A minute earlier, hell, twenty seconds earlier, and Homelander could have let Clark keep that plane in the air without any of this happening.
Losing the aircraft would not have mattered much in the long run. Even if Superman ended up doing all the real work, even if someone eventually traced the malfunction back to a stray blast of heat vision through the control panel, none of it would matter once the story got written the right way. The rescue succeeded. That was the headline. Headlines were the only thing Vought's press office ever needed to work with.
Doesn't matter how ugly the process was. Only matters what people read about it afterward.
Vought would spin this into three heroes stopping a hijacking together. Depending on how generously the company's copywriters played it, this might even turn out good for business. No casualties. A handful of dead terrorists. A clean win. His share of that glory, dressed up right, would not come in smaller than Superman's. If anyone's part got trimmed down for the cameras, it would be Maeve's. What the company actually needed wasn't a Superman. It needed balance. Vought, Homelander, and Superman locked into a triangle stable enough to hold weight.
Let Maeve walk out over this, and Superman became the undisputed king of the new Eight, unrivaled and unquestioned. That was not a future either Madelyn Stillwell or Stan Edgar wanted to wake up to. Control mattered more to both of them than raw talent ever would.
None of that was the root of it. Compared to a man who could out-muscle him and hold up a falling airliner with his bare hands, the timing was what crawled under Homelander's skin.
"Why the hell didn't you come sooner?!"
Twin beams of heat lanced into Clark's chest. They did exactly what they had done the last time. Less, actually. The first round of heat vision had at least left a mark, a flinch, some sign Superman felt it. This time there was nothing. Not even a glance in his direction.
So he closed the distance and hit him. Three times.
"Homelander, have you completely lost your mind?!"
Clark didn't stagger, but the impact sent his body swinging. The plane swayed hard with it. The passengers lurched in their seats.
Clark rounded on him. His brow lowered, his jaw set hard. "I found somewhere close enough to put this down safely. Don't get in my way while I'm landing it. People are going to die."
Doesn't matter what he found. That only makes this worse.
Homelander had assumed Clark had bailed, gone back to Vought, out of the picture entirely. He hadn't clocked that Clark had peeled off to scout a landing site nearby. If he had known Superman was still watching, he never would have let the mask slip in front of a hundred witnesses.
"I'm going to fucking kill every one of you with my eyes!"
That one sentence undid him. Right up until he had said it out loud, there had still been a way out. Walk away from the wreck, let it be one more disaster he couldn't stop. That was still a hero's story, however hollow. Even with Superman swooping back in to save the day, if everyone on that plane made it home, Vought's money and reach could keep a hundred-odd witnesses quiet. Paying someone to lie was hard. Paying someone to simply not talk was easy.
The problem was the sentence itself. It had already gutted whatever hero the cabin thought they were looking at and put the real thing on display instead. Not a savior. A lunatic in a cape with a god complex and heat vision.
Give someone hope, then rip it away. That was the cruelest thing you could do to a person. He had built a career on that particular cruelty. Now the universe was returning the favor.
"What a joke," he said, his upper lip curling. "What a joke. None of you were ever walking away from this."
If Superman actually lands this thing, I'm not the hero who couldn't save the day anymore. I'm the psychopath who tried to kill everyone on board in front of a hundred witnesses.
The thought of falling that far, that fast, god to monster in the space of one flight, pushed his panic past its limit. It shifted into blind, murderous need. There was only one outcome left he could live with. Put the plane at the bottom of the Pacific, and put everyone aboard it there with it. Nobody left to talk meant nothing left to verify. Even if Superman and Maeve wanted to tell the truth afterward, Vought would not let them. Not with the stock price on the line. Given the choice, Madelyn Stillwell and Stan Edgar would cut both of them loose before they admitted to any of it publicly.
He threw everything he had at Clark. Heat vision, fists, boots, every trick that had ever put someone down. He burned through thirty straight seconds pushing his body to its absolute limit. Clark didn't move.
"Don't do this, Homelander." Clark held the plane steady overhead with both hands. He remained wrapped in his own field, not so much as swaying under the barrage. "I don't know what's gotten into you. But you're wasting your energy."
The attack sputtered out. Homelander's hands would not stop shaking. Both legs ached down to the bone. He felt hairline cracks running through them from slamming his limbs into something that had not given an inch. Hitting Superman left his knuckles raw and bruised. For the first time in his life, Homelander stood face to face with power that outclassed his own.
His jaw worked. Red bled back into his eyes. Not at Superman this time, but at the fuselage over his head.
"Leave marks, fine. I'll just say Superman did it."
"I'm the only one who gets to be God here!"
The beams tore loose just as Clark's patience ran out. Two answering lances of heat met them halfway. There was no standoff. No grinding contest of strength. Clark's blast cut straight through Homelander's beams and sent him tumbling backward through the air.
The stench of charred flesh hit before the pain did. His uniform was gone across the chest, burned clean through to a raw, smoking hole underneath. Whatever gap existed between the two of them in raw output, it was vast. He was still breathing only because Clark had pulled the shot. Skin and muscle instead of bone.
Behind the cracked cabin windows, the passengers pressed their faces to the glass. They watched the two figures tear the sky apart above their heads.