Work Text:
One of Our Lackeys is Missing
Homelander stretched, enjoying the feel of the silk sheets against his skin, before he opened his eyes. The space next to him in his bed was empty, and he had a vague memory of Stormfront getting up and kissing him on the forehead before she left. She had a six AM call for Dawn of the Seven and he wasn’t on the call schedule for the next two days. Today he thought she was filming the confrontation scene with Queen Maeve, the ex-girlfriend and the new girlfriend hashing things out. It might have been amusing to watch, but he preferred the time off.
A glance at his bedside clock told him it was after ten-thirty, and his brow wrinkled in confusion. Ashley should have given him a wake-up call by now, even if he didn’t have to report to the set. He’d have to scold her for that. They hadn’t seen each other much—at all—lately, what with the blooming of his relationship with Stormfront, but he didn’t want her to think she could do whatever she wanted when he wasn’t paying attention. No need to let her feel too free.
Sighing, he got up and took a shower before going to find Ryan. His son was eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes while playing Minecraft. Homelander asked, “Having fun?”
Ryan nodded. “What are we doing today?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He settled down on the sofa. “I should get my schedule from Ashley. If we have enough time, did you want to go to the movie set and watch Stormfront do her scene?”
The boy didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “That might be fun. If we don’t have time, am I going to hang out with Ashley until you get done with whatever?”
“If you want. Do you like Ashley?” A spark of jealousy lit up inside him.
He shrugged. “She’s okay.” The subject seemed to bore him.
That made the jealousy go away and he got out his cell phone. “I’m going to call her to get my schedule for today. After you finish your breakfast, go get dressed and we’ll do something.”
Homelander hit the speed dial with her number and her phone went straight to voice mail. “What’s going on with you? You didn’t come by to give me my schedule this morning. Get up here on the double.” He hit the disconnect and tried to ignore a tiny sense of unease. She was reliable, always, which made today’s behavior troubling. Whatever—he’d give her a little motivational talking-to and get her back on track.
After a VM like that, normally Ashley would have been in his apartment within ten minutes, stammering and terrified and full of apologies, but not today. After half an hour he was equal parts furious and confused. Two more calls and a few texts later, he still hadn’t gotten a response from her. “Ryan, I think we’re going to go down to Ashley’s office and see her before we go to the movie set.” And get an explanation for her behavior.
Ashley’s secretary sat at her desk, fingers busy on the keyboard. Homelander took a quick look through the closed door of the office and found it empty, the lights and computer turned off. A strong scent of chemicals reached him. Had her office been cleaned? “Hi there! Is Ashley in? I had something I needed to talk to her about.”
The secretary—what was her name again?—said, “I’m sorry, sir. Ms. Barrett hasn’t come in yet.”
“Has she said when she’ll be in? I need to get my schedule for the day from her.” He kept his face pleasant. No need for her to bear the brunt of his irritation. That was all for Ashley.
“Uh, no, sir. I haven’t spoken to her since Friday.”
“Did she just have nothing to do today?”
He found that hard to believe, even before her secretary said, “Ms. Barrett was working on getting a marketing tie-in for Dawn of the Seven with McDonald’s. She had a meeting with their rep at nine o’clock and didn’t show. I told him she’d been hospitalized unexpectedly and rescheduled the meeting, but she isn’t answering phone calls, texts, or e-mails. Maybe she really is ill,” the woman threw in after a hesitation.
“What makes you say that?” That caused some fresh irritation; of course she would be inconsiderate enough to get sick on him, disrupt the functioning of the company, maybe blow a deal. Humans were so fucking fragile.
“Well, when she came in on Friday she insisted her office get an immediate deep cleaning because she claimed someone had been smoking in there and it was turning her stomach. She cancelled all her appointments for the day because she was working on a project for Mr. Edgar, and then she couldn’t finish it because of Environmental Services having to come in and clean.”
That explained the chemical smell. They must have soaked her office in cleaners if he could still smell it after almost three days. “Did she find out who was smoking?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t smell it myself when I went in after she left.”
“And you didn’t see her again after the dailies on Friday night?”
“No, sir.” The printer on her desk began chattering, and she ripped a piece of paper free. “Here’s your schedule for today. It’s a light day, nothing until after lunch. The first appointment is at one-thirty. They want you to do an on-set interview for the movie’s behind-the-scenes featurette, and then there’s a photo session for the print ad campaign for Vought Laserblast Red at four. I took the liberty of checking your schedule for tomorrow and you have the complete day off.”
He took the sheet of paper without thanking her and moved toward the Seven conference room, Ryan in tow. “I’m going to need you to stay here for a little bit, buddy. I want to fly to Ashley’s apartment real quick and check on her, see if she’s sick. I’ll be back in no time and we can go to the set to have lunch with Stormfront.” Since he had to do the interview, he might as well eat lunch first.
“Okay. Why can’t I go too?”
He cast around for an excuse that avoided the thought he’d just had. “She might have diarrhea or something. That would be embarrassing for you to hear.”
Ryan shrugged and sat down in Homelander’s chair at the conference table and pulled out his phone. “Tell her I said hi.”
“I will.” He went out to the roof and took off for her apartment. The thought he’d had earlier came back; maybe she was so sick she couldn’t get to her phone. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she’d even killed herself. His mind flinched from that. Nothing that had happened on Friday that he knew about seemed that serious, but there might have been things he remained unaware of. If she was dead, Ryan couldn’t see. He liked her.
Homelander had been aware of where Ashley lived ever since he’d brought her back to replace Madelyn. He even had a key that she didn’t know about, but he didn’t bother using it, landing on her balcony and forcing the doors with a small move of his hand. Before he could even look into the room, the bleach smell smashed him in the face, choking him to the point where he had to take a couple of steps backward and turn away enough to let the fresh air brush his face. Christ, had someone killed her? This seemed like the level of cleaning that would be appropriate for a crime scene. Taking a breath to calm himself, he turned around and entered her apartment.
Before this, when he kept a desultory eye on her to make sure she didn’t run away or do anything else stupid, he’d hung around on neighboring rooftops, looking through the walls of her building into her space. She’d had furniture and a TV and household appliances, but nothing of that was left. Other than the sheer curtains over the balcony doors, nothing remained inside but the carpet on the floor and the paint on the walls. Trying to crush a growing sense of fear, he wandered around her rooms, looking for any evidence of her, but there was nothing except a lone clothes hanger in the front closet that he took down and looked at, turning it over in his hands. All her clothes were gone.
The fear rose up, but he assured himself that no one had killed Ashley. Her office had been cleaned too, at her insistence, so that indicated that she had cleaned her apartment herself and disposed of all her possessions. Why? It might not mean murder, but it could mean suicide. Ashley smelled frightened all the time, and maybe she’d broken under the pressure of him. Homelander put the hanger back in the closet, trying to ignore the shaking of his hands as he got out his cell phone. He would tell Stan about this. Stan would know what to do.
“Homelander.” The older man’s voice was calm and unrevealing.
“I need to talk to you. There’s—a problem has come up. I want to get your opinion on it.”
“Is it important?”
“I think it is.” A surge of rage went through him. Would he be fucking calling if it wasn’t? “I’d…appreciate it.” Having to say that made him even angrier.
“All right. Six-thirty?”
“Fine. I’ll see you then.” He fumbled the phone as he tried to put in in its concealed pocket and it bounced on the carpeted floor. When he picked it up, on impulse he tried calling Ashley again, but it just went to voicemail. “Ashley, I’m in your apartment. Everything’s gone and the place is empty. Where are you? Call me. Please.” He didn’t expect her to do that even if she did hear the message.
Homelander and Ryan had lunch with Stormfront in her trailer. She and his son seemed to get along, which made him happy. Maybe he could accept her as a mother figure, now that Becca was out of his life. Ryan hung out with her while Homelander did his interview for the featurette. He didn’t want his son nearby when he had the meeting with Stan, so before he left for the photo shoot, he suggested, “Why don’t you stay with Stormfront for a while? I think she can help you get some practice with your flying once she’s done on set.”
Ryan gave him a look that disturbed him, but said, “Sure, Dad.”
Stormfront gave him a smile. “I’ll take good care of him. Have you flown out over the ocean yet?”
“No.” A spark of interest appeared in his eyes.
“Well, I think it’s time we fixed that. Nobody’s there, so there’s nobody to see if you make some kind of mistake. You don’t have to be self-conscious. And it’s a lot of fun.”
He felt better that they were talking and left for the photo session for the energy drink. He’d done these so often that he didn’t have to devote much of his mind to it, which had the drawback of having nothing to distract him from the subject of Ashley and her disappearance. Maybe it was the pregnancy.
A thrill of remembered anger went through him. If she’d hoped to fool him with a new perfume and making herself scarce, she’d failed. With his sense of smell, the subtle currents of scent she left behind in moving through Vought’s corridors betrayed her. How dare she. How fucking dare she get knocked up. She was not Madelyn; he had no intention of putting up with her obsession with a baby that would do nothing except pull her focus from him, leave him needing while she ran around taking her baby to doctor’s appointments and…hell, he didn’t know, baby playdates or whatever. He had no intention of living through that purgatory again.
Because Stormfront occupied so much of his time, he hadn’t gotten around to telling Ashley to get an abortion, and part of it was that he didn’t want to acknowledge her as a sexual being. Most men couldn’t get access to the level of beauty that he was exposed to on a daily basis, so he could see how someone would settle for her. The only candidate he’d identified for baby daddy was the late, not-so-lamented Shockwave, which surprised him a little since he was younger than she was and had a decent groupie pool to draw from, unless he was using Ashley for her connections to the Seven. Shockwave had wanted to oust A-Train for a long time, and maybe he’d seen fucking Ashley as a way to do that. Homelander had thought she was smarter than that. Could she have taken a leave of absence to have the baby and intended to come back later? Maybe she hadn’t told him about her plans because she knew he’d react badly? His lips curled in a humorless smile. She was smart enough to know that, at least.
Stan was seated behind his desk when Homelander entered his office. “How can I help you?”
“Ashley is…well, I haven’t been able to find her all day. Her phone goes straight to voicemail and her secretary has no idea where she is. I went by her apartment and it’s empty. All her furniture is gone and it looks like it’s ready to be rented again. Her secretary told me that she missed an important meeting this morning. I was wondering if you knew what was going on.” He tried to conceal the anxiety he felt. “Like, if she’s gone on medical leave or something. Her secretary also said she was working on a special project for you.”
Stan raised an eyebrow at him. “She was not. It…puzzles me that you haven’t realized what must have happened. After you tried to murder her on Wednesday, that is.”
That brought him up short. “What—what are you talking about?”
The older man’s smile widened. “Vought has security cameras all over the set. One of them caught you using your laser vision to destroy your trailer while Ms. Barrett was inside. I’ve since disposed of the footage, of course.”
“I…I wasn’t trying to kill her. I hadn’t checked to see if anyone was inside. No one was supposed to be.” Irritation with her flared up again.
“Be that as it may, you can understand why Ms. Barrett might have decided this was an attempt at murder and reacted accordingly. She told me about what happened with Blindspot after she returned to the company. If she is as intelligent as I suspect, she will have put an exit plan in place after that in case it became necessary to run. I believe she’s done that.”
“Run away? She’s run away?” His mind vapor-locked. She couldn’t leave him. She was too afraid of him to risk his anger. He’d made sure of that.
“That would be my conclusion. Rather a shame—she was quite good at her job. Still, I’ll put a list of candidates together and start interviewing for her replacement.”
“No. No.” How could he stop this? Homelander didn’t want anyone except Ashley in the job. “Just put her on indefinite medical leave and appoint an acting SVP for the duration.”
Stan gave him a quizzical look. “I suppose her assistant will do for now. Her name is also Ashley, so that should make things a bit easier. And what do you plan on doing when she doesn’t return?”
“She will. Don’t worry about that.” Baby or no baby, she was coming back to her damn job, and she could just deal with any looks or gossip about her being an unwed mother. He wasn’t going to be inconvenienced by her worry about what people thought.
Stormfront and Ryan hadn’t returned from their sea trials yet—he must be having fun if it was taking this long—so Homelander went up to his penthouse to try to calm down. That Ashley had left him was inconceivable, but it seemed she’d found a set of balls somewhere that he’d never suspected. Anger prickled at his insides.
“What’s wrong?” Surprised, he glanced over at the mirror and saw his reflection giving him a smile that raised the hairs along his spine.
Homelander wasn’t stupid. He’d done enough reading over the years to understand that he suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder as a result of the decade of torture he’d experienced at the hands of the Vought scientists who’d raised him, and that mirror Homelander—Mirrorlander?—was the alter personality created to absorb the pain that he couldn’t cope with. Why had he appeared now?
“Come on, what’s wrong? You’ve got a smile turned upside down on your face. Tell me,” he coaxed when Homelander remained silent.
“Ashley…seems to have run away from Vought.” From me.
Mirrorlander’s image sharpened somehow. “What?”
“What I said. Her apartment is empty, she hasn’t been to the office in three days, she isn’t answering her phone and nobody knows where she is. She missed an important meeting this morning. I talked to Stan about it and he thinks she took off because I almost murdered her last week.”
“What?”
He felt the need to explain. Was his other self reacting strangely to this? Why? “I wasn’t trying to kill her. I just lost my temper. Stormfront had lied to me about where she was going to be when I had something romantic planned, so I set my trailer on fire with my laser vision. I hadn’t checked to see if it was empty, and Ashley was inside. But she’s fine, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter?” Mirrorlander sounded odd, but he didn’t pay attention.
“I thought she might have killed herself, but Stan said he thinks she’s run away because of the trailer thing. I think it’s because of the baby.”
“What did you say?” Homelander finally gave his full attention to his reflection. Mirrorlander’s eyes had begun to glow red, and he looked furious. “What about a baby?”
He cast his mind back; how could his other self not know that Ashley was pregnant? But then he hadn’t been pushed beyond his limits and forced Mirrorlander to handle things until he was back on an even keel, so he hadn’t been exposed to the world for weeks now. “Ashley’s going to have a baby. She and Shockwave were fucking before he died.” Why had he qualified it that way? They sure weren’t fucking after his head got exploded.
The red in his eyes died away. “You fool. I had no idea how stupid you are until this moment.” All he could do was stare at his mirror self. “That’s not Shockwave’s baby. It’s mine.”
Homelander took an involuntary step back. Mirrorlander had been fucking Ashley? How was that even possible? Why would he want to? Why would she want to? All he could say was, “What?”
“Any baby Ashley is pregnant with is mine. Is that clear enough for you?”
He racked his memories but couldn’t find anything that even remotely indicated that this was true. “I’ve never smelled her on my skin. Were you trying to keep this a secret from me?” And he should have—Homelander would never have agreed to a sexual relationship with her. Never.
“No, I was trying to keep it a secret from Stormfront. For your sake. I let you knock the dust off your century-old Nazi hag, and this is how you repay me? You try to murder my child and take away my sweet, succulent little pet.” He recoiled from that description of Ashley, but Mirrorlander paid no attention. “You’re going to find her and bring her back.”
Instinctively he shook his head. “I…I don’t know where she went. I wouldn’t have any idea where to start looking.”
“Well, you’d better get one! What the fuck is Analytics for if they can’t find one little woman? You get them on that right now.” Mirrorlander’s face was set and angry.
“Okay, but what if—”
“You’ve deprived me of her!” His voice was a scream and Homelander clamped his hands over his ears. A shudder of fear went through him. “You will give me back my pretty little toy!” Before he could say anything else, Mirrorlander continued. “You know all those situations where you get stressed and I have to handle shit because you can’t cope? Well, if you don’t get her back to me, I won’t do that anymore. I’ll let you flail around on your own, terrified, whining, crying like the little pussy that you are, and the whole world can see what you’re really like.”
“You can’t. You just can’t.” He thought he’d felt panic before, but this was like nothing else he’d ever known. Mirrorlander had been with him for decades—how could he just threaten to leave, and over Ashley?
“I can and I will.” Mirrorlander’s voice was calm and even now. “If you don’t bring her and the baby to me. I don’t expect her to be here tomorrow, but I do expect you to get to work on it tomorrow. Tell Stan Edgar he needs to cut your schedule down to the bone so you can look for Ashley. As long as you don’t do anything he needs to cover up and keep working on the movie, he’ll let you do as you like. He’ll probably pitch it to himself as you doing work he’d wind up doing anyway. Tell him to assign a dedicated Analytics person for the duration to help you. And I will be checking in on you, John. Don’t think you can put me off. I want my pet back, and you had better get her here.”
Something shifted in the mirror’s surface, and suddenly his image was just that, moving as he moved, making the same expressions, and finally Homelander looked away from it. He felt as if he’d fallen off the edge of the world, and his mind was occupied by one thought, and one thought only.
Well, fuck.