as the veins that sat just beneath her porcelain skin.
His voice was a start to his own ears, rough from disuse, and the words felt like sandpaper grating against his esophagus.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“My name is Dreambender.”
Never heard of her.
“You’re a supe?”
She nodded.
“Where the fuck am I?”
“You’re in cryo-sleep. What’s the last thing you remember?”
He racked his brain, features contorting as he strained to access the memory.
“Homelander,” he said eventually. “He knocked me out, that weasely fuck.”
She seemed pleased that he was able to remember this and took a step closer.
“Well,” she began in an impossibly serene voice considering she was speaking with the most lethal man alive, “Homelander is dead.”
Soldier Boy’s face became a blank slate. She studied him, trying to discern what he might be feeling. Shock? Grief? Exaltation? Some combination of them all? She doubted even he knew.
His brow folded again into a more familiar look of skepticism.
“How?” he demanded.
“William Butcher. But before you can ask, there’s no possibility of avenging his death. Butcher is dead, too.”
He laughed acerbically. “Why the fuck would I want to avenge the dickhead who shoved me back into this box?”
The shadow of a smile tugging at her lips led him to believe she had no intention of answering his rhetorical question.
“The death of Homelander has catapulted you back to the top, Soldier Boy. You are now the most powerful supe alive again. But,” she went on, “I understand you’re not on good terms with Vought’s newest CEO. Stan Edgar.”
The guffaw that erupted from his chest this time seemed to take even him by surprise.
“If that ain’t the understatement of the century, sweetheart. Lemme guess. That’s why you’re here?”
“Exactly. We’re hoping to come to an… agreement, if you will.”
Fearlessly, she strode forward again so now they were huddled like they were in some sort of coat closet or store-room. She was surprisingly tall and lanky. Shorter than he was, of course, but they were closer to eye-to-eye than he usually was with women.
“The political pendulum is swinging drastically in the opposite direction now, as these things often tend to do. Vought needs to reinvent its image. And you… well, some might say you’re a relic of the old, old guard,” she declared with a clinical edge to her tone.
She paused to measure his reaction again. He held his jaw high and his masseter muscle twitched on one side. He peered down the bridge of his nose, assessing her like a bored predator. She watched his throat bob as he swallowed whatever he might’ve been contemplating saying, but his posture remained rigid.
She took a minuscule step back. “But, you are powerful. No one can deny that. So Stan would like to come to an understanding that is mutually beneficial to all parties.”
He seemed to relax slightly. “Yeah? And what’s that?”
“Media training. Therapy. ‘Doing the work,’ as the kids today say.”
Soldier Boy staggered back and cackled like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He doubled over, hands on his knees, as his eyes crinkled at the corners.
“Therapy?” he repeated in-between thunderous, breathless laughs. “As in head-shrinking?”
When the laughing fit had finally subsided, he sighed and swiped at an invisible tear with his knuckle. “Wew. That’s a good one, I’ll give you that.” Then, he straightened. “Honey, you gotta be kidding me. No fucking chance.”
Her lips pulled into another hint of smirk. “He thought you might say that,” she replied, nodding. “But unfortunately, those are the terms of your release.”
Suddenly, all the mirth evaporated from his face. He lunged at her like a lion taking down a gazelle on the Serengeti.
However, his massive fist gripped empty air as she flickered like an apparition.
“Sorry,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way. Neither of us is tangible here. This—” she gestured to the emptiness around them— “isn’t, strictly speaking, real. But if you’d rather stay here for the next century, I’d be happy to relay that to Stan.”
She turned and began to walk beyond the orb of light. The click of her stilettos echoed into the void.
One.
Two.
Three–
“Wait!” Soldier Boy shouted after her. “Okay. Fuck it. That’s what it takes to get outta this shithole? Fine. I’ll play along with your bullshit little game. How hard could it be to listen to some four-eyed, degree-wagging, clipboard-totting pussy lecture me about my feelings?”
She spun back around, pearly-white teeth bared in a lupine grin. “Excellent. I’ll see you on the other side, Soldier Boy. Our first appointment is tomorrow at eleven.”
She resumed walking away.
“Oh, and for what it’s worth? I don’t wear glasses.”
Then, she disappeared into the blackness just as the sound of her heels faded.