Running From Himself 2-12

The ninety-ninth-floor meeting room of Vought Tower was, as always, a sterile cathedral of corporate power. Statues and murals and all of the finery to keep them pacified, everything expected of upjumped lab experiments playing a pantheon.

Recently, however, it was the exact same place where those gods of his came to be reminded of their leashes, and today, their mortality. 

Stanford Justin Edgar stood at the head of the V-shaped table, a roiling sea of agitated demigods swirling around him as he watched in silence at their near-panic. 

Of course, all of this was far from complete without the frantic actions of one particularly anxious Vice President of Hero Management, young Ashley Barrett doing her part to increase the ambient level of stress as only she could. He didn’t regret appointing her to the position, as weak-willed as she was.

That was the benefit of her, really. Far less ambitious and much less intelligent or experienced as the late Madelyn Stillwell, she was much easier to control as Homelander already discovered.

Truly, the woman was in essence a glorified publicist with an anxiety disorder just this side of debilitating. 

Stanford sighed again, the sound going unheard in the mess of it all. The air thick with the scent of expensive and entirely untouched coffee as well as the low, simmering hum of barely suppressed hysteria, he couldn’t help but feel like it was nothing short of a perfect microcosm of an ecosystem with a new predator. 

Beautiful, in its own way.

At the eye of the storm was Vought’s very own Stormfront, Clara Vought nee Risinger, the epicenter of today’s current disruption. The woman sat in her assigned position, petulant to the point of outright fury. If not for her own restraint born of many many years of recalcitrant fuck-ups, Stan was sure she would be out the window right now, cackling in German like the little witch she was on the inside.

He was honestly quite surprised to see her maintain what little composure she had, quite honestly, especially given the fact that her once-pristine face was now a swollen, purple roadmap of someone else’s profound displeasure. Poor Stormfront, no livestream for the fans tonight, he tutted his tongue slowly at that, shaking his head as if in sheer shock at the events unfolding before him. How will they survive?

Vought’s on-site medical team were second-to-none, of course, but they could only do so much against a body like hers, so incredibly durable that they would have been better off giving her a band-aid and a juice box to go with it. As expected, they had done a poor job setting her broken nose, giving her a thuggish look that was, in its own lopsided way, a significant improvement over her usual curated edginess.

“-en it was just there,” her voice was a furious, half-angry rasp, the sandpaper-slick irony somehow nowhere to be found as she nearly whined like the one-hundred-and-one year old giant woman-baby she was. “One second, I have the little bastard… right in front of me, dead to rights. The next, i-it’s like I was hit by the fist of God.”

Fist of God. Stan allowed himself the mildest of smiles, the expression wiped away before anyone could notice. How wonderfully melodramatic. Nodding to himself, the CEO made a mental note to forward that specific motto to Marketing; something like that could easly be workshopped a bit for one of their younger supes with the appropriate strength profile. 

Above anything else, it had potential for their Fundamentalist demo.

Ashley, of course, was already there as soon as the words left Stormfront’s split lips. The redhead buzzed around the table, phone clutched in a white-knuckled grip and mouth already yammering on. “A fist of God? Do we have a narrative for that? Because ‘act of God’ is nothing, whatever, wouldn’t even work b-but ‘fist of God’ could poll well, if we frame it as a divine trial, a test of her resilience, it shows grit, it sh-”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ashley,” Maeve’s voice burst out from her end of the table, the Queen of the Seven staring at her own perfectly manicured hands entirely unbothered by Stormfront’s mangling. “Do us all a favor and shut up already.”

Ashley managed the perfect impression of a carp drowning in open air, mouth opening and closing silently, as she stared over at the woman in a circlet. Truly, the woman lacked the gravitas and ability to think on her feet her predecessor wore like a badge of honor, considering it took her a good five seconds to find a single word. “Maeve, you don’t understand. This i- this is important brand alignment we’re staring down the barrel of! The second we let it get out in front of us, it’ll snowball and next thing we know, all the blogs will run with ‘Stormfront gets her ass kicked’ and our Q4 projections for her merchandise line will tank. After a half-dozen different focus groups just for the lightning-bolt earrings?”

“Poor you, how will you ever recover?” Maeve said, still not looking up. 

Shockwave, ever the opportunist, leaned forward, his voice a too-loud bark trying to fill the space. “So, what about the a-hole who did this, though? Shouldn’t we be more worried about getting sneaked trying to do our jobs, not… whatever this is.” He waved a hand in Ashley’s general direction.

“It’s called crisis management, Shockwave,” Ashley seemed to find her backbone all of a sudden, the young redhead snapping at the resident speedster. “And I’d watch your tone, your brand visibility isn’t too big for you to get replaced if a race goes bad.”

“Don’t even joke about that, my brand’s top tier,” Shockwave shot back, even as Stan was well aware that was more or less false. Shockwave had neither the built-up presence of a public that grew up with A-Train nor the uniqueness of being a Black man on the seven. “I’m the fastest man in the world.”

“Fastest man on the payroll, you mean,” Nubia finally decided to say her piece, speaking up from across the table. “Big difference.”

The lead monkey of this little circus stood at the window, back of the American flag broadly displayed to the room. The coiled spring of theatrical indignation he was, Homelander hadn’t said a word since all this had begun. Despite that, the temperature had dropped several degree; nothing at all to do with the thermostat, and everything to do with wounded ego by proxy. 

Stan raised a glass to his lips, sipping his water as he continued to let silence do the work for him. His primary asset was unsettled; not by the threat itself, of course, the statistical probability of anything genuinely threatening someone that would survive anything short of a direct nuclear explosion was almost approaching zero.

No, it was the narrative implications that he knew had his signature supe by the short-hairs. An unknown variable had entered his carefully curated story and he couldn’t have that.

Predictable.

“I’m just a little confused, honestly. If I got this right,” Nubia piped up again, the woman in white and gold leaning back in her chair, arms crossed and voice dripping with sarcasm hot enough to scald. “You, of all people, a woman who can shoot lightning out of her hands and toss aside a 747 with your powers, got into a fight with two B-listers at best,” Nubia tilted her head with a sharp hum, her gold single-bolt earrings jingling with the motion, “along with a mystery guest in a back-alley shithole in Jersey, and you not only lost, but you also got your face rearranged and tossed like a Raggedy Annie.” 

Nubia’s gaze darted over to Starlight. “No offense, Starlight.”

The Midwestern supe blinked all of a sudden, surprise at being addressed written all over her face. “...uh, none taken?”

Nubia turned back to her lightning-throwing ‘sister’ supe. “Did I miss anything?”

“It wasn’t a back alley, it was an industrial park,” Stormfront’s response came out a near hiss, eyes narrowed into slits as she turned them Nubia’s way. “And it was faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Faster than you. Faster than Shockwave. Faster than that asshole A-T-”

"Don't." Homelander's voice cut across the room, soft and deadly. He still hadn't turned around, clearly enraptured by the view from the top floor. "Don't even say his name."

Stan took another deliberate sip of his water as he let the moment breathe, the silence thick but not quite suffocating… yet.

Starlight, bless her earnest, traitorous little heart, rushed to fill the void.

“But… who could it be?” Oddly enough, she was honest in her confusion, decades of dealing with consummate liars letting him pick out the tells in both normal people and supes. That… that realization actually left Stan a bit on the backfoot, the CEO blinking owlishly behind his glasses in the girl’s direction. “One of the street supes? They’ve been getting more organized, maybe they have someone new?”

“Sure, a bunch of hopped-up chicanos playing dress-up did this. No, blondie, use your head for once in your life,” Stormfront sneered at the single blonde on this team that wasn’t an out-and-out sociopath. “This was different. This was… controlled. Precise.”

Nubia let out a dagger of a laugh; sharp, short and piercing. “Oh, I’m sorry, you mean the opposite of your usual approach of ‘fry everything that looks at me funny’? Yeah, I can see how precision would seem like a new concept to you.”

“You wanna say that again?” Stormfront’s hands dropped to her side as the woman stood up in a rush, fingers already crackling with faint, blue-white energy. So easy to provoke.

“I said,” Nubia leaned forward, voice dropping low to the dangerous purr that had Marketing convinced she could easily play to the market more into mothers that was sure to take off, “that maybe if you spent less time live-streaming your bullshit and more time out in the field, you wouldn’t get your ass handed to you by a ghost in a tracksuit.”

Maeve sighed, a long, drawn-out sound paired with the gaze of a woman desperate for a literal gallon of whiskey. “Are we done? Can we please be done? I have a T-Mobile store opening to get to in an hour and I’d like to be at least three drinks in before I have to smile and wave next to a six-foot-tall smartphone.”

“B-but…” Starlight sputtered. “We have to figure out who did this.”

“No, honey, he has people to figure this out for him,” Maeve said, nodding her head in Stan’s direction. “We’re just the talent. Our job is to show up, smile, look pretty for the cameras, and try not to kill each other before the company can make money off us. We’re failing at one of those things today, by the way, considering the newbie got knocked out by a ghost.”

“It wasn’t a ghost,” Stormfront snarled, her voice venomous. “It was a n-”

A perfectly sculpted eyebrow went high as Nubia tilted her head to the side. “A what?”

"A nothing," Stormfront spat back, a clumsy save to anyone bothering to pay attention, meaning barely anyone in this room. “Some man. I don’t know.”

When Homelander finally turned, the placid, all-American smile was still plastered on his face, years of media training firmly in place, but the eyes…

They did say the eyes were the window to the soul, and Stan had a pocket theory that Compound V was at least mildly soul-killing. 

“A man. Strong enough to do that,” Vought’s signature superhero gestured to Stormfront’s ruined face with a single red glove, “Fast enough to be a ghost. And we know nothing. Not a name, not a description, not a single thing.” His voice was still soft, but Stan knew that Homelander was performing again, a dominance display for a captive audience. “Ashley.”

“Y-yes, sir?”

Homelander rounded directly on the VP, grown woman visibly twitching under that blue-eyed gaze. “The public? What are they going to hear about our new recruit looking like she just went ten rounds with a meat tenderizer?”

“Uh, well,” Ashley’s hands flew through her phone, the woman stammering as Stormfront let out a low growl at the entirely unsubtle put-down. “We’re planning to run it as a training exercise mishap. Something about Stormfront pushing her limits, playing to her tough, take-no-shit, edgy branding. But in her practice fight with…. you…” 

Ashley swallowed a mouthful of nothing as Homelander raised an eyebrow, “So… she misjudged how strong you were, and ended up hurting herself… It shows dedication. It shows grit. It makes her look tough, and you look even… better? It’s…  relatable.”

"Relatable." The word found itself in Homelander’s mouth like it was something dead, blue eyes lifting to meet the CEO’s gaze. "Is that what you want, Stan? For us to look relatable? Like we make mistakes? Like we can be... hurt?"

Stanford Edgar allowed his gaze to drift from the news feeds cycling on the screens — report after report of super-villain arrests, all neutralized non-lethally, and all in the same five-block radius as Stormfront's divine revelation — as he met Homelander’s gaze once more. Man-child he was, Homelander had always been as transparent as glass. Always had been and always would be; a blond peacock with a tail of red-white-and-blue preening in front of an audience of hundreds of milions, utterly convinced of its own magnificence and completely oblivious to the fact that it was just a bird.

A bird with an especially elaborate mating display, but still just a bird.

An utterly exhausting bird, at that.

"What I want, Homelander," Stan began, tone as authoritative as he meant it to be, "is for this to be handled as quietly and efficiently as these things can be. After all, we have more pressing concerns." A gesture toward the main screen brought up a map of the East Coast, dotted with familiar red icons marking incidents relating to the rampant forgery of their flagship product. "Our little super-villain problem is metastasizing, but fortunately, we have someone handling that for us.” Before Homelander could cut in, the superhero’s face twisted up and halfway to rage, Stan continued on before he could get there. “The primary target remains the telekinetic who destroyed the helicopter. Find him. Neutralize him. Give the public a victory, without collateral damage if you can." 

His gaze flicked to Stormfront's battered face. "The rest is noise."

"And what about the Fist of God?" Stormfront demanded, electricity still crackling faintly between her fingers.

"An anomaly." The tone was final as final could be, the woman shooting him a glare that would likely have killed him if it came from her son. "Vought is handling it."

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Back in the quiet sanctuary of his own office, the city lights a glittering carpet below, Stanford Edgar allowed himself the freedom of an audible sigh as he settled behind his desk.

Free from the yammerings of superhuman children he’d been monitoring, it was a weight off his chest that he couldn’t deny. You’re getting old, Stan. Long gone are the days traipsing after wayward supes in the jungles of Nicaragua.

As idiotic as Payback were, they were at the very least idiotic adults.

Not like the Seven; the original team lineup composed of almost all third-generation supes. The first Compound V babies. He’d always been against the idea, truly. He’d seen what child stars turned out like far too often, and why would tangible power be different than fame?

It was visibly clear what happened when you combined the two after all.

A collection of the most powerful beings on the planet, and it was enough to make one believe none of them had ever matured past high school the way they postured and sniped at each other like it was lunchtime in a cafeteria. 

Stan bit back another sigh, not one to make a habit of it, as he opened a secure, encrypted program on his personal terminal, the spinning Vought logo giving way to a simple search interface. 

Fingers moved across the keyboard with practiced efficiency, punching in a series of numbers and letters he had memorized nearly a dozen different instances of; V-HEP-IVA-218.

A-Train. 

Reginald Jesse Franklin, to be exact.

The system had maintained his internal tracker despite the boy’s “retirement”, naturally; standard protocol for all major assets, active or inactive. Vought would have been foolish to do anything else. The only one not to possess one was Homelander and that was more a matter of inability than anything. By the time Vought had developed the technology, he’d already been a man full-grown with a physiology too dense for it to even be a possibility.

A-Train, however, was no such superhuman.

Edgar allowed himself a slight smile as the system booted up the map, only for the expression to halt in place.

A blue dot should have appeared on a map of New Jersey, hovering over the sprawling mansion he’d allowed the boy and his misfits to occupy. A necessary and observable controlled opposition, a useful foil for when the Seven attempted to pull their leash. 

Instead of the map he’d been expecting, however, a single line of red text appeared on the screen in its place.

TRACKING SIGNAL OFFLINE. LAST PING: 322 DAYS AGO.

The CEO of Vought International stared silently at the readout and the continuing scrawl of red that went into greater detail. Not a simple disabling; a catastrophic power surge had been logged at the time. The internal circuitry fused, an entire tracking unit fried to nothing. 

The very same day the asset had gone off-script, according to the timestamp.

Expensive leather groaned softly as he leaned back against it, Stan’s fingers steepling together as he processed this new development.

Nearly a year.

One of his most powerful assets had been operating entirely off the grid for nearly a year, and not a single person had noticed until now. Not the security teams, not the tech division, not a single person in the entire infrastructure whose specific job it was to notice.

Unacceptable. Heads would roll for this oversight. Quietly, of course. Always quietly. 

But they would roll nonetheless.

The tracker's failure coincided exactly with A-Train's behavioral shift from compliant asset to independent operator, his brain damage and amnesia somehow dropping a fully-grown conscience into the boy’s skull. Almost like a different person entirely.

Fingers drummed once… twice… three times against the mahogany desk surface. 

This was interesting.