There was this one line. Blond guy, ridiculous ponytail, hair spiked up in every direction, from some anime I watched way too much of.
Art is a Patrick!
...No. That's not it.
Art is an explosion! There it was.
"Damn, that is tall." Jude rubbed his chin, watching Homelander drop out of the wreckage of three mushroom clouds. He clicked his tongue, nodding slowly. "First time I've popped a Doom-shroom. Gotta say, the artistic merit really is something else."
"Three, four stories easy," he added. He stepped backward into the shadows of the alley and slipped away before anyone turned their head.
Behind him, Clark and Maeve stood shivering, frost melting off their suits. Neither looked his way. Their heads were tilted straight back, eyes locked on Homelander's plummeting form.
The blast was a strange piece of work. It was massive enough to knock a man like Homelander out cold, yet surgical in its containment. The devastation stayed packed within a few hundred meters. The shockwave carried maybe a kilometer beyond that. Past that line, nothing. No debris, no spillover. Neither Maeve nor Clark had ever seen an explosive behave like that. If the guy who set it off called it art, they weren't going to argue.
Homelander kept falling. Maeve blinked hard, her breath hitching as her eyes tracked his descent. He rode the tail end of the blast wave straight down, headfirst.
More precisely, face-first.
"Move the civilians! Now, before he lands on someone!"
Clark vanished before she finished the sentence. A sonic crack split the air. Moving faster than Homelander's freefall, he scooped bystanders out of the impact zone in a blur, depositing them safely down the block.
Boom.
Homelander hit the pavement skull-first. The impact cracked loud enough to send gravel spraying across the street.
The heavy crunch echoed through the block.
"There goes a perfectly good street," Maeve muttered, stepping over the fractured pavement to look down into the crater.
Clark didn't look at Homelander. He moved through the scattered crowd, checking the civilians for blast injuries.
He didn't find any. He saw torn jackets and scattered smears of blood, but no active wounds. The skin beneath the rips was already smooth, closed over as if the damage had never happened. The faint scent of crushed herbs and honey hung in the air, thinning out with the breeze. The healing mist didn't need to be swallowed or applied. Standing inside the cloud for a few seconds did the work. It left no residue and no trace. The people brushing dust off their clothes didn't look down at their healed skin; they just kept moving.
None of them realized what had happened.
"...I feel kind of dizzy."
The hoarse voice drifted up from the crater. Homelander pushed himself onto his hands and knees. His head swayed. Every inch of his skin was flushed red and blistered. He pressed a hand to his chest, his fingers digging in over his ribs.
"Oh my god, are you okay?" Maeve dropped into the crater, grabbing his scorched arm to haul him up. "That thing was terrifying. Had to be a supe."
"I know." Homelander stood. His jaw clamped shut, the muscles jumping along his cheek.
People on the street scrambled up from the pavement. None of them looked at him. They turned and scattered, running in every direction.
It tracked. New Yorkers had lived alongside supes long enough to build a set of reflexes. When the disaster ended, they cheered, clapped, and held up their phones. When it was happening, they ran, hid, and pressed their backs against the nearest solid wall. When the hero himself went down, there was no script. Up until thirty seconds ago, nobody had ever needed one.
When the sky over the alley lit up with three mushroom clouds, the crowd had frozen. Before their legs caught up with their instincts, the shockwave swept them off their feet. Then Homelander fell out of the smoke.
He's down. Homelander's actually down. Why are you still watching? Run, unless you want to die too.
Climbing out of the crater, he looked at a street full of people fleeing for their lives. The few glances thrown over their shoulders carried wide eyes and pale faces. There was no worship. No reverence. No trust.
They had all seen him fall.
They looked at him with shrinking pupils and tight mouths. They saw something that could put a hole in the untouchable. They looked at a god bleeding on the asphalt, waiting for him to stand between them and whatever had put him there.
Every glance that landed on his blistered skin made Homelander's hands shake. His breath came in short, jagged pulls.
Do gods bleed?
He would have said no. He would have sworn to it.
Madelyn had told him a thousand times over what he was supposed to be. Pure, flawless, untouchable, without a single crack. Carved out of cold marble. Something built to be looked at, not something that could be hurt. A man who called himself Homelander did not stand in front of people covered in soot and burns. It was the moment the myth broke.
A god that bleeds isn't a god. So if he's not a god, what does that make him?
He swallowed hard, cutting the thought off. His chest tightened, a cold knot forming in his stomach.
"I'm going to kill you! You son of a bitch, I am going to kill you!"
He ripped his arm out of Maeve's grip and launched into the air. His eyes flared crimson. He swept his gaze over the street, the veins in his neck bulging against the skin. Interrogation, secrecy, and the careful plan he brought into the alley were gone. He just wanted to find the masked man and tear him apart.
He drew a ragged breath and spat a mouthful of blood onto the pavement. He scanned the crowd and the surrounding rooftops, his eyes darting until his temples throbbed.
Nothing.
No mask. No two-headed snake tattoo. Not even a stranger favoring a bandaged side and a bad leg. The man was gone. Clean, complete, and total, leaving empty space where he had stood.