After Sally drove off with their daughter, after he swore all the swear words he could think of and kicked everything he could find to kick, Blake went back into the meeting hall and saw Adrian Veidt, kneeling on the floor, sifting through the remains of his charts.
Blake almost felt sorry for the kid. Didn't actually feel sorry for him because Veidt was a twink, an unapologetic fairy with two many books in his head that hadn't taught him a goddamn thing about the world. And, also, because Blake didn't have the fucking energy to feel sorry for anybody. And even if he'd had it, it wasn't a thing that he did.
Still, in fairness -- Blake understood the concept of fairness the way he understood vampires and unicorns -- it wasn't the twink's fault. Blake had said what he said because the people he worked for (the people he really worked for) didn't want this meeting to lead to anything. And he had said it for the look on Laurel's face, the face of a daughter who thought he was a stranger, the way she watched him knowing, This, this is a man. Last of all, last and only relevant because it made the role easy to play, because it helped him come up with the words, Edward Blake believed everything he had said down to what he knew very well was the rotting core of his soul.
But in all of this calculation, Blake had never given a tinker's damn about Adrian Veidt: not his charts, not his plans, not his fucking feelings. But now the kid was crouched on the floor, glaring up at him, and even through that idiotic mask, it was clear his eyes were red. Blake had other things on his mind, and he'd long ago made peace with the fact of being an incurable asshole, but one thing he had not set out to do today was make a goddamn superhero cry.
Seeing Blake enter Veidt rose slowly to his feet. His lip trembled as he spoke. "Dan said we shouldn't have invited you. I ought to have listened to him. But I was trying to be inclusive." As though Edward Blake, the Comedian, went around every day to nursery schools and made guest appearances on public fucking television preaching the value of inclusiveness. As though this was something Veidt actually expected him to care about.
Blake reached into his pocket for another cigar, pulled out his lighter. "Which one is Dan?" He had read all of their files. He knew things about them they didn't know about themselves. "You mean the new Owl-boy? To tell the truth, Ozy, I have trouble keeping you and him straight." He gave the last word a meaningful inflection, and flicked his lighter as he let his eyes travel over the kid's long frame. Blake drew in a long breath of smoke, let it out, and said softly, "Anything I can help you with?"
Veidt stepped back, tensed his arms at his sides, and said, "I think you've done quite enough."
"Oh, I dunno. I think I'm just getting star. . .," he said, at which point Ozymandias grabbed him by the neck, pressed the lit end of the cigar into his face, then spun him around and threw him into the wall.
That was the last time Blake would ever underestimate Adrian Veidt.