Brute Quiet

Butcher didn't hear Homelander touch down on his balcony, just the sound of the balcony door coming open. He pulled his eyes away from the images on the television screen to witness the supe set down a large bag outside before entering. "William. I waited until she was in the ground before I came here."

He took another swig of the whiskey in his glass. "Causing you problems, then? Finding another CEO?"

"None worth mentioning." Homelander seated himself in a nearby chair, his hands resting on its arms. Something was off about the cunt, something that he'd never noticed in their previous meetings. There was no sarcasm, no mocking grins, no threats, at least not yet. His face was almost masklike. "So you admit you're the one who took her." The one who killed her.

Lifting the whiskey glass in a salute, he said, "Course I did. You'll be happy to know how loyal she was to you. She never gave me a secret of yours worth having." But she had given him the secret of Vought that would hurt him most, just as a parting gift.

"Project Athena," she finally gasped when the impact of Butcher's fists on her flesh became too much to bear.

He paused to look at her. She was as she had been since he and Hughie and Marvin had kidnapped her from her Upper West Side apartment, completely naked, spreadeagled on a stained bed with her wrists and ankles securely chained to the frame. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, which a distant part of his mind told him probably meant she had serious internal injuries, but he didn't give a toss. He'd learned what his father must have always known: it was fun to beat someone weaker than you, make them feel your sheer physical power, with no resistance possible. Dark bruises from previous sessions stained her abdomen, so probably an internal rupture which would cause bleeding into the abdominal cavity. If the rupture weren't treated, Ashley would die. But he only needed to keep her alive until she gave him information about Homelander to use as a weapon against him. "Never heard of it."

"Your CIA contact has. Grace Mallory." Butcher couldn't hide his surprise, and she gave him a little gasping laugh. "Oh please, Homelander's met her. You think Vought couldn't find out who was taking care of Ryan after Becca died? She's heard of Project Athena, but she'll never tell you."

"And why not, pray?"

Ashley's grin became predatory, revealing the blood on her teeth. "No, no, not just yet. We've only begun the foreplay, Mr. Butcher. Go to her and drop the project name. Tell her you've managed to hack into Vought's e-mail system and the project was mentioned a couple of times. Don't give her context. She'll respond one of three ways: she's never heard of it and will look into it, or she's never heard of it but is sure it's nothing, or they've already looked into it and it's nothing."

"And why won't she tell me about it?"

"You'll find out, but she'll die before she utters one honest word about it." She moved one manacled hand lazily. "Go on, Mr. Butcher. Start finding out things you don't want to know."

"Yes, I'm sure she was loyal. You would have coopted her into your little group if she hadn't been. Just like Starlight tried to do." Homelander paid no attention to the images playing on the television; the sound had been turned down when Butcher couldn't stand it anymore, but he couldn't stop watching. It was like an itch too deep to scratch, a truth that refused to sink into his brain.

"Damned if she did, damned if she didn't." He took another sip of his whiskey and hit the pause button for the DVD player, doing his best not to register the image as he turned his attention to Homelander.

"Yes." He sat in the armchair, staring at Butcher with an unreadable expression. He hoped his own expression was equally blank. "I'd like to thank you for the Grace Mallory thing. I certainly wasn't expecting that."

"Neither was I."

"Project Athena?" Grace Mallory met his gaze with a clear, untroubled stare. "I don't believe I've heard of it. Do you have any information as to what the project involved?"

"No," said Butcher. "We hacked into Vought's e-mail system briefly and found a couple of references to it. Thought it might be important."

She nodded. "I appreciate the information. I'll look into it and let you know what I find."

But she hadn't said another word to him by the time Ashley explained everything, and Grace opened her door that day to find him standing there. She may have registered the Beretta in his hand before he put two rounds through her forehead—he wasn't sure. He left her lying in her doorway to the mercies of the weather and the blowflies.

"What did she do?" asked Homelander. "I thought the two of you were all buddy-buddy."

"She kept secrets from me." Butcher saw the other man startle.

"Yes," the supe said. "That's a good reason to kill her. What did she lie about?"

"A project at Vought. It would have changed my life if I'd known about it. She didn't want me to know the truth, just be her lone-wolf killer. So she lied, and she died."

"Expecting the truth out of the CIA is like expecting Santa Claus to materialize on Christmas Eve."

"True."

Homelander asked, "Why didn't you rape Ashley? I would have expected it since you thought she was my equivalent of Becca. An eye for an eye."

"What makes you think I didn't?"

"I couldn't smell you on her like that. I smelled that you'd been around her, but there hadn't been any…intimate connection, so to speak. I have a sensitive nose. That's how I smelled you on Maeve before she took her swan dive out the window with Soldier Boy and you helped her pretend she was dead." Again Butcher couldn't control his expression, but it was to be expected with the hammerblow he'd taken over Project Athena's contents. Homelander grinned. "Oh, I know she's alive and powerless. Ashley had a second thought or two about hiding it from me."

"Surprised you didn't kill her yourself."

"I forgave her since she told me pretty shortly afterward. I would never have killed her."

"Too useful to you?"

He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Tell me why you didn't rape her when you think that would have been poetic justice."

"I tried. She decided she'd take a beating instead." The memory of her laughing at him, her eyes almost mad with glee, sent a shiver through him, as the sight had then. His cock had shriveled in his pants and in his rage he'd given her his fists instead, pistons driving into her belly over and over until he was satisfied with the sounds of pain she made. Little bitch.

"You ruptured her spleen. She bled into her abdominal cavity. That was the cause of death. Just in case you were interested." Something flickered in Homelander's eyes, but it wasn't the laser vision, and it was gone too quickly for Butcher to determine what it had been.

Butcher wished she'd died more slowly, or too quickly to reveal what Project Athena had been. But, as she'd said when he'd raised himself from that last beating and turned to leave the room, "I've done better than kill you. I've hurt you." That rang a bell, but he couldn't identify where he'd heard it before. "From Hell's heart I stab at thee." That sounded familiar too, but he never bothered to try figuring out what she was quoting.

"You could have tried again. Why didn't you?"

He let the well-practiced madness appear in his eyes. "Beating her was more fun." And she deserved it, the bitch, the cunt, to explode the foundations of his life with her well-chosen words the way she had. He should have kept her alive much, much longer.

She was waiting when he returned from Grace's home, but he hadn't expected anything else. "So what did Little Miss Wetwork tell you?"

"Never heard of it, will look into it."

"Smart. She can string it out longer if you think she's actually checking into it."

"So what is Project Athena that you think it will buy you your freedom?" Nothing would, of course; she'd never leave this room alive. The others—in particular Hughie—would have a problem with that, but they would obey or they could have their corpses thrown into the street the way he planned with Ms. Barrett here.

"Oh please," she scoffed. "I know you'll never let me go. The only reason I'm telling you about Project Athena is to hurt you. Once you know all the details, you might even kill yourself. I haven't decided if it will hit you that hard or not."

"Project Athena," he prompted.

She coughed, and bright red blood splattered her face. "In my office there's a wall safe. Here is the combination." Butcher didn't bother writing it down. His military experience had taught him how to hold information as long as he needed. "Inside the safe is a manila folder labeled 'Project Athena' and three DVDs. Nine hours of footage is on each DVD. I'm sure you'll want to watch them, just to make sure I haven't lied to you about the nature of the project." Ashley grinned at him with bloody teeth.

"No doubt."

"You had a vasectomy when you were twenty-one, when you were in the Royal Marines. Correct?"

Butcher nodded. "Why does that matter?"

She giggled. "Why, Mr. Butcher, that's the most important thing you ever did in your life. It's the entire reason why Project Athena changed everything for you and your wife."

"Explain."

"I'm trying to!" Ashley winced and turned her head toward her left shoulder. Doubtless her upraised manacled arms caused her pain, but it must be less than his fists. "Project Athena was conceived by Madelyn Stillwell. She brought it to Dr. Jonah Vogelbaum and he assisted with the medical part of the proceedings. Really it didn't have anything to do with Vought and Stan Edgar would have put an immediate stop to it if he'd known. Did you know that he and Madelyn didn't get along at all?"

"Had no idea." And also didn't care, but he let her continue.

"He would have fired her years ago except for the fact that she was banging Homelander, who would feel some type of way about his fuckbuddy getting her pink slip, and he wasn't willing to take a chance then. Madelyn felt insecure in her position and she had reason. She liked to play girlboss, but I was the one who did her actual work while she schemed to solidify her position. I'm pretty sure she intended to replace Mr. Edgar as CEO. I could have told her that wouldn't work, but she never listened to me."

"But on to what interests you. Madelyn created Project Athena to make sure it was safe for a human woman to carry a supe baby to term. Homelander was focused more on Queen Maeve, and she knew she had to give herself a solid reason for him to support her staying in her position. What better way than by becoming the mother of his child?" Ashley nodded when he reacted. "Yeah, Teddy Stillwell's his son. I can't figure out whether he knows it or not."

"So what does any of this have to do with me?" he asked, even though he had a sinking feeling he already knew.

Ashley started laughing, coughing up more blood. "Do you think Madelyn would just jump right into getting pregnant with Homelander's ankle-biter? Oh no. She wanted a human trial before she subjected herself to it. And that's all your wife was—a human trial."

Butcher reached down and slapped her across the face. In the previous three days he'd restricted himself to body blows, but this was too much. "Shut your mouth about her."

She shook off the impact of the blow, but more slowly than she would have at the start of their acquaintance. "But you wanted to know about Project Athena, and I can't tell you without including your holy sainted wife."

"So you're saying that Madelyn set her up to be raped by the cunt to get her pregnant, so she'd be sure it was safe to get pregnant by him herself?"

"No. Had Becca said anything to you about children, about wanting a child?"

"No. She knew I'd had a vasectomy and that wouldn't happen." Butcher had resolved not to pass his generational trauma down to a new generation.

"I wonder if she thought about trying to convince you that the vasectomy had failed and decided it wouldn't work. The first of the DVDs are her interviews with Madelyn and Dr. Vogelbaum. The gist of the DVD is that she had the baby fever and didn't much care who the father was as long as she got her little bundle of joy."

"You're lying."

"You'll know I'm not when you watch the DVDs. The third one is the only one you're going to care about, though. Spoilers: it's nine hours of your wife servicing Homelander like a thousand-dollar-a-night whore. You'll see a lot of things on that footage, but not rape."

Butcher hit her again, the fury boiling inside him, and she began laughing again, crazily, the way she had that first night when he'd unbuckled his belt and prepared to rape her. It was for Becca, to hurt Homelander, and who gave a shit about one of the supe's lackeys? But he couldn't stop her laughter and it shrank him until his fists took the lead, hitting and hitting and hitting until he was warm and satisfied, but the laughter didn't stop—he wondered if she'd gone insane—and eventually he fled the room to escape it.

The next morning he returned to bruises marring the woman's pale freckled skin, and the sight caused his cock to stir. "I saw footage of Becca coming out of Homelander's apartment. She looked traumatized."

"Context is everything. Why did Little Miss Wetwork only show you footage from the corridor? Homelander's apartment has cameras everywhere. That's where the DVD footage came from, and if she had access to one she had access to all."

He didn't say anything, but he knew the answer. Watching his wife consensually fuck Homelander wouldn't have turned Butcher into a guided missile, wouldn't have made him the kind of weapon that could destroy Vought.

Ashley saw the knowledge on his face. "It's a bitch when you find our your wife's a lying adulteress, isn't it? Especially when you thought she was some pure vessel of perfection or whatever the fuck you thought."

"Shut your mouth."

"Adulteress—that's such a lovely, old-fashioned, evocative word. It almost sounds classy. Definitely not like a woman who fucked a man she didn't give a shit about multiple times to get his precious semen so she could have her supe baby, and definitely not like a woman who lied about being raped. I'd call her a fucking, lying slut, in fact."

A red filter snapped down over his vision, and he only came out of the fugue state when Ashley lost consciousness. Blood on his hands, splattered on his arms, in fact—he couldn't lose control like that again. She was lying. She had to be lying. He'd question her again tomorrow and see if he could get any truth out of her lying mouth.

But when he came back the next morning her eyes were open and staring, with a fly crawling on one of her irises. When he released her arms from the manacles they flopped down, so she must have died shortly after he left her yesterday since rigor mortis had passed. With a sigh he unlocked the cuffs around her ankles. Her bladder and bowels had released, if the fly on her eye hadn't convinced him she was dead. With Frenchie and Marvin's help he rolled her up in garbage bags and left her in a dumpster behind a restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. With luck she'd never be found at all.

His luck had been bad because she was discovered a few hours later, but he'd managed to get access to the Tower and her office, pull the manila folder and the DVDs from her safe, along with several thousand dollars in cash that may have been her getaway fund. Well, she'd gotten away, that was for certain.

Butcher had come back to his apartment and spend the day and night watching that third DVD, the one showing him Becca entering Homelander's apartment and sinking to her knees in front of him as soon as the door closed, finding his zipper and taking him in her mouth to get him hard, and then she fucked him. Christ, did she fuck him, enthusiastic and expert, and the supe enjoyed himself immensely. They adjourned to his bedroom and she fucked him some more, and when she was leaving they felt the need to tear one more off and he fucked her up against the door, which at least explained the state of her clothing when she left his apartment in the footage Grace had seen fit to show him. And then he had to watch another eight hours of Becca fucking Homelander, just to feel in his bones the enormity of her betrayal. The redheaded cunt had told him nothing but the truth, and she was right. She'd done worse than kill him.

Suddenly he became aware of the silence in his apartment. Homelander still sat in the armchair, saying nothing. "Nothing to say to that?"

"You seemed lost in thought. I didn't want to interrupt anything." His eyes moved to the television screen, rested there for a moment, then moved away.

"So what are you planning to do about this? Still want a death match between us?" Homelander shook his head. "Not a surprise, I suppose. Starlight told us all how much you hated Ashley. She said you'd probably pay us to kill her."

Homelander snapped his fingers. "That reminds me," he said, and went out to the balcony, to the bag he'd brought with him. "Don't worry, William, we're almost done with our little talk and then you can get back to watching your amateur porn." Butcher opened his mouth to deliver a reply, but the words stuck in his throat when the supe threw two round objects at him that he wished he could have thought were soccer balls, but the shape was wrong to roll properly.

They were heads. Starlight's head. Kimiko's head.

"Had to take out the two bitches first because they were both supes. They deserved that much respect. Then I killed the others: Hughie, the Frenchman, Marvin. I was going to kill Grace Mallory too but imagine my surprise when I arrived at her house and it was already done. All I could do was lop off her head and toss it in the bag. Then a quick visit to Maeve—she was asleep, never felt a thing, and here we are."

Butcher just stared at Starlight's beautiful face, her silky golden hair, separated from that body that so many men would have sold their souls for. How many times had he pleasured himself with fantasies of her before the guilt kicked in? "Why would you do this? You hated Ashley. Starlight had dozens of stories about you abusing her."

"Did you ever think, even for a minute, why I did that? It wasn't because I hated her. It was to make sure that she would never, never leave me. Because I fucking loved her. And you took her away." Before he could take any steps to defend himself, or even register what had happened, Homelander's laser vision flashed out and knocked him from his chair. He rolled crazily on the floor, coming to rest in a position that showed him the most horrific thing he'd ever seen: his own body, sitting in his chair before the television.

Homelander grabbed him by the hair and lifted him as his awareness faded. "You know what I'm going to do, William? I'm going to the cemetery where Ashley is buried and I'm going to remove all the dirt that's on top of her. Her coffin is inside a concrete box called a grave vault. I'm going to burn her name into the top of it with my laser vision, then I'm going to take the top off. Then I'm going to arrange all your skulls around her, looking at her. I've already burned her name into the top of the coffin and put jewels into it, and weapons too, so that in a few thousand years, when archeologists find her, they'll think she was a great warrior queen, and her name will live even when she couldn't. But no one will remember you, William, or any of your killers. You'll be nothing but grave goods then, just dead enemies to accompany her to the afterlife. Funny, isn't it? Oh yeah, you never were much of a laugher." He fetched the bag from the balcony and tossed Butcher's head inside, where it banged against Frenchie's, before he retrieved Starlight and Kimiko's heads and put them back inside. "All right, everyone. We'll be able to fly." Homelander hummed "Don't Fear the Reaper" all the way to Ashley's grave.